Mass protest can electrify even the most jaded observers
Evidence
As I plodded along, I pulled out my phone. I got a message from Juliana, my photographer friend, on Facebook Messenger. We had taken the cable bridge. The police had lost or given up. She sent me a photograph of that big, gnarly construction, packed with people, all of them now supporting the protests she had been covering sympathetically for weeks. Juliana suffers from depression and is not given to flights of fancy. She is the type of blasé Paulistana who frowns constantly and listens to darkly comic British indie rock. So I will never forget her caption. She wrote: “I don’t think I have ever seen anything more beautiful in my life.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 406
Categorization
- SEED: A journalistic craft note: anchoring a political-historical moment in one skeptical witness’s uncharacteristic emotional reaction to convey scale and meaning.
- XREF: connects to: Mass protests transform individual participants into class-conscious actors — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 1087; Mass protest can move US majorities toward anti-racist structural politics.; Mass leaderless protest can rupture the sense of living at history’s end — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1549 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Mass leaderless protest can rupture the sense of living at history’s end
#expands(0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1549 - Mass protest can move US majorities toward anti-racist structural politics.
#expands(0.74) - Sheer mass protest changes nothing without organization, goals, and structures
#complicates(0.73) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2163 - Mass protests transform individual participants into class-conscious actors
#expands(0.72) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1087 - Protest movements must become robust institutions to have lasting impact
#complicates(0.71)