Tuesday, April 18, 2000
 
the cheese stands alone
More Fish! Less Shark!

Probably by this point on page three, you are sufficiently sick of hearing about the IMF protest in D.C. this weekend, but humor me for just these 500 words or so. I, like fully 5% of the Wesleyan campus, drove down to D.C. for the weekend (we drove through Delaware–it’s still just as weird the third time around) to participate in the protest against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Now, I just decided that I wanted to participate in this protest on Tuesday, but I did my best to educate myself on the issues before leaving, and I felt as though I had a pretty good handle on why I was protesting. I wanted to learn more about the policies and actions of the IMF and WB, and I wanted to help raise national awareness about two organizations that need major structural changes.
However, somehow in the midst of the hoopla and hullabaloo and hubbub, I ended up sitting in the  middle of an intersection, linking arms with about 100 people shouting "Hey hey! Ho ho! The IMF has got to go!" and "This is what democracy looks like!" at a handful of wild-eyed cops brandishing billy clubs. It was so easy to get caught up in the excitement that I started to forget exactly why I was there in the first place. It started to become a battle between the protesters and the cops, and that’s not what this issue is about. In fact, I talked to plenty of cops who told me they thought we were doing a really great thing by protesting. The whole "just doing my job" response is a whole other can of worms that I don’t particularly want to delve into, but it is an interesting point nonetheless.
 
eden robins
Basically, I felt really uncomfortable with the fact that I could so easily get sucked into supporting a position that I didn’t necessarily know enough about to endorse, and that if that could happened to me it probably happened to most people. And in truth, I don’t think mass protests like the one this weekend are even possible without some form of widespread brainwashing. Now "brainwashing" is probably too harsh of a word, but it is true that in order to get a large group of people to mobilize there needs to be a profound amount of singlemindedness, and it is also true that it is unlikely that each of these singleminded people will have a firm grasp on why they are protesting and what the big issues are.

And herein lies my ideological dilemma. In order for a protest to be successful, the issues have to be radically oversimplified to elicit emotional reactions from protesters and observers. Protests can help bring about changes in the system, but the people who  want change do not necessarily realize what the changes will entail, and they may not know the whole story. Is a protest still a positive form of social action if a significant number of protesters are there for an MTV-esque Spring Break-With-Dreadlocks weekend in D.C.? Can a protest be successful without all these different kinds of people with different agendas? Those, of course, are rhetorical questions, but they definitely made me stop and think when I caught myself chanting or doing things this weekend that I would not ordinarily endorse.

Probably one of the coolest and weirdest things I did on Sunday was to join my affinity group in carrying around a giant papier-maché shark and little cardboard fish and doing little performances for different groups of protesters. We would put on a little show during which the little fishes would organize themselves to attack and kill the formerly oppressive "loan shark" (creative, huh?) and then we would chant "loan shark go fish!" and "more fish! less shark!" Hundreds of people watched and cheered for us and then they all started chanting whatever we did. The solidarity and support was amazing to be a part of, but I felt uncomfortable wielding the power to make masses of people say what I wanted them to say. Protests are definitely a double-edged sword. I think changes in the system are absolutely essential, and protests can be very effective, but we need to be wary of the balance between enthusiastic activism and uninformed activism. When the revolution does come, we certainly don’t want a bunch of lemmings running the country.