Protests can be amazing events--both for the cause and for the participants. They can also get messy. Here are five things you shouldn't do at a protest...unless, of course, you're trying to make a fool out of yourself.
1. Break formation.
If you have a good reason to leave the protest event--if you need to take a bathroom break, say, or return a phone call, or change a diaper, or just rest your weary bones--then of course that's fine. But when you leave the protest event, leave the protest event. Don't try to go off and start a second, competing protest event nearby because you think you've found a more visible or convenient location; that just dilutes your visible numbers.2. Start a revolution.
If you're protesting for change, that's great. If you're protesting to change a protest for change, you're just being silly. The organizers' strategies should define the protest. If you want to do things differently, make suggestions to the organizers or run your own protest later--but don't fight the organizers over control of the existing protest.During a pro-choice protest last year, we were ordered by police to leave our main event at Smith Park due to a bomb threat. We regrouped across the street, outside the Governor's Mansion. One earnest young man gave what was probably supposed to be a rousing pep speech encouraging all of us to charge past police and reenter Smith Park in force. We all just kind of looked at him funny.
3. Go off-message.
Most protest events are single-issue protests, and they bring in people with a wide range of views. If you're protesting the death penalty, for example, the group will probably include both socially conservative Roman Catholics and socially progressive civil libertarians. Good slogans will be slogans that all, or nearly all, participants can join together and chant. Good signs will be signs that further the basic message of the protest.So if you're at an anti-death penalty rally, don't try to start a "My body, my choice!" or "No blood for oil!" chant. That screws up the cohesion of the group, and distracts observers from the central message of the protest.
4. Act like a jerk.
This is America, and everyone has the right to their beliefs. Whatever cause you support, counterprotesters have as much right to protest your event as you have to stage it in the first place--and you have the right to do the same. But neither of you has the right to disrupt the other group's event. Make sure they know you're there, but keep a comfortable distance and let them do their thing.There is a video making the rounds on YouTube of a young woman interrupting a socially conservative event by entering the crowd, then screaming and howling epithets at the top of her lungs right in the face of a young man timidly holding a Bible. If this incident wasn't staged, it may as well have been; it was great PR for the guy with the Bible.
5. Get arrested for no good reason.
Earlier this year, members of a gay rights organization were arrested for marching onto the campus of privately-owned Mississippi College after being specifically told not to by police. So what were these folks protesting? The college's homophobic policies? Seems to me they were protesting trespassing laws.Likewise, antiwar protesters who take off their clothes in public aren't being arrested over the war. They're being arrested for violating indecent exposure laws, effectively transforming the protest event from an antiwar protest to a pro-public nudity protest.
If you're willing to get arrested for doing the right thing, that's great. But if you're going out there and getting arrested just for the hell of it, why bother?