I am notoriously bad at throwing parties. Whatever time I pick, it always turns out something is going on that's far more exciting than hanging out in my apartment. On the other hand, if I do absolutely nothing, let my refrigerator run empty and my apartment go the way of entropy, somehow, mystically, a party will find its way to my place.
Thus it was that on Friday evening a contingent of Albuquerque's radical youth found themselves packed onto the floor of my studio. As one person was leaving he announced, bullhorn in hand, that he was going to wake some folks up with a friendly reminder that bombs are falling on Afghanistan.
And that got me thinking. You see, the party had gotten started when Ben told me he needed to decompress. The, er, unradicalness of the peace protests lately has been a bit frustrating for some of us.
During the march that Friday, I briefly drifted off the sidewalk into the gutter. And I mean really, literally in the gutter. There was no way I could possibly have been blocking traffic. But it wasn't long before I was informed that I should get back on the sidewalk because I was making people nervous.
Remember the perils of jaywalking.
Ben endeavored at one point to suggest that we should try doing something a little more radical than marching politely down the same street every single week. The response to his plea was, shall we say, less than warm.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
So in light of the fact that even some protestors just aren't getting it, I feel the time has come to explain why politeness isn't always the best course of action.
Let's start with tagging. Unless we get a downpour between the time of writing and Monday, you probably arrived on campus today to find the area in front of the bookstore completely covered with drawings, sayings, and bits of poetry about peace.
I know some folks are just seething with fury because the oh-so-gorgeous concrete has been defaced. But I kind of like it. We here in Albuquerque are not lacking for independent media. We've got the Lobotomy, the pirate Ditch Radio, and now the all new Independent Media Center. But what better forum for free expression than the very ground we walk on? Radio equipment and printing can be quite expensive, but just about everyone can get their hands on some chalk.
Submitting work to a publication can lead to censorship, editing and, of course, rejection. Chalking has none of these drawbacks. Let's face it: In a capitalist society, tagging is the only medium I know of that truly allows free speech for all.
And then there's that ever so controversial issue: blocking the streets. As far as I can gather from what I've heard from people who were actually at that fateful intersection on Sept. 21, no one was actually trying to block the street.
They were just crossing against the light, something I'm sure you've all done on many occasions. But even if they had been deliberately blocking the intersection, so what?
We are bombing Afghanistan, even when the least bit of rational thought should tell us that terrorists know better than to stick around the most obvious targets; that the only people we are hurting had nothing to do with our own tragedy.
And our illustrious president refuses to even attempt a diplomatic solution. Surely the terrible act of inconveniencing traffic for a few minutes pales by comparison. Besides, if I've learned anything from working for a mainstream paper, it's that news editors really do prefer running protest stories when somebody gets arrested.
Even when I was a grassroots lobbyist, our cardinal rule was that legislators would only listen to us so long as we could back up our polite lobbying with more disruptive action when necessary.
If you can get what you need by just asking nicely, then go for it. But if people's lives are at stake and courtesy just isn't working, perhaps it's time to get rude.
Sari Krosinsky
Daily Lobo Columnist
