I've been critical of peace protests in the past, and I've definitely got nothing good to say about ANSWER. This time, however, I wasn't feeling animosity for last week's protests. I was feeling something akin to apathy. This passage from the Daily Show (via
AmericaBlog) kind of sums up one of the reasons why:
Stewart: On Saturday, a 100,000 strong peace march descended on Washington seeking to crystallize America's dissatisfaction with the war into one single idea.
Clip of young male speaker: Peace!
Stewart: Okay.
Clip of male speaker: Justice!
Stewart: (pause) Fine.
Clip of male speaker: Environmental protection!
Stewart: (pause, confused look on face)
Clip of male speaker: No racism!
Stewart: (dumb-founded, and then says in Valley Girl-like voice) Dude! I didn't hike from Oberlin for this.
The lack of focus is maddening, obviously. But my biggest problem with anti-war protests is that they're obsolete. What do they accomplish? Historians still argue about the role Vietnam-era protests had on ending the war (shortened it versus prolonged it). But today, they mean nothing.
We are a media-saturated world, bombarded on all angles by information. A bunch of people marching in the street no longer have any serious emotional effect on media consumers. One picture on a front page and CNN of flag-drapped coffins would likely have a greater effect on war opinions than 1,000 marches like the one we had last weekend.
War opinion has eroded based, in large part, on local coverage of local boys and girls killed in the conflict. Every such death is a week's worth of coverage -- report the death, interview teachers, friends, the parents, cover community efforts to make sense of the tragedy, cover the funeral. Such coverage is heart-wrenching, and while it flies under the radar of the national media, it's brutally immediate. That's why the national mood on Iraq has turned sour despite the cheerleading by the vast majority of national media and political figures.
And we don't need marches to let the country know that people are turning on the war. Every week we get one or two new polls telling us that the public is now hostile to the war. And the press, to some credit, has been reporting on those polls.
Media savvy will carry a movement much further than any march, regardless if it had 100,000 or 500,000 or a million people. Cindy Sheehan had the right idea with the Crawford protest -- there was a story line and drama which the media could use to create a narrative, hence a long-running story. People marching on the street? Boring. Unless you 1) have violence, or 2) crazy people making crazy speeches. It's a lose-lose situation, and at best a single news cycle story.
The Right, except for the crazy anti-abortion protesting crowd, focuses its efforts solely on influencing media coverage. And it's paid incredible dividends in the past few decades. We need to follow suit, rather than continue the same activism tactics of a century ago.
Ultimately I was agnostic over the march this past weekend because I can appreciate that people want to gather to fight for the cause, I appreciate that they want to feel like they're doing something.
My question, then, becomes whether the money and effort people expended getting to DC to march might've been better spent in other forms of activism -- letters to the editor, contributions to anti-war candidates, politicians, and organizations, calls and letters to their elected officials, creating anti-war media (e.g. Flash animations, documentaries), and so on.