Protests, as a rule, represent segments of the population who are more engaged with the issues than the median person. Verdicts shouted and slogans delivered cannot compete with the parliamentary process for representing the diversity of personal experiences and perspectives across our country. With these flaws existing in theory, do real-life protests hold up under scrutiny?
Every protest in memory shimmers on the surface with the tempting glimmer of condemnation: that they failed. The 1981 Springbok Tour continued to its bitter end, protests be damned. The school strike for climate has gone on for over a year, and our planet is only getting worse. The Arab Spring of 2010-11 created four civil wars (Iraqi, Yemeni, Libyan and Syrian) that have destroyed millions of lives. What’s the upshot?
The Springbok Tour protests are gravely misinterpreted as unnecessarily divisive, or senseless rabble-rousing, which misses the point. Apartheid South Africa permitted neither black & coloured players on their team, nor Māori players on ours. Apartheid South Africa put “politics” (racism) in sport. Counterprotestors who claimed that they were apathetic, that they stood for no politics in sport, fought precisely for that politicisation. The Aotearoans who told them to shove it wanted that attitude out. A protest does not deliver a manifesto; it calls your attention. Pay attention, do your homework, and you can’t go as far astray as some New Zealanders did.
There’s still something magical about climate striking that hasn’t quite sunk in. A childhood dream has come alive: young people have stepped up to the plate and attained generational parity. Parents and politicians, childcare workers and teachers, have staked their lives on what our future looks like and how we get there. We have changed the course of the latter. In doing so, we have reminded them of their stake, through our own pressing interest, in the former.
Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām - "the people want to bring down the regime" - and variations thereof were the “Skolstrejk för klimatet” call for youth across the Arab world at the start of the new decade. The region served, and serves, as a massive microcosm for our global awareness and our Kiwi experience. Youth faced up to corrupt governments run by out-of-touch gerontocrats. Their sudden, startling bravery took the world by storm and saved many of their countries and their countrypeople.
Protests are, at their beating heart, a healthy contradiction: the primal scream of politics. This is not working. We deserve better. Protests riposte the devastating blows that business as usual inflicts on our world. Protests lift the sheer crushing weight of the smoggy, dollar-soaked, media-saturated atmosphere off our shoulders, every demonstrator an Atlas. We don’t agree on how every protest played out, and we won’t agree with every dissident, abstracted out to a face, a chant, and, if they’ve been productive, a sign. But we should be grateful Kiwis are delivering, loud and proud, the answer this world begs: “What do I stand for?”
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