Civil Disobedience Isn’t Helping Your Cause
Last week, activists protesting the climate summit blocked off a street near where I live. Not a big inconvenience for me since my schedule for the day only included binge watching Shark Week, but it was met with a fair amount of negativity from those I share a building with.
Having spent most of my adult life working with environmental organizations I was aware of what the protesters were blockading the street over, but those around me were not, nor did they care to be.
In the lobby somebody asked someone else what the protesters were protesting, and the words chosen to answer that question have stuck with me for the last few days: “I don’t f’n know or care”
Was this a case of one person’s apathy, or a symptom of a culture of activism in Canada that frequently employs tactics which ceased to be effective decades ago?
There have been times and places where civil disobedience has changed the world for the better, there can be no doubt about that. Civil disobedience has ended wars, given women and people of colour the right to vote, and on a personal note once got me one-third off my cell phone bill for a period of a year.
I can’t help noticing however that the years I spent protesting pipelines and angrily shouting about tar sands developments didn’t actually yield any tangible results, in fact we are in a worse place now than we were when I started all that yelling. So what do you do when nothing seems to be working?
A study from the University of Toronto recommends that a change in tactics is long overdue for Canada’s culture of activism, one that does not include civil disobedience, shouting, or getting angry at all.
University of Toronto psychologist Nadia Bashir studied the ability of certain types of activists to have influence over the opinions of the general public. The results were considered “troubling” to some, but were confirmation for me of long held suspicions over the work I had been involved with.
