A Suspiciously Silent Summer?
Every summer for the last decade, we've seen some kind of mass movement demonstration in the US. Are we freakin' tired? Are we just not seeing it? Or are we finally wising up and just striking?
This week’s short, meandering missive is a product of me taking a little break before getting back on the horse in September. It is also short because the last week of summer always makes me sad—the passage of time really gets to me. Yet this summer didn’t feel like the others to me. Perhaps it was because I was buried in work and medical treatments, or because the news cycle was quite slow except for Trump indictment news. I started realizing, “There wasn’t a massive protest this summer!” Being hot and fed up with injustice in the summer months (while the rich post Puglia pics) then taking to the streets, is a historical trend that has only been increasing with climate change.
This summer, I couldn’t think of a mass street protest in the US. In the past decade, I recall both Right, Left, and Extremists taking to the street en masse in the summer. This is just a little example, clearly not definitive, of some of the summer protests I recall:
2022: Protests after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June
2020: George Floyd protests
2019: Climate Strike in September
2018: Protests to end migrant family separation under Trump
2017: Standing Rock protests; Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally (and subsequent counter-rallies); in Fall, #MeToo becomes popularized because of Harvey Weinstein rape accusations
2016: BLM protests and anti-police brutality protests all over America
2015: Freddie Gray protests to protest police brutality
2014: Protests against Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, MO
2013: Protests against George Zimmerman’s acquittal
2012: Occupy
Zeynep Tufekci in Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest has described how energy produced on social media platforms can incite great flare-ups of mass mobilization in a relatively short amount of time. Yet often times, these mobilizations are not the result of years of planning or organization, resulting in movements that may not have clear demands or political goals. They are viral events with meme demands, like a trend on Twitter or outrage mobilization on Facebook. Recall that planning the March on Washington (that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at in his famous 1963 “I have a dream” speech) took years of planning. The Women’s March on Washington in 2016 took about three months.
Yet after summers and years of mass mobilizations as a result of popular social media movements, are many people simply tired of street demonstrations? Do people feel they won, or that this kind of mobilization is not fruitful?
Strikes and Actions
What I could think of happening this summer where strikes and smaller riskier actions — such as protesting Cop City outside of Atlanta. There are always protests somewhere, let’s be real. But their visibility and magnitude are what I’m fixated on.
On the strike side, we most visibly see the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild Strike in Hollywood. Of course, people who are trained to be pithy in words and get attention on screens would certainly be the center of media focus. However, there are other strikes around the country still going on — if you look at this AFL-CIO map.
There are also targeted actions. Cop City protests in Atlanta have resulted in arrests and even death, as protestors squat on a land reserve that has been earmarked for a $90M fire and police training center — something most residents don’t even want citing conservation reasons, indigenous land rights, the unwanted militarization of police, lack of public input, and quite simply a wasteful use of money in a city starved for EMTs and other public services.
Moms in Tennessee have been going to their state and city houses to protest gun violence following Nashville’s Covenant school shooting earlier this year. They’ve been met with silencing and forced escorts out of government chambers.
As Michelle Lhooq wrote for the Guardian, protestors from Extinction Rebellion (the same who glue their hands to the Mona Lisa in Summer 2022) blocked highways into Burning Man this year. They cited the need to go back to Burning Man’s roots of conservation and enlightenment— as well as ban private jets and single use plastics at the burn. Police rammed the trailer protestors had chained themselves to, pulling guns on them so that Burners could get to camps and workers could get to work
In her Substack Rave New World, the same Michelle Lhooq in a recent post, a fragment which was reposted on Instagram:
Perhaps we are in a moment of escapism. Perhaps the girl bosses realized they didn’t have to protest to sell feminism. Perhaps people realized K gives the same euphoria as a crowded collective action. Or perhaps we are in a moment where we just changed out tactics in the US to get more out of the hours we put into our democracy.