Protesting

I have been interested in the tea parties for a while---I admit that I read Instapundit, otherwise I would never have heard of them, since I don't watch live TV or listen to anything but NPR and classical radio. (I certainly never heard of it from conservative talk radio or Fox TV.)

It is interesting, but I am not really tempted to join in the protests. My view of protests has been influenced in an unflattering way by two examples I have seen in the past few years.

First was a man who came to my mathematics department, ostensibly to get a graduate degree in mathematics, but really to participate in politics on campus. (I know, this is probably not the real reason he came, but he certainly wasn't interested in attending classes or in passing tests.) He would often email the whole department (professors, administrators, adjuncts, graduate students) to let them know about a demonstration or teach in or gathering going on for one of his causes. I know some of the other students were interested in his posts, and in the mathematics department, deleting an email was easier than asking him not to spam the department mailing lists. The straw that broke the camel's back was when he emailed, rather breathlessly, "The Student Coalition has a demonstration going on today at 1 down in the pit. I don't know what they're protesting, but let's all go show our support." Just the idea that you would go demonstrate against something---anything---without even knowing what it was, still blows my mind, and I think it points out the superficiality of the "culture of protest."

The other incident that influenced my view of protest was in the run up to the huge demonstrations against the Iraq war. NPR had hours of reports from all over the country, from large demonstrations and small, and interviewed many of the participants. One of the interviews was with a woman who was taking a bus from a small college in the middle of the country to Washington. When asked why she was protesting, she said "The difference between us and the people who supported the war is that we actually think for ourselves, we don't just believe what our parents tell us." This typifies the arrogance I see in many protesters: the people who disagree with me haven't thought about the issues enough, and if they were to think for themselves, they would agree with me.

Do protests change minds? I know that when people marched for civil rights and were beaten, the video of their treatment changed minds. It is possible that the protests against the Vietnam war changed minds, although I think the fact that we couldn't win changed more minds. And I also think there is a danger that the language at these protests inflames rather than informs the debate. I have seen many sensible signs from the teaparty protests on conservative websites, and many offensive ones on liberal websites. During some anti-Bush protests, I saw the opposite---in other words, we see what we want to see (and what people with agendas want us to see).

I think facts will change minds, and if I thought protests brought out the facts to people who otherwise wouldn't have heard them, I'd protest more. But I don't think so, so I think I'll sit this round out.