You don’t. Protests happen all the time in the hundreds. How many have you heard of? I haven’t heard of any unless it gets violent. Unions strikes are disruptive so you hear about them. Cost of living marches walking past government buildings or protesting outside of them? Nothing.
Want to know the last march I heard about that was large and non disruptive? It was on a Youtube video. The youtubers didn’t even know it was happening.
Blocking a road is boring now so isn’t being reported as much, disrupting a gaming tournament gets news.
Rallies help don’t get me wrong but they are often ignored. The disruptive, novel protests get news coverage.
plenty of protests have happened through history. Some have been more successful than examples being Marton Luther Kings rallies woman suffrage movements the salt march singing revolution plus with the world of the Internet if you make a large enough rucus you’ll have eyes and ears on you from across the world
Okay lets take the civil rights movement. Incredibly disruptive and even violent at times, albeit usually in response to violence. Rosa Parks for example sat on the front of a bus and got arrested. She didn’t move. She stopped a bus and all the passengers on the bus until she was arrested, nobody critisises her because some people were late that day!
Highschollers trying to desegregate school needed armed guards to just get in the building. They didn’t go “dang! Best hold up a sign outside, don’t want to stop others learning”
Many performed sit-ins. Sit-ins take up space and make it hard for others to use the space for its intended purpose.
They were very disruptive and people hated them for it. It wasn’t only speeches and marches.
Women sufferage involved arson, women learning martial arts and beating people up, vandalism, and sex boycots, once again not just speeches and marches.
Rosa Parks for example sat on the front of a bus and got arrested. She didn’t move. She stopped a bus and all the passengers on the bus until she was arrested, nobody critisises her because some people were late that day!
I think a lot of people tend to look at Rosa Parks’ act through a modern lens and say, “she wasn’t disruptive, she was just sitting there,” not realising that it was incredibly disruptive at the time. What she did seems like nothing by today’s standards because her protest worked.
Women sufferage
Martyrs, too. Emily Davison threw herself in front of a horse race and died for it in the name of women’s suffrage. There’s debate about whether she intended to die, or whether she may have just been trying to attach suffragette colours to the King’s horse, but the fact is that she was consciously willing to die for her cause. Plus she went on hunger strike in prison to the point where she was force-fed on multiple occasions.
Suffragettes going on hunger strike in prison, and the prison authorities violently force-feeding them to the point where they sustained fairly serious injuries, was common in the early 1910s. It’s not particularly pleasant reading, but there’s an article from the Museum Of London that talks about some of the lengths suffragettes went to with their hunger strikes that is worth reading for anyone who isn’t familiar.
I think everyone should learn about the suffrage movement and the lengths they were willing to go to to fight for women’s rights, particularly with civil protest being a somewhat relevant topic over the last few years.