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Originally posted by Niki2:
Along the lines of that video posted about changing things:

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The police motorcycles came out of nowhere and blocked the intersection of Kingsway and Theobald's Road in central London. The bus came to a sudden stop and remained motionless.

What the heck? I walked forward to ask the driver what was going on and then I heard whistles and drums and indistinct chanting. I no longer needed to ask. The kids from the University of London were marching to protest tuition fee rises.

The driver let us off and I hurried to my meeting at Bush House, home of the BBC World Service. By the time I came out, the University of London students had been joined by others from LSE and King's College some bearing signs that read: "Tory Scum/Here we Come."

Political marching, protest marching, call it what you will, has become in the new millennium a way of exercising one's ego. When making a programme recently on the history of protest marching I asked folks over and over again why they went on marches?

"To make my voice heard," was the usual reply. Really? Even if the government isn't listening?

Making one's voice heard wasn't the reason people went on marches at the beginning.

The first successful political march in England took place in 1834. Six agricultural workers from Tolpuddle in Dorset had been transported to Australia in chains. Their crime? Organisaing a society to prevent a cut in their wages.

For the Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they were called, transportation to Australia was a sentence of living death and tens of thousands of workers marched from King's Cross to Parliament to present a petition signed by 800,000 people demanding the six be allowed to return to Britain.

Parliament gave in to the pressure, and the men were allowed to come home.

Over the next century and a half, the political march became an important tool all over the world for those seeking political change and redress of injustice.

Marching did not always work and often ended in violence whether in Chicago's Haymarket Square in 1886 or outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburgin 1905.

But the rallies frequently produced pressure that led to dramatic change. Successful marching campaigns have certain things in common. They need to have a very specific goal and it should be focused on gaining a positive - independence, civil rights a decent wage - rather than repealing a negative.

In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement staged the March on Washington to bring pressure on then President John F Kennedy for legislation guaranteeing African-American's constitutional rights in the South, where segregation had disenfranchised them for more than eight decades.

Act of political nostalgia

Despite Kennedy Administration concerns about the potential for violence, the march went off without a hitch. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech which guaranteed that the march would become one of the most famous in history.

It also made marching the template for the full range of political protest associated with the 1960s. Martin Luther King would later march in Alabama from Selma to the state capitol Montgomery. The violence from local authorities that greeted the marchers led to an international outcry and hastened the passage of civil rights legislation in Washington DC.

Marches against the Vietnam War filled out the decade. Sometimes there was violence, as in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Party convention and in 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio. But often the marches, with their hundreds of thousands of participants, went off without a hitch, their main purpose being to remind politicians of the war's deep unpopularity.

It wasn't just in the English speaking world that the 60s marked a high-water mark for political marching. French students marching through Paris in May 1968 provoked disproportionate violence from the government of Charles De Gaulle. This in turn cost the government its support in France at large, and the government fell.

Today, marching seems to be a retro activity, an act of political nostalgia more than a tactic to bring about specific change. Very few of those who walk the streets "making their voices heard" would be willing to go much further to change politics.

Marching is a right in free societies. Political leaders tolerate marching but don't fear it. When more than a million and half people marched through London in February 2003 to protest the impending war with Iraq, it changed absolutely nothing.

In America, there have been million man and million women marches that echo Dr King's March on Washington, but they seem to want nothing more than television camera time.

This has culminated in television personalities taking over the march on Washington business.

The two big rallies held this past election season were organised by TV stars Glenn Beck and John Stewart. I wonder what the future of political marching is. Clearly, it has become a fun day out and chance to be among like-minded people who wanted to make "their voices heard," or "show politicians I disagree."

Yes, well, thank you for sharing.

If protest marching is ever going to be a useful political tactic again, those who put one foot in front of another are going to have be willing to take a bit more risk.

Civil disobedience would be the next step, with jail time a possible consequence of one's actions. How many students protesting tuition rises would risk that?

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11849259

I'm very much afraid he's got a good point, and it saddens me greatly. Looking at them, it seems to make his point:




Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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