...since my post last week about the anti-Rove protest on campus. A bit of an identity crisis. Here I am, someone who has had major life-altering experiences (drug-free, thank you) at a May Day protest years ago, putting down activists I agree with. Have I become cold and heartless? Well, no. I realized early on that protests and radical actions were not my thing. But they work for some people, and I was assigned an article for a class that reminded me that even if they don't directly affect change, radical actions do have reasons: Activist organizations use disruptive image events, which are highly charged protests that involve visuals such as people being buried up to their necks in roads and grandparents chaining themselves to trees (DeLuca, 1999). Such events rarely put an immediate stop to the things activist organizations protest; however, according to a Greenpeace campaigner, success is judged by the protestors’ abilities to reduce complex issues to symbols that disrupt pe...
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