Thoughts On A Protest • Long Beach Post News

Photo at right: Greggory (middle) with Councilmember Robert Garcia and E. Thor Carlson

Almost no one reading these words is unfamiliar with the Westboro Baptist Church and their presence in Long Beach recently. (If you are, see my previous column.) And while I didn’t want to tip my hand when I wrote about the question of whether holding counter-demonstrations was the best tactic to employ against their hatemongering, there was NO WAY I was going to miss it. I mean, big gathering + prime people-watching + loonies = more than enough reasons to get me out of the house. (The fact that personally I wasn’t all that interested in bothering to protest ten or so people standing around with insipid signs was beside the point.)

And I was not disappointed. The whole thing was quite a spectacle. Interestingly, while the WBC’s presence may have been the catalyst, the WBC members themselves really were just about the least of it. I was at the intersection of Ximeno and 10th a full five minutes before I even realized they had long-since arrived and were standing in plain sight. Because really, all they did was stand there with those frigging signs, and a lot of the time no one paid them any mind. If you couldn’t read English—and thus lacked the ability to see that their signs displayed messages completely out of step with the hundreds of others all around—you might not have noticed them at all.

After looking at them for awhile, I figured: Why not go talk to them? So I crossed Ximeno Ave. to where the main gal was standing (sporting four signs and a flag) and, introducing myself as a local journalist, asked if she would speak with me, which she did. But I’m afraid we never really got to anything particularly interesting. First she was busy trying to locate other members of her party, and then, just as I got her talking and was getting to the questions I really wanted her to address—mainly: 1) “If you think that by protesting like you do people will hear your message but won’t obey [as she told me is the case], what is the purpose of protesting at all?”; and 2) “Do you enjoy seeing a big crowd turn out to see you, and are you disappointed when they don’t turn out?”¹ —she was distracted by people in the crowd who pretty much just wanted to harass her or treat her as an of object of ridicule, coming up and posing for pictures like she was a sequoia tree or wax dummy.

We can talk all we want about how proud we are of the students and other Long Beach residents for showing up and conducting themselves etc. but there were moments of the counter-demonstration when people did not behave well. Yelling “Fuck your sister!” to this woman and/or her prepubescent child is nothing to commend. Treating fellow humans like props for our amusement is nothing to want our children to emulate. Etc.

Look, I get it: it’s hard to think of people like this as us (in the sense of being fellow humans) when they do everything they can rhetorically to set themselves off from any sense of community that we understand. But I think that’s what we’d be better off doing nonetheless. Because compassion is probably the most likely thing to beget more compassion (in society at large, at least, even if certain individuals are impervious to our most graceful efforts), just as separatist thinking is probably the most likely thing to beget more separatist thinking. Let us not forget: the WBC members are just people, and they’re only talking. I’d love to see those two conceptualizations always kept front and center for anyone allowing themselves any kind of reaction to the WBC. Anyway, needless to say, those who wanted a quiet, dignified protest had to be disappointed.

That’s not to say that all or even most of what took place was undignified. But it certainly was not quiet. Raucous with a celebratory edge is more like it². God knows most of the people out there enjoyed themselves—which had less to do with projecting specifically toward the WBC and more with partaking of the general energy. The people who turned up generally seemed most interested in being part of the rather forceful statement that the WBC’s views are not our own, nor even close. They had their signs, their shirts, their costumes and flags; chants of “Long Beach!” were heard more than any other; friends hugged each other when they met up in the crowd. Most of the time the majority was pretty much ignoring the WBC—after all, just a few yahoos with not-very-creative signs. I imagine more than a couple of the counter-protesters saw the WBC in the pathetic flesh and wondered, “What was I so worked up about?”

But ideas work us up. We’re idea creatures; we’re designed that way. Our ideas make us human. And new ideas can transform us into new people. No wonder, then, that ideas—our own and other people’s—matter so much to us.

Keep in mind, though, that not all ideas are equal—and so, pragmatically speaking, not all ideas are worth equal amounts of our time, energy, and attention. Case in point: the WBC has completely ludicrous ideas—and nothing else—right? Then how much time, energy, and attention do they deserve?

That’s not to say that getting together with other members of your community when the WBC happens to be around is necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I was there. I had fun.

(By the way, it wouldn’t have been enjoyable — for me, anyway — if most of it had been people behaving particularly undignified or poorly or aggressively, etc. It was only a small percentage of people I witnessed do anything I’d be critical of. And there was lots of real positivity and true fun (e.g., bunny suit, guy toting boom box playing “The Hustle”, a certain genuine love in the air); does that really mean there’s nothing else to consider? I’m just interested, always, in thinking about how we might be better, no matter how good we might be.)

Footnotes

¹ I was also considering delicately asking a few questions of her young son, but I’m guessing she would have balked at that.

² To get an idea, see my video clip (shot from the best possible vantage point—crappy camerawork, though) of the climax of the counter-protest. (Note: The mood gets a bit more aggressive here than it was generally.)

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