(The Bulletin) – Some people don’t believe in the art of protest. Some people think the exercise of marching, holding signs and yelling things at the top of their lungs is nothing more than a wasted activity.
I beg to differ. Sure, protests are an act of defiance. It’s called peaceful resistance. People demonstrate because they may not like a cause, a group, a person, or whatever it is. The freedom to protest is at the fabric of American life, whether people like it or not, or whether one political party objects to it.
Let me give you an example of this. When former NFL star Michael Vick was slated to come out of prison for his participation in dogfighting, he was greeted with a slew of objections. When it was known that he was applying for and later received employment as a football analyst, he was deemed the worst person in the world.
At times, he was deemed even worse than that.
Even though dogfighting continues to this day, people were quick to denounce Vick’s existence, lining up with derogatory signs and hitting the online social handles with depraved remarks about the one-time superstar.
Despite all of the backlash that he has received from people who disliked what he did with his dogfighting ring, Vick went to prison, was able to give football fans the Michael Vick Experience 2.0, and brought more clarity to himself as a professional and family man when he assumed the title of a legitimate broadcaster.
That was not enough for some people. The forgiveness thing just was not happening with a lot of people. It was their choice to forgive or not to forgive.
If they wanted to hate and still hate on Vick, that would be their expressed opinion. People don’t have to like what Vick did. They have the option of not liking him now.
That’s how America works. We are given the choice to like or dislike someone, their personal affiliations, their choice of education, the doctors they pick, and even the communities they choose to live in.
Protests, in many forms, reflect this pattern of opportunity. It does not have to always be in the form of a nasty-worded sign or vulgar language. You can quietly dissent from someone’s religious or political beliefs. We, as Americans, can agree to disagree on what we believe would be valued as valued entertainment.
Some people like sports. And believe it or not, there are quite a few people who couldn’t care less about sports. Some people love law enforcement. Still, others want to go out and defund the police. Either way, that would be their prerogative.
Nobody in life is going to like everything that you do. There is always going to be dissent. It does not matter if you are a politician, a maintenance man, a gardener, or an entertainer; people are going to disagree about how you move and how you do things.
And yet we accept these differences because that is what the fundamental core of what America is about: freedom. The right to peacefully protest serves as our liberty.
This is true in the case of the United States or other places in the world seeking liberation and justice. Peaceful protests can be a beautiful thing when you see a multitude of different faces coming together for a common cause.
We’re not talking about people trying to distort the message of a protest or rally by bringing their own agendas to the table and trying to hijack the narrative of a peaceful demonstration in the first place.
Protest if you must. Go out and demonstrate if you feel compelled to do so, but do it peacefully.
