Their message was "STOP U.S. French and British WAR on LIBYA." The flyer said "This is not a war for democracy — Stop the criminal bombing of Libya!" ANSWER is a knee-jerk reactionary organization — you can always count on it to oppose whatever the US government does, regardless. But whatever you think of their viewpoint, ANSWER does a really good job of telling the world what it is.
At some point supporters of the Libyan insurgents saw ANSWER’s message and didn’t like it. Instead of creating a conflict, half a dozen brought out their own flags for the new Libyan Republic and waved them a few feet from the ANSWER demonstration. The Park police didn’t intervene, but they did keep a close watch to see that neither side got physical.
Men outnumbered women in every protest except the one against Monsanto. Even the ANSWER demo had about two men for every woman. The ratio was about three to one for Bahrain, with its student protestors, and even more for the Syrian and Yemeni demos. The latter had lots of children and adult men, but only a few adult women.
Now come the grades. ANSWER gets an "A" for clarity of message and visibility of presentation, but with a "minus" for monotony of posters.
Millions Against Monsanto gets a D for speaking only to the converted, who already knew what they were protesting about.
The Yemeni’s get a B for numerous good signs and at least having a flyer even if they didn’t pass it out. If they’d broken the circle long enough for photo-ops in front of the White House they would have gotten a higher grade.
The Bahrainis and Syrians only get Cs because they didn’t have any flyers to tell the public what they were demonstrating for. On the other hand, their signs were very clear. Staging some photo-ops would have raised their grade. I couldn’t tell if they had spokespeople available for interviews, which would also have raised their grade.
All in all, the more experienced did better, and the least experienced did worse.
©2011
At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist by Jo Freeman
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