• GRAAARRG. That is all.
• I'm listening to Doug Stanhope: 12 - Tits & Buttfucking are Il

October 06, 2005

blarg.

While walking on my lunch break, I passed a little old man fiddling around with something on one of the traffic signal control boxes. If you've been in any major city, you've seen the large metal boxes that house the wiring/controls for traffic signals. They're usually made of huge, flat, boring sides that just ache to have shit plastered/graffiti'd all over them.

So I was passing by and saw him messing around with something. It's impossible to resist snooping and seeing what any random weirdo might be doing at any given moment. It just is. I kinda peeked around the signal box and saw him with a sour-assed look on his face that made my normal countenance look cheery in comparison, tearing a sign off of the sides. I glanced at the other sides to see if he had already visited those, and sure enough, he had. What was left of the signs read "[url=http://www.worldcantwait.org/]Drive out the Bush Regime, Nov. 2nd[/url]" and had directions to what will hopefully be a large protest in L.A.....only blocks from where I work. Minor inconveniences aside, I welcomed the idea.

Then I looked back at the pucker-faced old man, practically sneering as he ripped off pieces of the signs and threw them in the garbage. It's got to be a shame when the only protest you can muster for yourself is tearing down signs in a smoldering, impotent rage. And despite all his best efforts, more signs will arrive, more signs will be posted, more protests will be coordinated. That's what you should expect in a neighborhood populated by a massive percentage of decidedly liberal college students and employees of said college. It’s funny. When you’re young, you act like you know everything. When you get old, you act like everyone else doesn’t know shit compared to you. It’s pretty contradictory, and by contradictory I mean hilarious.

Despite my mentality that protests in general are now a mere shadow of what they used to be, it's always good for groups of like-minded people to coordinate and hang out and share ideas. But there’s always the issue of other groups coming in to promote their own agendas and then invalidating the general purpose of the gathering at hand, which is seen all too often. War protests turn to “Here’s the war protest, and over there’s the genocide protest, and then behind them is the protest against hunger. Oh, yeah, there’s the pro-choice groups, too.” And it’s the same for all clashing ideals. They see a rally for one thing and think that it’s their chance to attract others to their cause. Which is fine, provided that it’s a legitimate cause that’s somehow related to the cause that precipitated the gathering in the first place. But when you have a protest that turns into a mishmash of ideals that don’t really advance the general purpose at hand, the idea of protest is invalidated.

At least, that’s my take on the whole thing. Maybe I’m wrong.

So it makes me wonder whether I pre-judged that bitter old fart. Maybe he was an ex-protestor, incensed with the notion of supposedly single-issue protests turning into a melting pot of various (and possibly contradictory) ideological representations.

Then again, he could have just been a bitter old fart.