Protesting: what's the point?

Nothing feel quite like a protest does.

The funny banners. The catchy charts. The tiredness that comes from standing for hours.

The joy of being surrounded by people on the same side as you.

The buzz of being in a crowd.

The feeling that social change is achievable because WE are willing to fight for it.

It is exhilarating.

I felt all of this on Saturday at the Million Women’s Rise March. It is what keeps on me coming back whatever the weather and despite my dislike of standing for long periods of time.

I have noticed recently that attending a protest has become more mainstream and more popular. Ones I have attended for years are getting bigger and the crowds younger. The connectivity of social media has made organising them quicker and advertising them easier.

But a debate has opened up around the point of protesting, if you turn up to the women’s march, take a selfie and then just return to your life, what impact have you really had?

At the same time, protesting is not an accessible activity, it is geography and ability dependent. It is always worth remembering that having the time, resources, and energy to engage in a protest is a privilege. For this reason, activism must take many forms. Including, for many, simply exist and being proud of your existence.

We need to have conversation around activism more generally as something you do that can take many forms, aside from a traditional protest.

If you would like to come on a march, fantastic but that is just the opener. Social justice is something you practice everyday, it's about your relationships, it's about challenging power wherever you find it, it's about creating a platform for people less privileged than you in all areas of your life, it's about learning and developing. If you are privileged enough to be able to attend a march, surely you can do more elsewhere too?

A protest march is noisy action but social change happens from many places, many people and many actions pushing forwards together. It is built through unglamorous background grind.

That, of course, doesn't mean that mass protest marches don't have a role. They function first and foremost as movement-building tactics, giving people an immediate physical sense of being part of something larger than themselves, a palpable experience of collective power.

They can educate and raise awareness of particular causes, as well as being an antidote to despair. These days, they can counter the sense of paralysis that can come all too easily when the daily news is demoralizing and depressing.

I am a big believer that to build a movement you need all kinds of people in the conversion. This includes the direct action activists who will dedicate their lives to the cause as well as the weekend warriors who come to a march but do little else.

We can appreciate everyone’s involvement while also challenging people to do more. The best grassroots organisers know how to do this.  They take the energy and attention from these marches and feed it into longer-term strategies, using these marches to strengthen people’s willingness to undertake the other kinds of work that produce lasting change.

So if you want to do more, and be more than a weekend warrior, listen to these organisers, because if we want to win, we need to see marching for what it is. One step amongst thousands.