A Farewell to Protesting

Let's interview Lao Tsu, author (in case you didn't know) of The Art of War.  Let's ask him about this business going on in Ferguson and in Gaza.  Let's get to the bottom of this and, more importantly, try to judge and determine its effectiveness.

So a repressed group of people -- repressed economically, restrained physically and geographically, and with a long history of being murdered by "police" or "defense" forces with no due process result, decide they have had enough.

But stop right there.  They have actually had enough for decades, if not centuries, by now.  So what is this "enough" that they have had now?  Why now?

How did things get so bad that they reached this boiling point -- when emotions overtake cool and calculated reason, and the repressed begins destroying the only little bit that they have as resources, and which would otherwise be used against the oppressor.

And the idea would be that you use what little resources you have to assemble and consolidate a power base.  Get Friedrich Nietzche on the phone.  Page Niccolo Machiavelli.  You begin to gather strength through internal networking, generating economic power the old fashioned way -- you work and you work hard.  And don't forget education.  Then you begin to enter politics. 

This isn't a new recipe.  It is time-tested.  And you organize your community to then use laws to protect yourselves, instead of going out in the street and breaking the laws that the oppressor has already set up to confine you.

But the most important thing is cooperation.  If you don't have that, all is lost.

So let's go back to Lao Tsu.  What does marching around in the streets, breaking stuff, and throwing things accomplish?  Is there some value to a physical threat?  Or does that simply extract concessions in the short term that soon dissipate and leave the same status quo. 

In fact, wouldn't that be the best way for the oppressor to keep the oppressed in their place?  Let them blow up every once in a while, but slowly keep moving the walls in on them, a la Gaza.  In that sense, protesting is actually destructive to the real cause, to real change.

Let us bid a farewell to protesting.