an alternative to normal methods of protesting
xy | 01.05.2002 07:54
One is going beyond the formal and exploring the informal. Protests are formal; they are often seeking to "speak truth to power". Places where the demo is to happen is known of ahead of time, and therefore soldiers called police can prepare themselves most completely.
Informal methods of communicating our information and spirit are less easy to undermine. We can go around neighborhoods either in small affinity groups (doing a wide variety of actions), or individually. We can meet formally at a demonstration, and then disperse (when or before police order us) into our affinity groups, etc. whereupon we may choose to "infiltrate" the entire city in all directions, at any time we choose. Doing this by engaging everyone we come across in meaningful communication (in my view, much more meaningful than marchers shouting slogans).
Yet another method is *resistance consciousness*. This is a method that needs no above-ground organization nor leadership. It is a method where people may do a kind of informal general strike (and semi-passive resistance) based on their critical awareness of an issue, while not articulating their strategy openly (to articulate openly is to open oneself up for police state methods of silencing and intimidating us). We take "good cop, bad cop" and turn it around to "good peasant, bad peasant", and work on classically conditioning authoritarians via two extremes of silence/avoidance (beyond professional duty, such as a food service worker giving them coffee) and wildly celebratory interaction (beyond the norms of daily alienation).
Is this a start for you?
xy
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