Fake Activism

On the topic of activism, and the earlier topic of Occupy Wall Street, I thought I would share a video I stumbled across while searching through articles:

In this interview, Naomi Wolfe (who honestly I've never heard of before) brings up some goods points, her main point being that with the laws set by our government today, protests are not effective. She says that in order to be effective, they have to disrupt the way people outside of the protest go about their lives. This makes sense, I mean, no one will pay attention to it if they can just bypass it. But if they get stuck in traffic because thousands of protestors are taking to the streets, then they tend to take notice. So why now, even though our rights give us the right to protest, can we not protest disruptively? Civil disobedience is almost illegal now, since protesting without a permit is illegal and with a permit you have to follow strict guidelines. But these strict guidelines take away any sort of oomph the protests have and strip it of any effectiveness. 

You can't protest the status quo by obeying it, that's not how it works. But you have to now or risk being arrested. Which in this economy, if people are arrested, they lose any chance of finding a decent job. Which is what they're protesting about. So it all comes around in this big loop of fake activism, where activism nowadays has been fixed so that it almost has no meaning. Unless they are willing to protest indefinitely with this slow rate of acceptance, Occupy Wall Street needs to figure out how to get around this obstacle of ineffective protesting.