(Don't) Honk if you're angry

I really need to start writing things down so that ideas stop hiding from me... This one was somewhere under the rug for a week, and thankfully did not evade me entirely.

Back in my days when I carried a voice recorder, I would come around one of the last of seemingly endless bends and twists on Lincoln Drive, passing protesters from the Unitarian Universalist church. "Honk if you are against the war!" their signs would blare. Here I was, bleary eyed and sick of working (it being hump day and all) and not really feeling the barrage of horns from my fellow travelers. At first I thought it was my refusal of all things political, with the cop-out that I was an "objective reporter" that prevented me from participating in this weekly demonstration. I did and still do oppose the war, but never felt compelled, not even once, to sound my horn.

Then last Wednesday, as I was leaving my grown-folks class (that's grad school for y'all who don't know), I noticed more protesters, this time about two miles away, outside a presbyterian church, toting similar signs, as passersby would either stare or "beep beep beep" on their way past the intersection. I can no longer hide behind the guise of neutral reporter. It's not really the political stench reeking from their dedicated demonstrations that turns me off. I learned last Wednesday, and reaffirmed it yesterday, that the exercise in futility is what abates any morsel of desire to honk my horn if I'm against Bush.

After all, it is the tree in the forest theory we're talking about here. If 1,000 people honk their horns every week in protest against the war, but no one on Capitol Hill hears them, do they make a noise? Indeed, they do; a nuisance to be exact. But do they make a difference? Are they changing anything? Not a damn thing. Not once have I seen a headline touting anti-war horn honkers provoking any pull out of US troops from Iraq. It just ain't gonna happen. Why? Because backyard protests are a waste of time. Inciting drivers to honk their horns on some corner in Philadelphia is just plain silly. It disturbs the peace and nothing more.

While democracy includes the people having a voice, the misapprehension lies in identifying the appropriate audience. The medium is just as important, if not more so, as the message. Case in point: Would the March on Washington have made a ding in the civil rights movement had it taken place in say, Newark, NJ? No. The March was a strategically planned event to get the most people with a unified voice to speak out in a place where it would have the most visibility, and thus, the most impact. Angry with your mayor's decision to veto an important bill? Don't protest outside your church; protest outside CITY HALL. The message is simply lost in the medium when poorly planned and ineptly executed demonstrations take place. All the more true when they occur weekly. Sounding an alarm in your community to take a stand does little else other than make your neighbors, of whom many may concur with your arguments but are now too disgusted to care, view you as a problem rather than an active participant in our government.

Excuse me now, I must go apply calamine lotion; my hives are spreading.