Yeah I hear ya on all counts.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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I’m a millenial/Gen Z. I was really surprised to find out that I was one of the youngest in my protest group. A lot of people told me they were protesting for their grandkids. They also expressed regret that my generation would have to deal with the fallout of this.
Also, do we know that millennials are protesting less than other generations? My protests seem to be pretty age-diverse. They seem to match up with the generation percentages of the population at large. People might just be used to seeing mainly young people at protests.
Anecdotally for me, millennials are less present in the protests I see or attend. I think it's less a lack of caring or believing in a cause, more, social media. People vent online which gives a kind of catharsis. I'm not talking about likes for prayers or that nonsense. I mean the lack of a third space has implications outside of our mental health.
Protests can be organized more easily online but they can also lose their real world effect and become diluted as just another online event without meaning. People need to be together for real protest. It's like the difference between watching a concert online and being there. I think the online part, outside of organization dilutes the protest movements.
The BLM, occupy and women's March protests all had an effect on the psyche of the world and although didn't change the world how they wanted to, were still impactful. There is a famous study that says when 6% of people (I think) start protesting, change is inevitable. So rather than feeling downtrodden by lack of change, we need to keep pushing for it. Simple actions have an effect. If fox news is on in your doctor's office, ask to have it changed.
Protesting only works if it’s violent, or threatening violence. If the powers that be aren’t scared they will not care.
Are there no effective peaceful protests in the Netherlands?
That only works if your government isn't deranged.
~~By this logic, South Africa should have had a violent revolution to end apartheid.~~ It is true that sometimes, violence is the only option. For example, the abolitionist movement in the US tried to end slavery peacefully for decades until things escalated to violence. But saying violence is the only thing that works against an unjust government is unnecessarily dramatic.
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My thing is I literally don't have the time. I'm primary income for my household, my kids eat up whatever sick time I have, and these protests, as far as I've seen, are never on the weekends. There's the 'economic blackout' ones I participated in, but it's not like those are making an impact to these companies that have hordes of resources to keep them afloat. Idk man. I don't want to be the reason our democracy fails, but I don't want to be one of the idiots just sitting around on their ass either.
There are large, organized protests all over this Saturday! It's never too late to start going. I'll be going for the first time ever on the 5th.
I think both parts are right, but maybe more balanced. If millennials could afford to protest AND thought it was effective, they would.
I actually like the “no economic activity” protests, but they are possible for me because of my privilege. Not everyone can just not work or buy things, especially when on paycheck to paycheck.
Money talks right now. It would take collective action and new movement to break folks out of their slowing inertia. They’ve shoved a lot, and like you said, results have been mixed. We got a lot of change, but now the Sisyphean boulder is rolling back down the hill. :/
I'll get bombed for this but oh well.
Remember this when you see all of those "boomers made this happen by accepting X,Y, & Z."
They all had lives, children, etc, and the policies/administration weren't even 1/10th as stupid and shitty as what we see now.
And no, I'm not a boomer. I just think that argument (which I've seen many times) is ridiculous. We're all trying to do the best we can, just like they did.
...and the policies/administration weren't even 1/10th as stupid and shitty as what we see now.
And that's the problem. It's easy to fight an opponent who's weak. They had jobs and families, yes, but they could also afford a house on a single salary. The government wasn't a fascist police state that would send natural-born citizens to El Salvador for using their First Amendment right of free speech. The media was still the Fourth Estate.
So while I appreciate your perspective, I don't think their generation's extreme privilege and golden economy is much of an analog for current generations, except on the surface.
Yeah, I respect their take at the same time that it ignores the history of at least the last hundred years. It's problematic trying to sector off one generation from another. We're all being worn down and have been since at least the mid or late 60s
There are huge lists of all the new policies, investigations, reforms, and more that happened after BLM. Same lists for the women’s marches during Trump’s first term. If you still don’t believe protests accomplish anything, you are being willfully ignorant and defeatist. It takes mere seconds to find these lists and start learning.
Protest does work to a degree. But there is a dialectic change in that quantity begets quality when it becomes resistance.
I am boycotting instead. Also, not American.
Direct action is great but eventually we will need band together to get the thing done
Well the movement to buy european is growing
*Bernie Sanders is not a democret
But he caucuses with the Democrats. He's been a consistent voice of progressive ideas in a party of geriatric complacency. So yeah, in our current political hellscape, he's a Democrat.
Lots of good feedback here. Not much to offer. But I’ll help out where I can. I came from Reddit. Deleting my Reddit accounts.
Yea im not interested in the opinion of a cryptobro that says taxes are theft like this duckhunt fellow...
I’m old enough to have lost friends in college for protesting the second Iraq War.
Americans are trash and if they want to act like trash I clearly can’t stop them.
I watched a news program from 1968, it was special coverage of the Democratic National Convention. There was a Vietnam protest, and the jackboots came and started to beat the protesters. Later that night, members of the DNC held a vigil for those beaten earlier.
Speak for yourself.