How to Change the World Overnight
Making a Difference
Mark Twain said:
If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.
In other words, if the government is not trying to stop something, it must not be very important.
On the flip side of the coin, the great historian Howard Zinn noted:
Protest always looks futile at the time it takes place, but protest mounts up.
If they thought protest is futile they wouldn’t send the police out every time there’s a demonstration. [Examples of what Zinn is talking about here, here, andhere.]
You set up a picket line somewhere of 7 people, and 12 policemen show up. They must worry about protests. Because they know that small protests lead to large ones.
We noted in 2009:
As MSNBC news correspondent Jonathan Capehart tells Dylan Ratigan, the main problem is that people aren’t making enough noise. Capehart says that the people not only have to “burn up the phone lines to Congress”, but also to hit the streets and protest in D.C.
Even though most politicians are totally corrupt, if many millions of Americans poured into the streets of D.C., a critical mass would be reached, and the politicians would start changing things in a hurry.
As [liberal] PhD economist Dean Baker points out:
The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that convinced members of Congress to end legal racial discrimination. More recently, the townhall meetings, dominated by people opposed to health care reform, have been a serious roadblock for those pushing reform….
A big turnout … can make a real difference.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
