A counterproductive protesting tactic

There is a form of protest where people glue themselves to roads and block traffic. If you’re serious at all about building a movement or awareness—i.e., you’re trying to enact positive change—you must consider the effects of your tactics. What will they make people think about your cause? What is the likelihood that you’ll get them on board?

Are your tactics likely to work? Will they perhaps backfire in the near-term, but have positive long-term effect? When you protest, what is the reach? What is the impact? Who does it affect?

If the people the most inconvenienced by your protest action are also the ones you’d hoped to sway to your cause, then it’s unlikely to have the desired effect.

It’s likely that you can’t shame people into caring about the climate, but they’re definitely going to hate you for blocking their progress to work, and they’re definitely not going to think about how to organize their lives without driving. They’re also incredibly unlikely to start a voting pattern against car-based measures so that society eventually ends up at a place that doesn’t require them to drive to work. Was that the plan? Or did you just decide to stick yourself to the road and see where it went from there?

I think these protests are not good because they involve too little effort on the part of the protestors and too little focus on inconveniencing or targeting the right people. It’s a shotgun approach. You can pretty much assume that everyone inconvenienced by the protest will not be on your side after having been inconvenienced. They will miss their flight, they will lose a job.

They won’t be happy.

Good! You might say. That’s the point.

They should compare their minor inconvenience with the suffering (Palestine) or crisis (climate change) being protested. Will they, though? Is this a credible way forward?

Don’t you want to protest the people who are actually causing the problems? The rich? The powerful? Block access to private planes, not public planes. Protest at people’s homes, not on public highways.