The Imbalance of Protest

This is a fairly new concept to me, since I'm only on the brink of possibly entering into an administrative or managerial role in some company or other.

Let's look at a protest from both points of view involved.

From the point of view of the authority, the people being disrupted, a protest is an inconvenience, an annoyance. And there are a couple of options you have, none of which involve a special level of effort.

If you are holding an event or a meeting, or some kind of ceremony, one of the things you can do is postpone it to a later date, or move it to a new location, away from the disrupting influence. This is effective because protesters, by definition, have less organizational resources than the "legitimate" authority. You can almost always out-organize protesters.

The other option you have is to remove the protesters, and you can do this in advance or on location. When I say you can remove the protesters, I'm not talking about activeness here, because you can call the police in to do this for you. You don't really have to lift a finger. The only problems that could arise are when your event becomes so large that it attracts such a large group of protesters, that the normal police force of your host community cannot effectively remove the protesters. You have to either hold it in a bigger community, or give the police advance warning, if you know that a protest is possible or likely.

So when a protest happens, you are justifiably annoyed, but it might as well be like calling a ball game on account of rain. It might as well be as if someone forgot some key paperwork, and you have to reconvene at a later date.

Now, to switch things around, we can begin to look at things from the point of view of the protesters. To a protester, a protest is a big deal. To some of them, it means the world, and they are willing to possibly be arrested for their protest. A protester's whole life is put on hold by a protest, and their entire psychology is based in whatever issue they are protesting. To them, nothing else matters. They also tend to perceive their effect as rather large. To them, a victory is to make the rich and powerful, the decision-makers to take notice.

Unfortunately, many protests don't even get that much attention from the powerful. The protesters' only allies are the media. The media are able to make a story out of "we managed to annoy this big corporation/this government."

So for the protester, it is a matter of life and death, but for the authority, it's merely an inconvenience. Often though, the authority is willing to dignify the protest with indignation that it probably doesn't really deserve. I was walking along the sidewalk the other day, and it was flooded with ice-melt. I felt a burning anger in my heart at the inconvenience of having to go a few feet out of my way, and if there had been someone to lash out at, I would have. Authorities tend to do this with minor inconveniences like having to reschedule meetings. This is because it is the bureaucratic mentality that any little change in procedure is unthinkable, unacceptable, and needs to be corrected, loudly. Possibly with police intervention. But these bureaucrats are going to go to sleep in their own homes that night, wake up with the same job the next day, and get pissed off to the same degree that the photocopier still isn't working. They'll deal with it.

The protesters won't necessarily deal. They might wake up in jail. They might lose their jobs. They certainly don't have a corporate juggernaut to keep them rolling along in their fight against the system. They have the media, but the media can only do so much, and (as I've mentioned before) the media cannot be trusted. Not by the protesters, not by the powerful, and not by the consumers. The protesters are the ultimate underdogs in any such contest.