By Ryan DeLaureal
On Feb. 15, 2003, millions of people around the world came out to demonstrate against the United States’ imminent invasion of Iraq.
Riza Liu/VANGUARD STAFf
Damascus, Calcutta, Glasgow, Auckland, Sydney. In London, an estimated two million people. In Paris—250,000. And Rome alone had an estimated three million people in attendance, setting a mark recognized by the Guinness World Records as the largest anti-war rally in history. China was the only part of the world to not see any demonstrations.
Five years, one president and millions of dollars later, we were still in Iraq, bogged down in sectarian conflict and struggling to install a democratically elected government at our own expense. Troops were sent, bombs fired. Civilians were killed. American men and women were sent back in caskets to be buried as heroes.
In 2012, nobody remembers why we were even there. In the ’60s and ’70s, thousands came together to protest the Vietnam War, but it still turned into one of the longest wars in American history. It held its reign until the current war in Afghanistan.
For all the blood and sweat, Vietnam was one of our biggest military losses. Saigon fell. The communists took over South Vietnam. There was no domino.
As Americans, we tend to accept protest as a dear and fundamental right, guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights and part of a great American tradition. How much power protesting actually has to change anything is questionable. If the government remains obstinate, or if you’re protesting against public opinion, how much is your voice echoing within a vacuum?
Our Founding Fathers set a good example for us with the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence. Almost 200 years later, the civil rights movement reinforced the idea that change can come through democratic means.
Even though civil rights may seem obvious and fundamental now, it was a long and bitter struggle with much opposition in the South.
About 100 years passed from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson before equal rights became a reality for many people. Many tried to stop desegregation, still clinging to the antebellum past. Eisenhower had to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark. to enforce desegregation of public schools.
This isn’t ancient history—it was practically yesterday, at the same time we began sending men into space.
People say we’re a pioneering, advanced society. In response I say that in Los Angeles County a measure on this year’s ballot requiring the use of condoms in the making of porno films passed with almost 56 percent of the vote.
To this day, thousands of people in the United States oppose things like windmills, preferring to send their own children across the globe to die while protecting the rights of strange people in foreign lands, all in the name of justice and democracy. These are things that nobody in the Middle East (or anywhere else) ever asked the U.S. government to provide for them.
A good reason for living is also apparently a good reason for dying.
On the bright side, we’ve lately seen that change is possible. The Arab Spring movement is proof: Something that starts as a nonviolent protest has the power to topple a regime, based on the will not of the U.S. but of the actual, local population. It’s especially effective when you’re well organized and have the opinion and might of the United Nations behind you.
We may not have stopped the war in Iraq, but protesting is more than just standing on the corner with a sign. It means making an active effort to change the world by obstructing injustice and, if necessary, breaking the law. It means choosing one way over another. It’s the essential and vital right of saying no.
There are many ways of protesting—it doesn’t have to be violent to be effective. If you’re committed to something, make it part of everything you do. If you do this, then you won’t merely be opposing something, you’ll be creating it, and every second will be a protest.