Hi Don, At 05:46 PM 11/28/2000 -0800, you wrote: >snip snip >And I'm protesting the Bushes bringing in Republicans to disrupt the vote >counting. (Sorry Marty, I'm not pissed with you but your logic doesn't >hold. I would still protest the Nazis "civil disobedience" to attack the >Jews.) So would I, but that's not the point I was making. In my never-ending but frustrating (and Abbie-Hoffmanish) effort to prod the left into seeing how other's perceive us, I thought it a useful exercise to look at the right-wing demonstrators (separating them from their politics) and see what messages the act of waving placards, shouting slogans, and being in the camera's face conveys. Demonstrations should be organized as theater so that the action of the demonstrators conveys the message intended. Signs, slogans, raised fists, etc. don't necessarily do the trick and sometimes even undercut what we're trying to convey. This was one of Abbie's lessons of the sixties, and something WIN Magazine and the NY Workshop in Nonviolence (both of which I was involved with during the sixties) were experimenting with. The left, in its public demonstrations, often wanted to be seen as "militant." That was the goal. But militance can be a real turn-off to the public. And reaching the public is one, if not the only, reason to demonstrate in the street. The GOP in Miami was pretty ugly (in a petty kind of way). I would suggest that that is what the left also looks like to the general -- even the sympathetic --public. Marty Marty Jezer . 22 Prospect Street . Brattleboro, VT 05301 Author: Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words (Basic Books) Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel (Rutgers University Press) The Dark Ages: Life in the USA, 1945-1960 (South End Press) Rachel Carson [American Women of Achievement Series] (Chelsea House) Check out my web page: http://www.sover.net/~mjez
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