Last night, I wrote the following in comments:
It doesn’t make a difference when 50 people protest, or 500 people protest, or 5,000 people protest. It makes a difference when 50,000 people protest (in NC or Columbus), or 500,000, or 5,000,000 (in NYC). The hoped-for outcome is that the political status quo is delivered a jolt when it realizes that the American people believe that betraying the constitution, lying to the country, and abusing people are so wrong, so outrageous, that they’re willing to exercise their rusty right of assembly and free speech to shout in the street about it. But when 50 people do it, it’s just pathetic, embarrassing and god-awfully useless.
The difference between 50 and 50,000 is 49,950 people who are worried sick and angry like that mild-mannered shy guy Garrison Keillor, but…. Maybe those 49,950 people will never show. If that’s the case, then we have to either think of something else or just wait and see what will happen.
When 34 people marched on the sidewalk in downtown Columbus yesterday, they were seen by a few thousand people once, for a few seconds each by. There were no video cameras to capture the images for the evening news. There has been no newspaper report of the Columbus protest. The organizer of the Columbus march isn’t enthusiastic about the internet, so news of it won’t be spread by him there.
On the way home from the march, I saw this bus bench, also in downtown Columbus:
Tens of thousands of people drive by this bench every day. Just one person put it up. It will stay there for a good long while before it’s taken down. People get as much of a message from this as they did from driving by the march.
A well-attended, well-covered march would be an improvement upon this bench. But until the former is achieved, activism involving messages like the latter will be much more efficient.
