Where are the momentous, consciousness-raising boycotts of yesteryear that rose up against injustice, bigotry, or plain stupidity, to advance legal, civil and workers’ rights? Once upon a time high-profile uproars, some lasting years, brought down presidents, ended major wars, and remade national American priorities and values. Is such spirited activism, vs. the more legalistic modes now notching gains for marriage equality, as obsolete as quill pens?
With few exceptions, say Monsanto, the paucity here of policy-changing anti-corporate uprisings is all the more astonishing considering the moneyed octopus swells. And this dominance seems undeterred by challengers having, at our very fingertips, a limitless, low-cost communication network. Never before have so many activists commanded so many technological tools to corral like-minded millions into cohesive action. And yet, while trivial, celebrity inanities go viral, serious class and economic “viruses” endure uncontested.
What calamities remain that could trigger direct protests, by American consumers or street insurgents alike? Did tactical repression of Occupy scare off activists? Is corporate media ownership a reform death knell? Are we held captive, isolated, equating online petitions with defiant action?
I puzzle over the tepid response to the N.S.A.-corporate phone collusion scandal. Or lukewarm challenges to what the iconic John Lewis terms the Supreme Court’s “dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act”? How can entrenched Republican/corporate powers, so hypersensitive to shallow publicity stains (like Paula Deen), otherwise run roughshod, upping warfare against women or the misery of debt-laden college students, graduating into adulthood as indentured servants?
For the record, illustrious boycotts introduced me not just to politics but this key threshold, that audacity of change demands audacious confrontation. Effective protests not only grabbed headlines for months but testified that collective folks, vociferous, organized and focused, can make history, even reverse entrenched powers by sidestepping electioneering or the Washington shuffle.
Certainly, ‘60’s civil rights triumphs built on the Montgomery bus boycott a few years earlier, a success that modeled how non-violent means could whip ingrained segregation. Thousands in 1955 boycotted segregated a municipal bus system and, after 18 months, triumphed when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Rosa Parks knew more about the Constitution than hordes of bigoted southerners. […]
|