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As I wrote a few days ago (here and also in my comments here), I am astounded at the failure of "alternative" websites to promote or even mention the March 20 protest in Washington. I hasten to pronounce OpEdNews not guilty, since they have announced it here, and even headlined my note for a day -- to which there was no response from the readership whatever, which again astounds me.Also not guilty, and in view of the situation I guess I should say heroic (gulp, if that's what things have come to), are the following, according to a quick survey I did yesterday:
ANSWER Coalition with list of endorsers here
US Green Party (Cynthia McKinney et al)
Veterans Today
There are others, but this is just a random sampling of the sites I happened to visit. In that random sampling, however, lies my astonishment, because otherwise I rely on sites like these for real news, as opposed to the Crimestop and Doublethink force-fed pablum we get from the mainstream. Here are the pages where I saw NO MENTION of the March 20 protest in Washington at all, in the random order that they happened to occur to me:
antiwar.com
greenparty.org
libertarianparty.com
911truth.org
commondreams.org
truthout.org
salon.com
rawstory.com
MoveOn.org
UnitedforPeace.org
sagaw.org (Service Academy Graduates Against the War)
CodePinkAlert.org
infowars.com
prisonplanet.com
globalresearch.ca
informationclearinghouse.info
wsws.org
At that point, I stopped and sent an email to Kurt Nimmo of infowars.com, asking him why the Alex Jones org (I think he has literally millions of listeners and readers) was not promoting the March 20 demonstration. I said his answer would be seen (at least accessible) to my ca. 2000 Facebook friends, so he knows it would be public. He wrote back: "If you want to write an article about it, we will post. Unfortunately, I am but one person and do not have time to write about every event."
I answered: "If it takes an article from me to get you to promote such an event, it's a lost cause. You don't have time? Do you really expect anyone to believe that?"
Kurt did not respond to that, not surprisingly. I don't mean to pick on him or infowars.com or Alex Jones, or any of the sites above. I admire and respect the work of all of them. I am just trying to register my astonishment, disappointment, and sincere perplexity at their non-interest in this event.
I'm not a neophyte. I've been around awhile (64, therefore well into Old Fartage for most of you probably), been involved in a lot of protests and demonstrations, so it's not so easy to surprise me, and of course I'm not surprised at all by the lack of mass media coverage. But I am not talking about the mass media here. I am talking about US (you and me), the "alternative" media. I just don't get it. Are people -- again I do not mean the sheeple but the people who run, read, and contribute to websites like those above -- just too stupid or too demoralized to realize that this is an opportunity to protest against many things, not just the war, not just Bush, not just health care, not just the economy and the bank bailouts, not just 9/11, not just the Patriot Act, not just the McCain-Lieberman Nazi bill, but virtually everything inflicted on us by the previous administration and being continued by the current one?
I just can't get my head around this. So many smart and well-informed people -- the "alternative" media folk -- and yet somehow they fail to understand the most basic principle of politics, which is mobilizing and organizing people, fail to understand that the most effective way to do this and be heard by the powers-that-be is to hit the streets, and fail to understand or even appreciate the value of this form of protest, public assembly and non-violent mass protest, which for the time being at least is still legal and (I hope but am beginning to doubt) part of our culture?
I can hear readers saying, if not like Kurt Nimmo that they "don't have time," saying all sorts of things, none of which amount to anything more than irrational excuses for whatever the real problem is, and which I honestly do not understand. No reasonably intelligent progressive person is really going to sit back and say it's not worth protesting because it won't do any good anyway, or isn't focused enough, isn't exactly the way I would like it, I'm too worried about the economy, about losing my house, about the stock market, etc.
So I ask again: What's going on here? I have two choices. Either my opinion of the human race, including the "alternative" (by now very large, according to various polls) portion of the population, goes down another big notch, or something more sinister is going on. I don't know what the latter could be, exactly, but the obvious possibility that comes to mind is that Big Brother has got his hands firmly around the balls of "alternatives" as well as the mainstream. So firmly that the result is this: the "alternatives" can write and publish and youtube whatever they like, but when it comes to hitting the streets, NO! Yeah, it's (still) legal, and yeah, it is (or used to be) a time-honored American tradition, yeah it's our constitutional right (and DUTY!), but NO! Talk is ok, but no bodies (live ones, I mean) in the streets. That is just too effective. Too emotional. Too invigorating. Too inspiring. Too unpredictable. That just might actually get Big Brother and the Inner Party to feel some fear themselves rather than just keep dishing it out to us 24/7 -- and this why it is a NO-NO.
Either one of these conclusions would be a sad one. At the moment I see no other alternative.
