Let's Go to a Protest Tomorrow
The importance of invitations
Dear Friends,
I’m writing from the Bay Area, a place I used to visit in the summer as a young teen. Imagine – or better yet, please don’t – a late 90s-style center-part butt cut, a pair of extreme wide-legged Jnco pants bought with allowance money from the local Gadzooks at the Houston Galleria, and a Smashing Pumpkins Zero t-shirt in regular rotation.
There was some aesthetic restraint; rocking a long chain wallet felt like stolen skater valor to me and, to be completely honest, I was still the kid who rollerbladed badly and mostly wanted to go to Bennigan’s for dinner. I knew I was cosplaying.
Still visiting here felt like access to real counterculture to me. While I was collecting childhood treasures from home in Houston last summer, I came across a bumpersticker that I copped on one of my many righteous walks down Telegraph Avenue during one of those summer visits to Berkeley.
(That bumpersticker, by the way, is intact because I spared no effort in taping it to the cover of my Case Logic 100-disc CD carrier.)
Part of why I’ll be in Berkeley tomorrow is because of an invitation; my family here invited me to go to one of the Hands Off mass mobilization protests that are happening in hundreds of cities and towns across the country tomorrow.
I’ll be the first to admit, public protests don’t come naturally to me as I imagine they don’t come naturally to most people. I covered plenty of them. (If I’m going to catalogue past embarrassments in this post, here’s a dispatch from Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity I wrote for The Huffington Post in 2011. Gah!) But it’s hard to turn down a good invitation from good people. In fact, it’s critical to creating movements and getting effective messages out.
As the organizer and political theorist Anat Shenker-Osorio told Friend of the Crunch Anand Giridharadas earlier this week about this weekend’s protests:
….the first message is not the message that you write on a sign. The first message is: How many people who have never been to a protest are you personally asking? So that is the first thing that I want to tell you.
We just have new data back that shows an inordinate number of people who at least claim that they would participate say the reason that they haven't is because they haven't been asked to do so.
Organizing simply means asking people to do so.
So, before you make your sign, figure out who your buddies are that you're asking to come. That's really important.
The dramatic stock market swoon and tariffs are sucking up the oxygen this week, but if you’re reading this newsletter, I’m *willing to venture* that you oppose the Trump administration’s recent work. Somewhere in the throwing tens of thousands of veterans out of their jobs or cutting funds for public health or environmental protections or cancer research or euthanizing lab animals or disappearing citizens or cutting safeguards for vulnerable people and so on and so on, there’s gotta be something in there for you to oppose.
What’s more, if our opposition leaders or industry leaders can’t or won’t muster any meaningful or effective disapproval to what’s happening, it’s up to us. Even if it feels like unnatural or like some kind of cosplay, I’m inviting you out tomorrow. And I’d love to hear how it goes.
With love,
Adam