Gatekeeping the Fed Up: A Protest Story

[sylvanwitch]

Some context for the topic of this post:

I've been political since the fifth grade (no, really), an anti-establishment type since high school, a neo-hippie in my teens and twenties, alive with the conviction that the government was corrupt, and I was going to fix it. As I grew older, I recognized that I was more of a centrist, and I even went Independent for a short time in the 2010s, despite having been harassed by the FBI in the GW Bush administration (circa 2003) for my activism. Since 2012 or so, however, I've been shifting more and more left of center, until now I think I'm probably a democratic socialist, largely because capitalism is a deadly system designed to work for only a few (and then work not at all once they've eaten up all the resources--human and otherwise).

Anyway, all of this is to say that I consider myself a pretty self-aware political person. I'm vegan, queer as fuck despite my happy marriage to a cishet man, pagan... Well, you get the point.

In my life, I've encountered gatekeepers who felt I wasn't vegan enough, liberal enough, queer enough... And I'm at an age at last (54) when I process the words and behaviors of others, let my socially anxious brain perseverate on them, and then try to move on without changing my self-perception (unless their observations have merit, in which case, I hope I'm self-aware enough to grow rather than shrink).

Despite my online activism, letter-writing, mutual aid, other kinds of direct action, and volunteer work, I had never attended a protest in person until yesterday, when I went to one of the more than 1200 Hands-Off protests organized across the US. I would not have gone by myself because I am not good with crowds, but a colleague was going, and then she and I ended up organizing a bunch of us, so that we were ten strong when we got to the square where the rally was being held. We chanted and marched and shouted and clapped and sang songs and complimented people's signs and costumes, and despite some bouts of nerves about the police presence and the angry but few counter-protestors, I had an absolutely amazing time. I'm talking life-altering, drunk-on-life euphoria. It felt *so* good to be amongst like-minded people of all ages, ethnicities and nationalities, creeds, and conditions. It felt powerful and real and like I was awake for the first time in a long time. Even now, more than twenty-four hours later, my head is still buzzing with the energy of the experience.

I cannot WAIT for my next protest. It feels essential to me to join again with like-minded people and do what we can to let the world know that the US is not rubber-stamping the vile, ignorant, fatal and fascistic policies of the current regime.

But...

Almost immediately upon getting on social media when I got home from the rally yesterday, I found people telling those of us who rallied yesterday that we were dupes for going to a rally organized by a group demanding non-violent conflict resolution and de-escalation. That anyone stupid enough to put their name on a sign-up list to volunteer deserved what they got. That "wine moms" are just "doing a protest" to feel good about themselves. That if we went maskless (as in hiding our faces, not protecting the vulnerable), we were fools. That it wasn't enough, we weren't enough, it was a performative sham, it was children playing pretend.

And to that, I say: Who the fuck do you think you are? Really? Are we really going to gatekeep here at the very beginning of what is doubtless going to be a long, perilous slog? Are we going to deflate people's enthusiasm because they're middle-class women who buy matching tee-shirts on Amazon? Is that really how we're going to create community and solidarity?

I get it, okay? I understand that some of the folks at yesterday's rally weren't what you were expecting. Some of those folks probably behaved like gawping yokels when the furries arrived or when the braless lesbian moms shouted "Whose streets? Our streets!" while pushing strollers with protest slogans taped on the canopies. Some of those folks aren't as poor as the naysayers, not as queer, not as marginalized, not as brown. Yeah, okay--I know. I know they don't know intersectionality from a hole in the wall. So the fuck what? Are we going to draw those lines NOW, when we need to build momentum and create community? Can we maybe just have a big honkin' rally full of outraged but peacefully assembled people first before we start deciding who has the right to protest?

Oh, but those very people will become informers later, when the jackboots hit the street, the gatekeepers say. Yes, maybe. Probably, even.

But right now, in this moment, when our representatives are slow to make our feelings heard, what's wrong with a little street movement, a little joy and belonging and coming-togetherness? Can we have two precious hours of filling up our depleted souls with the juice of one another's company, and then get back to the deadly long crawl of progress against crushing authoritarianism? Can we stop telling people they're doing protest wrong and let them have the experience?

I saw someone yesterday saying that violence is always necessary as a counterpoint to peaceful protests, using Malcolm X as an example. Fine, yes, sure. But it's worth noting that both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., died at the wrong end of a bullet, regardless of their respective approaches to disobedience. Whether Jews in the ghetto went peacefully into the cattle cars or took a gun butt to the skull and came to the chambers still reeling with concussion, they all ended up in the same place. If we're going to use panic and worst case scenarios as our measuring rods, then let's be honest about the outcomes. Some of the righteous few who think they know it all are also going to be conciliators, confessors, informers. Some of those wine moms are going to hide their kids' trans friends in the crawl spaces of their McMansions. If you think we're going to somehow establish the Right Way of Protesting now and avoid all the very human mistakes of past movements, you're obviously on better drugs than I have ever taken.

All of this is to say that I do not want my mellow harshed just yet. Let me have the high before you bring me down to earth. Let me feel like we're all going to make it together. Let me pretend it's going to be okay.

Just leave the fucking gate open a little while longer, yeah? Just a few days more. To let the hopeful through.

Comments

[celestialstuff]

I strongly suspect that this sort of propaganda is spread by conservatives who want you to conform to their idea of what protest against them looks like. If protesters are violent and unlawful it validates their stories about "violent protests" and gives them a legal (and they think moral) excuse to further take away rights.

[sylvanwitch]

So, interestingly, one of the people I've seen gatekeeping the protests on social media is a trans woman who feels we aren't taking the threats seriously enough. She's been talking about violence as a necessary measure. I follow a lot of trans folks on bsky, but she's among the most vocal, and now I'm all kinds of wondering...