disruptive protest
id: disruptive protest aliases:
- disruptive tags: []
I used to be against “annoying” protests (e.g. blocking highways, taking over spaces) because, in my view, it would just turn people from away the cause, anger people in an unproductive way. After more reading and observation, I’ve changed my view somewhat, though I’m still interested in conversation about it.
It helped me to think in terms of the two axes someone might fall on: The first axis is knowledge, people who know a ton about the issue vs people who know very little. Another axis is people who are already inclined to be in favor of the issue, and people who are already inclined to be against.
For people who know very little, I feel like the conversations created by the protests outweigh the annoyance. In other words, yes they might be annoyed, but they’ll also start learning about the issue because everyone is talking about it, and that’s a net positive. This is especially true for people who are inclined to be in favor of the issue, but don’t know a ton, since seeing news about the issue might spur them into taking action.
For people who were already inclined against the issue, they aren’t the target audience of the protest anyways. They’ll complain, but ultimately they weren’t going to help anyways. Maybe a protest or change would spur them into negative action, but in that case it wouldn’t matter whether the protest was annoying or not.
For people who are both knowledgeable and in favor of the issue, they might be annoyed by the protesters, but they won’t turn away from the issue or stop acting just because they were annoyed.
I guess the ultimate question is: Is there anyone out there who was genuinely in favor of some cause, but stopped being in favor just because they found the protesters annoying? I just can’t imagine someone who genuinely believed in something being shaken by something so minor.
