Day Without a Woman: My Protest

I’m also starting to post clips on my YouTube channel from Captain America: Civil War, so stay tuned for those and my thoughts on the movie, rebellion, and the system!

In Cambridge, where I live, there are a lot of protests; it’s something of a regional hobby. Many times, I’m not entirely sure what people are gathered to protest; the signs are cryptic and the chants are jumbled. I have been invited to protests without anyone knowing what said protests are about. But especially lately, protests have more organization and explanation. One such protest is Day Without a Woman.

I have a few problems with protests. First, they confuse me. It seems to me that if we want more women in the workplace, we should have a day when women who don’t have jobs go out and find work, not a day where women who are already in the workplace leave. I remember being similarly confused about a spat a couple years ago at Harvard when a group of students holding a silent demonstration during Primal Scream grew upset that people failed to notice them… being silent… during an event with “scream” in its title.

It isn’t the cause I’m in conflict with here; it’s the method. These seem like singularly inefficient ways of getting one’s point across. I feel like there are much more productive ways to go about changing things we want changed. Certainly, non-violent protests have brought about change in the past, but those were specific protests about specific issues that were often brilliantly and eloquently explained, and went hand in hand with legal and political activism. “Increasing gender equality” is just too vague a cause to be advanced by a bunch of people not going to work for a day. This lack of efficiency in itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but I’m afraid it might point to one.

You see, when I see people protesting without thorough reasoning to back their position, or any plan for how their protest is going to improve things, I start to suspect that they’re not protesting because of any particular cause; they’re protesting for the protest’s sake. And that isn’t helpful; it’s divisive, and it breeds resentment and self-righteousness. I have said before that virtue is always positive; it always looks toward something, not away. It rejects things, but only because they are pushed out by something greater; virtue is never, in itself, a rejection.

But that is what protest is, on its own. It is division and rejection for their own sake. And those are dangerous. Much of history’s bloodshed began with angry protests, with people who wanted to move away from something without knowing what they wanted to move toward – and so once they’d gotten rid of the old system, they had no new one to take its place, and anarchy ensued.

Last semester our Dining Hall workers went on strike. I’m not getting into the specifics right now. What I noticed most at the time wasn’t the arguments on either side. It was the people shouting in the Yard while we were trying to take exams. “No justice, no peace! You should be ashamed! We see you!” It was the security guards checking IDs to let people into the administration buildings, which were basically under siege. It was the policemen who were protecting the right of these people to scream at them. It was the hate and self-righteousness in people’s faces, the explicit one-sided peer pressure, and the emotion-laden rhetoric that didn’t bother with facts. (It should be noted that many or even most of these people were not the actual dining-hall workers; they were students or other unaffiliated parties. I have found that often (though not always), the people most opinionated about a cause are those least familiar with it.)

We all want to root for the underdog; we want to channel our talent and passion into bringing a just cause to victorious fulfillment. There is nothing wrong and everything right with that. But when we rush in and oversimplify, we hurt more than we help, as I’ve worried before. We can’t divide the world into black and white. We can’t tear the world down and build a new one; we have to respect the fact that there’s also good in what’s already here, and if we really care about these causes, there are more efficient, if less dramatic, ways to change the system from within.

The system, especially in a democratic nation, is here for a reason; it brings us security and stability and the chance to make a life, and in return, for everyone’s good, we need to follow its rules. Don’t get me wrong; I love stories of heroic rebels as much as anyone else, and there is certainly a time and a place for rebellion. But we can’t rebel just for the sake of rebelling; that’s immature and shallow. Rebellion is only legitimate when it is on behalf of something larger.

You see, the system should have our allegiance, but it should never have our ultimate allegiance. There are higher things, things that aren’t manmade, like justice and truth and faith, that must always come first. We must always be ready to protest and act on behalf of the things that matter. But first we must make sure that what we are doing is for a worthy cause, and that it is actually going to forward that worthy cause in a way that outweighs the division produced by our actions. We must cherish stability and order and authority, and only go against them when they come up irrevocably against something we cherish more.

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