Mass uprisings slip through our fingers
On one of the last mornings before I was to leave Australia, I met up with a girl I had kind of grown up with. My family would always see the Crawfords at Christmas – the two girls of the house were around my age. I always wondered what it must have been to grow up surrounded by girls and a very strong female role model, and in turn perhaps they wondered what it was like to have three devilish younger brothers that could at any moment set fire to the garden. After getting lost a little on the windy day, I finally found Rebecca sitting waiting with a coffee in a Clovelly coffee shop. As I walked in she looked up and as she smiled I saw she was beautiful – like an Italian goddess literally radiating some sort of light. I felt a bit rueful at my rushed hung over state, but then I reasoned that the Crawfords had always been like that.
Seeing as we hadn’t seen each other for years we had a lot to catch up on (the mothers-grapevine had passed along the relevant details of our movements naturally, and I had to laugh when Rebecca said she was worried about what kind editing that didn’t involve.) We went through it all – boyfriends old new and potential, the family, whereabouts of errant friends, the baby boom, and what was on the horizon. We managed to get through this all even though I got worried I’d have to tackle the waitress to get any attention.
Having finished her Phd Rebecca told me she was ready to look forward to a new project. Off handedly she told me that she was thinking of writing a book. Before I could follow that up, she also mentioned that one another project involved doing a documentary following the lives of three Labour Party women as they ran for election in the next election. Rebecca has been involved in politics as long as I can remember. We sat in the café and talked about where our experiences overlapped.
Specifically, what was on my mind was the early mass ‘No War’ demonstrations of 2003. I had not been in Australia for the huge demonstrations that took place, in which a reported 250 thousand people choked the heart of my birthplace. I had participated in the ones in the Netherlands. Almost as a follow on to these rallies I briefly joined a group calling themselves ‘American Voices Abroad’, which sprang up at a grass roots level carrying forward the momentum of the demonstrations. To me, and to many others, the global demonstrations were incredible – to date they are the largest demonstrations ever held in the world. In the US they were the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam war. This is significant in that people claim that Generation X – which is now hovering around the 25 to 35 year old range - is essentially an apathetic generation. Although one of the strongest things about the rallies was the multi generational participation, the dichotomy between the reality of the mass protests and the supposed lethargy of people my age is quite marked.
The protest of Feb 15 and March 22 in 2003 were significant events. In terms of ideas, the confluence of so many people allowed for the cross pollination of political agendas. Terms like ‘neo-liberal’, and ‘economic imperialism’ cross seminated with ideas as basic as war is wrong. Suddenly you had a multitude of grassroots agendas coming together to march under the ‘no war’ banners. A huge gathering presented people with a sense of solidarity, which was only reinforced when we went home, and watched the news coming in from around the world showing the huge demonstrations in major capital cities. The sense of empowerment was real.
Since that day, activist bodies like Greenpeace have asked themselves how to harness that energy, and that sense of mass peaceful action. When I talked to Rebecca about it, she said that the Labour Party had no idea how to connect to that body that took to the streets, and they weren’t asking themselves how to.
A major party like the Labour party in Australia doesn’t have to harness the power of a grass roots uprising to create social change. Rebecca explained to me that the labour party has a long history, with a detailed public policy, with which the party members are familiar. As we talked I learned that the inter party political positions (left center and right) of party members is actually based on their interpretation of that policy; what policies they’d give up and what policies they’d consider fundamental to labour operations. Rebecca explained to me that no party could ever represent the true wishes of 20 million people, so government becomes a form of compromise.
What we have to do, said Rebecca, is justify to the people why we sacrificed one position in order to push another position through. That is the art of governing.
In contrast, I realized that Greenpeace is outside the structure of this form of governing, and acts as a pressure group upon the political framework Greenpeace doesn’t do solutions work; it acts as a catalyst for social change. The thing that is fundamental to what Greenpeace is all about, is non violent direct action. We use the media to leverage our actions to gather public attention – this is the pressure that we bring to bear on parties such as the Labour party.
Yet we share a common wish to harness the public to achieve social change. It occurs to me that neither of us have any idea how to really get a grip on what happened in early 2003.
3:07:38 PM 
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