BY MELISSA KANDEL
In the long-standing marriage of politics and protests, much of the passion has waned. There’s evidence of that detachment even as some 15,000 protestors braved the high wind and heat of Chicago to demonstrate at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit.
While impressive at first glance, the number of activists paled in comparison to the tens of thousands who came out against the First Gulf War during the 1990s and especially to the hundreds of thousands demanding an end to American involvement in Vietnam in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
“Clearly the war protest movement has dwindled,” said Patrick Boylan, a Los Angeles native who is an anti-war activist and humanities professor at the University of Rome. “It is not, I believe, due to an increasing pro-war attitude.”
If numbers alone told the story, the consistent plotline would be that increasing percentages of the population oppose the recent military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to May figures reported by the Associated Press, only 27 percent of the U.S. public now supports the Afghanistan war.
Yet opposition does not imply engagement and it is here that we find a swelling disconnect between the unhappy citizens of the world who can click “I am against this” on a computer screen and an unwillingness to physically partake in protesting as a means to bring about change.
“People aren’t feeling it,” said Sean Kay, a professor of political science and international relations at Ohio Wesleyan University. Kay has travelled the world studying the Eurozone crisis, especially as it relates to problems in Ireland. “There’s more of an indifference to things these days.”
Clearly—the AP results demonstrate this—this detachment does not manifest itself as a total lack of awareness about the unpopular political and military decisions of the day. Just as true is the fact that no single reason or cause can explain exactly what triggered this apparent trend of worldwide nonchalance. Instead, several contributing factors form this dispassionate disagreement and disinclination to take to the streets and speak out.
And as this aversion grows, global disillusionment caused by a perception of government stonewalling certainly plays a key role.
Recalling many Italian demonstration efforts, Boylan reported that, “Several [demonstrators] here in Rome have told us: ‘our protests over the years seem to have served no purpose, the government just doesn’t listen, we feel useless waving signs.”
If would-be protesters perceive their actions as useless against the powerful and ineffectual as tools to generate real results, human rational thinking alone would be enough to dissuade them from participating in demonstration events.
Another cause for ennui is lack of knowledge about protest’s rich past, especially in the United States where it has long been a significant impetus for social change.
“To me one of the problems is that people are disconnected to the history of protests,” said Bucky Halker, folk musician and history PhD who wrote the book, “For Democracy, Works and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protests 1865-95 (Working Class in American History.) “There’s so much amnesia,” he continued, “and people in the last 30 years have been lulled by false economic prosperity into thinking things were going along smoothly.”
For Halker, the recognition that demonstrators are not fighting alone but are protesting just as dissenting citizens have for years, gives them a greater sense of purpose.
Boylan agrees that identifying with the historical continuity of protesting would strengthen activists’ resolve. “You marvel at the contrast between huge Vietnam protests and the dwindled Afghanistan protests,” he observed. “Well, let me say that the servicemen who hurled their medals back at the NATO command in Chicago last Sunday did so with no less fury than their elders did during the Vietnam protest.”
One historical example of the latent power of protest is through a once-thriving entity now pushed to the very back of collective American minds: protest music.
In the 1960s and ’70s, college students listened to Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie protest music on their record players just as university students today listen to top-40 love songs on their iPods. For Halker, this change in musical predilections from protest to pop isn’t for lack of folk singers trying to spread their word.
The musician and author blames popular music’s inability to promote more autonomous musicians, backed not by corporate record labels but by a home computer and a self-made recording studio, to explain why protest music—almost always an independent endeavor—has not reached critical mass.
“There’s no mid-level people pushing out from the bottom, so it’s hard for young artists to get their music heard,” he lamented.
“People are writing protest songs that are as good as ever, and as many as ever but they won’t get major airplay or attention due to changes in the [entire music] industry,” he argued. “The industry has been in shambles since the 1970s and is dead for all practical purposes except at the highest level.”
Another major motivation killer for young would-be protesters is the lack of a military conscription in the U.S.
“I grew up in a small town and people came home in body bags,” said Halker. “When you have to face the reality that people you know are dying, you face an immediate threat.”
But even though this immediacy sparked an intense brand of activism hard to find in America today, fervent social expression may be starting to re-emerge elsewhere as political and military pressures push other populations to the brink of tolerance.
In fact, protesting may again be on the rise globally, as evidenced by the recent “Arab Spring” protests in the Middle East, the demonstrations against voter fraud in Iran or to those who rallied for the liberation of Tibet from Chinese rule, to name just a few examples.
With “Occupy” protest movements of late sweeping from Rome to Rio and any city that the word can be affixed to, the image of an inactive youth is slowly beginning to crumble.
“They’re being hit on a very personal level,” said Boylan, “just like their elders were in the 1970s.”
As unemployment and college-loan debt weighs down young adults, entangling them in a daunting new world of public policy and politics, this movement may continue to strengthen—much like the passion of the Vietnam War era.
“Many people have wondered where the sudden activism of all the young, educated people in the streets has come from,” Boylan said. “After all, they are not being shipped off to Vietnam but they are being deprived of their future.”
Whether this newly afire passion can be sustained is still unknown, but with apathy eroding and concern taking hold, the marriage of protest and politics may not be doomed for divorce after all.
