The Power of Pickets

It didn’t happen quite this way, but it could have. We’re marching to the legislature, a field trip mid-strike to implore the province to pay us enough to live in the places we serve. I’ve lost track of my friends, and for the moment, I’m alone in a sea of obnoxious yellow. I’m eavesdropping on the group standing a little bit ahead of me, who are talking about the state of the world in a way I find irritating. They’re good allies, I know – reliable, careful to look out for others, willing to stay back and help out with logistics when everyone else just wants to go home. They notice I’ve lost my own group and pull me into their conversation, changing the subject to something we can all agree on: the rent in this town is too damned high, and it’s hard to believe, sometimes, that the daily chants and the worn-through shoes and the signs that are more duct-tape than cardboard at this point will get us anywhere other than two months deeper in debt.

It’s a nebulous energy you get in a strike, ricocheting from optimism to despair and back along with the mercurial weather of the Pacific Northwest in autumn. Two days from now it will seem like nothing changed, like our march was a failure, like we could have saved ourselves five-thousand steps out of tens of thousands we are accumulating day by day. Four weeks from now, we will win at least some of what we asked for. Six weeks from now, these allies will fall out of my life like they were never there at all. Six months from now, I will be sitting at my desk thinking of them fondly.

The success or failure of a protest is often measured in immediate achievement of neatly defined objectives. Even by this measure, success is more likely than not, although you wouldn’t know it from the way people talk. It’s easier, sometimes, to assume there is no way to win. Still, not every success plays out as a neat and tidy win. To change the course of public conversation, to win a few more hearts and minds than you had the day before, to build a nimble community of long-term activists; these are successes that are harder to quantify, but also more essential.

I think, often, of how atomized we are, of how many of us are alone in a crowd of strangers we don’t know how to turn into, if not friends precisely, at least compatriots in the same struggle. Bridging the social discomfort inherent to talking to an unfamiliar person who you might not particularly like on a personal level is hard, and getting harder, a skill we let atrophy when all our social media is geared to put us in front of people just like us, and hide everyone else away behind a block button. Alone, we are lonely, isolated, powerless, prone to polarization, radicalization, extremism. The gap between us and our neighbours who sometimes want the same things we do grows and grows and grows.

One march alone won’t solve this, of course. But the activities of protest – moving together, chanting, singing, occupying the same space with a single unifying goal – are exactly the kinds of activities research shows us increase social trust, neighbourhood cohesion, and collective efficacy. This sense of unity can even lead to collective effervescence; a “transformational state of excitement that occurs within a group united in purpose or action”; the feeling you get when everyone at the concert joins in on Bohemian Rhapsody, or your team scores an improbable game-winning goal, or when everyone at your picket line learns that the employer has finally asked to bring in an arbitrator. Small wonder that participation in protests increases positive emotions or that activists have higher rates of well-being than non-activists. We are a social species that has forgotten how to be social. Protests are one way we can re-learn.

It hasn’t happened quite this way yet, but it could. Another year, another fight, but those same familiar faces and a new fight in the same struggle. We aren’t friends. We haven’t seen each other in years, perhaps. But they’re good allies, I know; reliable, thoughtful, willing. And we will march together. 

Written By:

Carolyn Dallimore, Policy Strategist, Engage