A weekend in DC

posted by The Vidiot @ 10:28 AM Permalink

Went to DC this weekend. Took one of those crazy Chinatown busses. $35 round trip NYC to DC. Not too shabby, huh? Anyway, DC is kind of cool. Georgetown sucks BIG time. Anyone who hangs out there is a loser. The bars there are horrible. Adams Morgan though is kind of cool. A little "Bourbon Street"-ish except without the drinking in the streets. The protest was disappointing though.

First, there weren't as many people there as there had been in the pre-Iraq protests. (Though, I find it funny that back then, we were struggling with the media to report on them AND report the numbers accurately. Back then, easily, a million would attend and the media would report "10s of thousands." Now, I'd be hard-pressed to say 100,000 in attendance and the reports are of that and more. Odd.) Second, protesting is supposed to challenge the system and/or break the reality. But the protests as they are now do neither of those things. They are extremely organized and ridiculously subdued. They completely adhere to the rules. Everyone behaves like everyone else and they all think they're speaking to power. It's practically mainstream. Mr. Vidiot and I suspect the whole thing might be organized and arranged by the government. Think about it. What better way to give the illusion of democracy and free speech? Make sure there are orderly demonstrations and that way, nobody can accuse you of squelching dissent.

The protestors' hearts are in the right place and I respect them all for trying. It's just that I believe that protests, as they're done today, accomplish nothing. The war with Iraq happend. And the war with Iran is, I'm sure, right on schedule. Bush will do whatever he and his administration wants and the protests will have no effect on him. The most that one can hope for is that when history looks back on this time, there will be a sidebar that says "not everyone supported the wars."

What's the solution, if not protests? I don't know. I'm not a genious. I just know that the protests don't work and that the protests don't really address what the real problem is: the unfairness of our economic system that causes the wars to begin with.

Yes, I know, I'm a broken record these days, blah blah blah.