Monthly Archive for September, 2008

The Boston Tea Party.

In the late eighteenth century, a group of protesters dressed as Native Americans boarded a merchant ship and then off loaded its cargo of tea directly into Boston Harbor [1].  That famous protest, known as the Boston Tea Party, became one of the first highlights in America’s rich history of protests and political activism.  Though the issues behind the Tea Party were long ago left in our past, the American protest spirit demonstrated during the Tea Party would perpetuate, each generation adopting a new issue, defining the social growth and progress of a people through its first two centuries.  With leaders such as Fredrick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the protesters persistently, but peacefully, stood for their cause.  The match-ups were often uneven and greatly in favor of the oppressors: the colonists versus the King of England, women versus the male-dominated society/government, slaves and abolitionists versus deeply entrenched slaveholders, the minorities versus segregation and bigotry, and so many more.  Americans’ example of peaceful protest has been compared to, and even may have inspired, worldwide figures like Nelson Mandella, Mahatama Ghandi, and Desmond Tutu, who led social equality revolutions in their own countries.  America would not be where it is today without its protest history, but unfortunately its protest future looks dim.

My observation of recent protest and activist movements in the United States is that the role of aggressor has shifted from the oppressor to the protestor. This shift has occurred at all levels of the community, and now it is like we have taken protest for granted, and have changed it from the peaceful thing it once was into the hate-mongering thing it now is.  This has led to a break-down of civil political discourse in America, and the vicious speech employed by activists only further strengthen the barriers to communication and compromise.  This is especially true recently, as the last few years have seen activists breeding hate and unrest instead of pushing for peace and unity.

Starting at the top, lots of blame is due to the activist groups.  Organizations like PETA take to Washington streets dressed in almost nothing to demand animal rights[2], causing chaos and upsetting order in the process, while groups like Greenpeace vandalize corporate property or disrupt corporate activity[3] in an effort to make a point about that business’s environmental policies.  Meanwhile, groups like the Sierra Club, NRA, etc, pay lobbyists to delay the progress of our laws while their spokespeople bounce from news interviews to press conferences denouncing and embarrassing our elected leaders.  No longer is the protest movement based in the idea of lifting people out of an oppressed state, rather in those seeking further entitlement for causes not nearly important as those of the past.

MLK during the March on Washington. What would he think of today's protesters and activists?

A recent example of a negative aggressive protest group is the PUMA group, or Party Unity My Ass un-Party, a group founded in protest of Hillary Clinton’s departure from/loss of the Democratic presidential primary.  These people spent time, money, and effort trying to undo the loss of their candidate claiming “disenfranchisement” and “deceptive practices”.  Leading up to the Democratic National Convention, they spent their efforts trying to demonize and minimize Obama as a viable candidate, presumably to allow McCain to win and then allow Hillary to run again in 2012.  Most who followed the PUMA movement would agree that it employed bitter, hateful aggression to try and make their point made.  Why?  They would say to make America better, most would say they accomplished the opposite.

Media figureheads who use media outlets as theaters to stage biased presentations of quote-un-quote news and opinion to further their views play a big role in this issue as well.  People like Michael Moore and Ann Coulter, in the name of their political affiliation, resort to lies, half-truths, conspiracies, and viscous verbal attacks to try and demean and beat down the beliefs of the other half of their America.  Meanwhile, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews, and Bill O’Reilly fill their airspace with heavily biased presentations, highlighting news that benefits their views while discarding that which does not and tearing apart their interviewees with different views while spoon feeding easy questions to like-minded interviewees.

Unfortunately, while the likes of media moguls and activist groups spew their vicious, sometimes hateful, words and stir unrest from the pulpit of American media outlets, everyday people express their own one-sided view of the world from the soapbox of blogs and social media websites.  It is there that the divisions are being further deepened, and is it on the web that I see no hope for America’s protest future.

The internet has undoubtedly changed the way my generation communicates with our world.  However, the internet’s greatest asset (and curse), the instant unmoderated flow of information and ideas, has given people the freedom to be as civilized or as barbaric as they choose, and most choose to be barbaric.

Good journalists write and rewrite their pieces, have them reviewed by an editor, and then rewrite it some more.  Their efforts, even if biased, usually are backed by research, offer some dissenting views, and are moderated by editors whose job it is to minimize bias and ensure good research.  Bloggers are rarely good journalists, often citing uncertain sources or unconventional and biased media, if citations are provided at all.  Their words back their own biased opinions and dissenting views are often ignored in favor of progressing their message.  Numerous fallacies are employed, possibly in an effort to throw the readers into an emotional state where they won’t question the work but either agree or dismiss it, or possibly because they know that research is not enough to justify their views.  Yet people consume this new form of media with vigor, hailing it as the future of the media, failing to see it for what it is, while traditional moderated media loses income and market share. Please don’t get me wrong, not every conventional media news article is perfect and not every blogger is biased, but in general what I have observed is supports my beliefs.

For instance, the other day I followed a link to a blog article where the the blogger was response to an accomplished journalist’s opinion piece on Republican Vice Presidental nominee Governor Sarah Palin.  In the opinion piece by Bradley Buston, which the blogger quotes in his post, the journalist explains his fear of us electing another politician unaware of his or her own shortcomings.  In the opinion piece, the journalist references an exchange between ABC’s Charlie Gibson and Gov. Palin during a media interview as evidence to support his belief.  The blogger fundamentally disagrees with the question that Gibson asked of Gov. Palin and therefore he argues that Gov. Palin’s response should not be considered as support to the journalist’s opinion.  But before the blogger even gets to establishing his counter arguement, he first says this of the journalist:

But what about Bradley Buston’s blindness to his own shortcomings: his unjustified certitude, his complacency, his arrogance, and his misinformedness?

How does this ad hominem attack further the message the blogger presenets? I would argue: not at all.  But what is does do is fires up all his like-minded readers while infurates all his those who aren’t.  And fruther down the hole we go.

One of the most common ways a regular American can protest is writing responses or opinion pieces for local to national news outlets.  The blog world has that too, call comments.  But they are abused.  Readers use the freedom of anonymous commenting to attempt, in whatever way possible, to strengthen or defeat the message of the writer.  Commentors carry out their effort by employing fallacy-rich argumentation lacking content but chock-full of unintelligent attacks.  Even after skimming through the heavily moderated comments section of the CNN Political Ticker, I found commentors calling candidates things like McChicken, spineless, and idiotic while accusing them of treason, perjury, and other unethical behavior.  How do these words benefit the discussion or the message?  How do these words strengthen America?  They don’t.  When as few as five years ago if you wanted to comment on a news article or opinion piece, your words were often thought out before submission and then of course moderated by the publisher, today you can respond, if you want, to a piece in seconds.  Nowadays, ones raw emotions can be typed up and submitted before there is a chance for even self-moderation, and then left online and unmoderated in the spirit of free speech.

From the high-profile activist groups, to the media mouguls, citizen journalists, and general people, the American protest and activist spirit has been tarnished by hate-mongering bigoted efforts of aggression.  In allowing our conventional and citizen media to feed us this, and in allowing ourselves to accept it, we are allowing America to deteriorate into a country of hate mongerers and aggressive protestors.  Yet when we turn on the TV and see a rally in Tehran, we express our gratitude for being Americans.  How shorted sighted we are, for if we allow our discourse and protest to further part from the peaceful civil roots it was founded in, we could be there sooner than anyone dares to believe.  I beg of America: civility please.  Let us not forget the responsibility that comes with the power of free speech, lest our abuse of it may lead to its demise.