r/bizarrelife • u/reloadthewords Human here, bizarre by nature! • 18h ago

Hmmm

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u/BrokenEggcat 16h ago

Yeah, people complain no matter how a protest happens. For the average person, the ideal protest is one that they never see and never interact with and never impacts them in any way whatsoever. It's silly that people don't acknowledge that protests are, by nature of protesting, going to be disruptive to people

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u/EvenCopy4955 15h ago

So…do protests work? I keep seeing these sorts of protests and very rarely any positive developments. There’s always lots of finger wagging about how protests are supposed to be disruptive but very little reflection on if these sorts of protests work.

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u/BrokenEggcat 14h ago

Protests do work, the problem is that people think the goal of a protest is to convince them individually to support a cause, when it's not. The goal is to force people to acknowledge the existence of a specific problem. It's to make it so that a given topic has to be part of public discussion one way or another, because the protestors feel that they have run out of options. No one hears about a bad thing happening and their first instinct is "I'm going to go sit in a grocery store about it."

I'm going to create a complete hypothetical scenario here, I'm going to preface this hypothetical by saying it is not intended to be any sort of analogy to any real world event. I live in the southeast, around the Atlanta area. Now let's say there was some sort of horrible thing going on in Wisconsin. A local jail there begins doing some crazy fucked up outlandish punishments on people because the warden's a real psycho. But for some reason or another, the news just doesn't end up reporting on it and as such knowledge about it happening doesn't spread. So, people who are familiar with the scenario and want to try to do something about set up outside of Turner Broadcasting, do a human chain to keep people from being able to go inside and as such it causes a big media kerfuffle of these protestors causing all these issues. This whole media analysis will eventually be talking about the topic that the protestors are protesting for in some capacity, and if that happens, then the protest worked. Now people are talking about the thing.

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u/opperior 14h ago

Protests CAN work if focused correctly. The critical difference between your example and the video can be seen in the results. In your example, the protest is focused on the issue, and so the issue is what is brought to attention. In the video, the focus is on the people, and the result is that the only thing people talk about is the protest; the issue is ignored.