Could you please stop protesting?

For the last twelve months there has been a weekly "protest" held in various places around the country. Those organising and running it are doing so in protest at "Israeli aggression" and the "Israeli invasion of Palestine". 

I am not going to comment on the rights and wrongs of those actions except to say the "protests" started the day after the October 7th attacks and before there was any retalitory action. That verifiable fact has been conveniently forgotten by many of those reporting these "protests". To remind us of it would mean changing the narrative and risking the wrath of some powerful "community" leaders. Nobody is going to do it. 

I may be wrong but I would take an educated guess that a majority of those present at these events know very little (and sometimes nothing at all) about the issue they claim to feel so passionately about. It is likely the same is true of many participants in other rallies and protests. 

My guess is based on a workshop I ran on "how to protest and achieve change". I ran this pre-internet when people did not have the same resources but they did have some and this group should, at very least, been reading materials I knew they had been given, At the start of the workshop I asked people to fill ot a check sheet asking them to fill in the names of their electorate, their state and federal MPs, the Premier, the Prime Minister and a number of other people who might be relevant if you wanted to achieve change. I asked people to identify sources of information and assistance and the role that various government departments and services played. 

Nobody had to show anyone else their answers and that was just as well because the scores were even lower than I expected. There were over forty people in the group and only one of them could have been said to be really well informed. It was his job to be informed about such things and even he publicly admitted that he "didn't get everything". Many of those present were struggling to answer the questions at all. They simply thought they "knew" the answers - until they discovered they did not.

Now we have the internet and, despite all the "information" out there I wonder how informed people really are. It is not even sufficient to know someone's name. You need to know what that person does, what their actual role is, what they can and cannot do. You need to know how to approach them and how to word a request for action.

Many years ago I looked after the office of a local MP for a few weeks. It was his secretary, a good friend, who asked me to fill in on an emergency basis. My role was, supposedly, to answer the phone and take messages, greet people who dropped in and take down their details so the secretary could get back to them.

Of course it ended up being more than that. The MP would come in at night after I had left and there would be a list of demands waiting for me in the morning. They would often be of the nature "letter to X about Y saying...."

I had only drafted two or three such letters (and even neatly typed them up) when he appeared one morning and started to sign things before going on to another meeting. There was a roar from his office, "Cat! In here now!"

I went in wondering what I had done wrong. He flung a letter back at me. "Tell them to do it, don't ask! It's why I am the Minister. You're being too polite." I crept back and changed one sentence...and I also managed to learn a lesson. He was not an easy man for whom to work but he knew his job. I needed to know mine too.

If you want to "protest" then you need to know things. You need to know a lot of things. You need to be really informed not simply believe something is right or wrong. If you want change or want to achieve something then you need to put in the necessary work. It might also mean weaning yourself off the weekend adrenalin fix brought about by going to that protest march. Yes, that's hard isn't it?