Week 4: Walking as Activism and the "No Kings" protests

Walking as Activism. 


I’ve reported on the No Kings protests twice now, once in Bloomington and once in Indianapolis. As we read about the ways that walking has been treated as activism, the ties between collective walking, protest, political unity and the sometimes warlike motifs used in peaceful political movements, images from No Kings kept floating to mind. In Martin Luther King’s “Our God is Marching On,” he speaks about the fight for civil rights as a battle, in line with other conflicts “fought and won” in Alabama’s history. The associations between walking together into battle and walking together into protest didn’t undermine MLK’s peaceability, but instead underscored the critical necessity of the march and acknowledged the violence endured by black communities and civil rights activists. Then there’s another side of collective walking, one closer in theory to Peace Pilgrim’s joyous approach to the craft. A collective walk can also be a parade, where spectacle, imagery and the messy-but-orderly joy of a crowd of people moving in unison gives an outlet for public celebrations of joy. 


The No Kings protests sat at the intersection of these two kinds of shared walks. As people marched around the Courthouse Square or the Indianapolis Statehouse, they waved signs showing they considered their protest another battle in a vast power struggle. In Bloomington’s protest this March, three twenty-year-olds came dressed in Revolutionary War outfits, sporting clearly fake white plastic rifle toys and flutes. They said they were here to show the importance of fighting tyranny; they held the rifle toys only to do flip them in the air and mostly played Yankee Doodle Dandy on their flutes. Other protestors came wearing inflatable plastic costumes inspired by scenes from Portland of inflatable-donning protestors facing down masses of armed law enforcement, including a video of a frog standing immune - as if in armor - while an officer in tactical gear sprays their costume’s air vent. The "No Kings" protestors walked the line between the spectacle of a parade and the battle-line imagery of so many political protests. One protestor last March in Bloomington - a former Reagan-era Republican who condemned the new political order and said he looked back with regret on the “trickle down economics” he once helped put in office - told me through the gap in his frog inflatable’s nose that he had spent most of the protest walking about and shouting chants. “Ribbit ribbit, get your frog on, uh, frog army coming through,” he said. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Stations of the Cross, Political Marches, and Walking as Struggle

When I was much younger, my family would attend, every Easter, a Passion in the Park performance. It was a live dramatization of the biblical passion narrative, starting with the Last Supper and ending, of course, with the resurrection. I was very young, 10 or 11 years old, and I distinctly remember being quite scared by the whole ordeal. For a devout child, who truly believed that Jesus was the son of God and had been sacrificed for our sins, and who truly believed He rose on the third day, the performance was an intensely disturbing one. Looking back now, I'm sure even if I weren't so religious I still would've been frightened: it was never quite The Passion of the Christ , but it certainly didn't shy away from the brutal realities of crucifixion and the gruesome anguish Jesus experienced on the way to Calvary Hill. I bring this up because our discussion about the Stations of the Cross this past week reminded me of it. My family was never Catholic, which meant we neve...
Read more

Week 12 - Night Walking

The birds at my apartment complex still sing at night, which unsettles me. Also unsettling is how the wind blows stronger and colder and all at once; feeling the chill of it, and hearing the roar of it in distant trees, and looking up to see the rapid shifting of silver clouds overhead, I felt like the friendly comfort of being outside on a beautiful day had been replaced by an unpredictable and uncomfortable smallness. It was very late on a Thursday night, the robins were trumpeting their hearts out in the artificial lighting of the parking lot, and my roommate and I were going to go play pickleball.  When Woolf takes a night walk, she pretends she is buying a pencil. My roommate and I are both too busy to do things together except late on Thursday nights, so we really were going to play pickleball. We passed by the complex where we had made snow angels at the start of the first big snowstorm, where I’d dropped my phone with all my cards and by the time I realized thirty minutes l...
Read more

Week 2

I was reminded of the term ‘apostasy’ within Thoreau's essay Walking. He is encouraging the unification of humans and a natural life without restriction from religion, tradition, authority, and society. Apostasy is the abandonment of religious belief, and I believe through this essay, Thoreau is saying that instead of conventional religion we should look to the ‘wild’. Thoreau believes civilization and productivity are the main threats in our lives. I align more with Solnit’s belief that erasure, forgetting, and domination are the main threats that walking can mitigate. The presence of a threat can motivate people to do anything, beyond the limits of societal regulations. Thoreau’s threats are self imposed, created in his head but embodied through 19th century human behavior. A lot of his justifications for prioritizing solitude, intellectuality, and challenging stimuli through nature comes from his motivation to be counter cultural, and dissolve the threat of conformity.
Read more