One of the most common questions of disillusioned or
angered citizens is, “So what can I do?” There are a myriad of reasons for this
feeling of inertia, but one of the simplest is that most people simply don’t know
how to proceed, or even begin, to channel their frustration into proactive
social change. In fact there is plentiful literature on this very topic if one
is inclined to look for it, including the work of University of Massachusetts
professor Gene Sharp, author of Nonviolent
Action: A Research Guide. My experiences differ somewhat, but the greatest working
example of Sharp’s methodology is the story of Otpor.
Otpor (“resist” in Serbian) was formed in October 1998 as a response to oppressive university and media laws in Serbia. Formed by a group of University of Belgrade students, the group based its philosophy on Sharp’s research and publications on nonviolent protest. At first, the group concentrated solely on academic issues; however, in the wake of the 1999 NATO air-strikes against FR Yugoslavia, Otpor expanded its scope and became a political movement against Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic. Police repression of Otpor activists began immediately, and thousands of members and supporters were beaten or arrested. Regardless, the movement stayed on-track. In September 2000, Otpor launched a campaign called Gotov je (“he’s finished”), aimed at mobilizing young voters, which resulted in record voter turn-outs and Milosevic losing his reelection bid. No longer an elected leader, and with many of his atrocities brought to the global eye by Otpor and the media, NATO was able to swoop in and arrest Milosevic for crimes against humanity a few months later. Oddly, Otpor’s role in Milosevic’s downfall didn’t receive a great deal of media coverage in the US.
Personally, I have had limited luck experimenting with this sort of thing, and the results have been less proactive than vicious, but I have learned some invaluable lessons from them. The first occurred when I was 17: three friends and I launched a campaign to have our friend Jon elected Homecoming Queen as a farce on school-condoned popularity contests. He won by a landslide – or he would have, but the people tallying the votes threw every “Jon for Homecoming Queen” into the garbage. The four of us retaliated and sparked a dance-wide brawl.
The following year, in New Orleans, twelve college buddies and I managed to instigate a full-fledged riot involving over 300 people when the police tried to stop us from dancing and playing music in the street. It was Mardi Gras, and the streets were filled with rowdy revelers, but our big group was the only one rife with visible tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks and instruments, so we were “disturbing the peace.” Sixty-five rioters were arrested and charged with assault; we retorted with a civil suit for excessive force, and the charges were dropped.
And finally, in early August 1999, my girlfriend and I worked as volunteers at Woodstock 99 where 300,000 attendees were prohibited from bringing food or water into the festival area in the blazing heat. Venders offered tiny bottles of water for seven dollars apiece, shoddy hamburgers for nine. By the third day of the festival innumerable people were suffering malnutrition and/or dehydration, and so about 30 or 40 of us laid siege to the venders. Our goal was to hijack their commodities and redistribute them to the crowd. Instead, we ignited a quarter-million person riot in which everything in the festival area was destroyed, including both stages. National news agencies blamed Metallica.
What did I learn from these experiences? People, especially in crowd form, are loaded with what physicists call “potential” (resting) energy, like a boulder perched on a cliff. Push the boulder and it becomes “kinetic” (impact) energy. In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, in the section on raising an army, it is noted that it only takes a tiny spark to ignite a blaze. In each of my cases, as well as that of Otpor, the group that initiated the conflict was a tiny fraction of the whole – but, like Sun Tzu’s spark, it only takes a tiny push for potential to become impact. In fact, the only real difficulty seems to be keeping it nonviolent.
