What we're doing right
The puppets of despair
5th December 2009
By the time I was on the train from the march home, I was actually bawling. Like a prissy little girl. All because of the puppets.
On the way home from the climate march, I started to cry. Winding through the wet streets of London surrounded by protestors painted blue and blowing whistles, I looked at the carnival of dissent around me, and realised what it was that so profoundly depressed me: it was the puppets.
By the time I was on the train home, I was actually bawling. Like a prissy little girl. All because of the damn puppets.
Two years ago I found the December trudge to be uplifting – it was the first time I’d found myself surrounded by thousands of people who genuinely understood the importance of climate change, and genuinely cared. I was cheered.
This time, surrounded by even more people – tens of thousands this time – I found myself growing sadder and sadder throughout the day. It reminded me of all the Iraq war marches I attended, surrounded by so many more people, full of so much anger and passion and hope. And how it all came to nothing.
This time, what depressed me the most were the puppets. At every damn protest there are always giant damn puppets.
A very cynical but very brilliant friend of mine wrote a satirical, fake editorial seven years ago in the joke issue of the student newspaper where we worked, titled “Our campus can stop this war!”, ironically praising the power of “paradigm-bending street puppetry” to force the autocratic war machine to its knees.
He encapsulated the idealistic romanticisms of student activists perfectly in just four words. The phrase has stuck in my mind ever since.
Still, I used to tolerate, even sometimes enjoy, the puppets. I used to feel that the carnivalesque atmosphere was an important component of dissent. That proving to “the man” that our “movement” – never without samba bands, rippling flags and ever-larger street puppets – was a lot more fun and meaningful than “the system” with all its suits, frowns, and endless, endless paperwork. And I used to think that celebratory and festive marches were more accessible for the mainstream, made them feel safe for families and moderates, and ultimately helped to popularise the ideas they were trying to convey, eventually leading to genuine social change.
Then I went to too many Iraq war marches, saw too many burning effigies of Bush, and saw it all come to nothing. In my mind, the puppets came to symbolise everything that was futile about a march.
What upsets me in particular about the puppets is that they are so highly visual. They invariably wind up as the images broadcast across television screens that evening and splattered across newspaper front pages in the morning. So they become symbolic for dissent as a whole – you see a puppet on your TV screen, you know there’s a bunch of people marching in opposition to something, whether it be free trade or banks or war or climate change or whatever.
And that is the problem.
The average person, without an in-depth knowledge of (or interest in) an issue, glances at the news and can easily come away with a simple impression: on the one hand, you’ve got the politicians, the bankers, and the diplomats who deal with painfully lengthy plenary meetings and painfully detailed and boring tomes of policy frameworks scripted in the impenetrable discourse of legalese, the magical math of finance, and the concrete but generally inaccessible language of science.
And on the other hand you have got the people who oppose their policies and their laws. Who have puppets.
I worry that the puppets actually detract from the message overall, because those who oppose unjust wars in the middle east, or coal-fired energy, or ineffective climate policies actually do have so much more at their disposal than giant puppets. They too ultimately base their beliefs and opinions on painfully lengthy symposiums and meetings, and painfully detailed and boring tomes of research written in legalese, mathematics and science.
But the average person can’t see the bedrock of thinking and research behind the dissent if all they can see are the giant puppets monopolising the field of view on their television set.
I don’t just find the puppets tiresome and annoying – sometimes I find them downright infuriating. I worry that they undermine the legitimacy and validity of the arguments they are trying to support, and ultimately detract from impact of the dissent in the first place. It’s utterly self-defeating.
Spinning in this sad frame of thought, marching alongside the damn puppets and thinking the whole time about just how utterly dire our ecological reality is, how much the situation worsens every year, and how unlikely it is that the political system we have will solve the problem due to its inherently compromising nature, I was driven to despair. Genuine despair – the kind where your heart physically aches. By the time I arrived home my face was stained red, my eyes were dim, and my spirit was grey.
My flatmates gave me a blanket and a much-needed space to vent my feelings.
“Well, even if it doesn’t make a difference at all, and we don’t accomplish anything, it’s so important that we make this publicly visible gesture in the first place,” Neon said. “Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket because the wrong decisions were made, in 50 years time young people need to be able to look back and know that not everyone supported those decisions – that some people stood up and said no. For history’s sake, we need to make sure our opposition is recorded, with foot power – or even just puppet power.”
True. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
But still, I insisted, so what if we know that some people didn’t agree with the norm. Does it ever make a damn difference? People have been unhappy with “the system” ever since there was one, and for thousands of years we’ve seen the oppression of the have nots by the haves, the continual eradication of indigenous groups on every single continent, and the inexorable extinction of the world’s biodiversity, from moas and mammoths to frogs and forests. When does our anger ever make a difference – what has ever changed because we stood up and said no?
Then I noticed the deep brown eyes staring at me from across the coffee table, belonging to my Wife. A smart and talented woman who works with words, is respected as a writer and thinker, who wasn’t forced to marry some random pre-arranged mediocre male at the age of 17 to start pumping out sprogs. And who I am so lucky to live with.
It suddenly hit me: women’s rights. Of all the things that should make me aware that dissent, protest and anger can make the world a better place, it is the fact that I am grateful every single day to be a woman now, rather than a woman a century ago. Of course social changes happen, and of course they are often – if not always – pushed by the vocal, public and demonstrative dissent of people with conviction and passion.
I felt indescribably better, and genuinely hopeful.
I’ll still march, I’ll still protest, and I’ll still believe it will make a difference.
But. I still can’t stand the damn puppets.
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