Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
-Rita Mae Brown*

The next time someone says "Let's have a march in DC" or "Let's do a die-in," put your hand on their shoulder in a gentle, supportive way, and then smack them upside the head. Our methods aren't working, and they haven't worked for years, so let's move on and get creative about this before the war rolls on for another five years and we wind up looking back and asking why, oh why, a bunch of us walking down a street in a vacant city on a weekend a dozen times didn't change the course of history.

Case in point, ANSWER's little demonstration on September 15th, which pretty much sums up all the things that are going wrong in the anti-war movement, while showing just a touch of hope for those of us who are praying that the leaders of the movement might actually be learning something. (Little? Yes. in the headline on their site: "100,000," in the first sentence, "nearly 100,000," half-way down the page in the one article they chose to highlight, "several thousand." If you're going to highlight numbers, I don't care how many people were there - I care how many people were perceived to be there.)

Leave the Numbers to the Bookies

First, let's drop the numbers game. Unless you're demonstrating against a new math curriculum, don't mention any numbers at all. Not before, not during, not after. Why? Because then the media just tells the story of how many people participated, or worse, were supposed to participate. It's not about how many people come to your protest, its about who they are and what they do there. ANSWER was going for the gold in a biathlon of Bad Planning and Over Promising when they told reporters, two days before their protest, that tens of thousands of people would attend their protest (for which they had secured a permit for 10,000, and which was held in a spot that really couldn't really hold that many people) and that 1,000 people had signed up on their website to join the die-in (why would you base any number on some online form?) and that, magically, I guess, that number would "double or triple" in the two days before the protest, even though getting to the first 1,000 had taken a month.

How many people participated in the die-in? Maybe a thousand, we'll never know for sure because it failed to provoke arrests. So instead, people jumped over the barricades by ones and twos, and got arrested not for dying-in (sort-of symbolic) but for jumping a fence into the arms of a bunch of riot cops (not symbolic at all). So now this protest, where they promised hundreds of thousands of marchers and 4,000 people doing civil disobedience, gets the following headline: "More than 180 arrested at protest against Iraq War." That might have been impressive had no one talked about numbers in advance, but instead it sounds like crumbs compared to the cake ANSWER said they were baking. If you don't have something more interesting to say than how many people are coming to your protest, how about rethinking your protest?

Margaret Mead wasn't kidding when she said "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, dedicated citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Small being the word most people forget about. 180 people is plenty - but when you play the numbers game, you lose every time.

Don't Fuck the Police

Want to protest against the police state? Getting a campaign together to combat the use of Tasers by overzealous, undertrained cops? Sign me up. But if you're protesting against the war, let's stick to the subject at hand. With a huge majority of Americans either calling for an immediate pull-out of troops or at very least a phased withdrawal, what are the chances that cop you're screaming at about the war is against the war? Pretty damn good.

But here's the kicker: when you get arrested for something meaningless, like jumping a fence, no one reading an article about you gets outraged. If you want to get arrested, get arrested for doing something people might believe you should be allowed to do. When you get arrested for jumping a fence, you're protesting fences.

And we can do better than that – protesters doing sit-ins in Congressional offices have gone a different route, and they're getting arrested for asking to be heard by someone who's supposed to listen to them.

Location, location, location

Cancel all your tickets to DC. Throw away your maps of the capital. Do it now. Are you protesting against the war? Then go somewhere that matters - arms factories, recruiting centers, hell, you can even line up at the local IRS office and demand your money back for breach of contract. Or, if you really, really need to feel close to your elected officials, at least stop showing up on the lawns outside the White House and the Capitol building. DC is just crawling with symbolic places where you can do symbolic stuff, or, stay with me here, do something that actually makes a difference.

Tired of Congress wasting our time condemning badly-written newspaper ads? Then get in their way. Stop them from meeting if all they're going to do is tell us "Just a little more time, there's still a chance this moron in the White House and his hand-picked generals are going to snatch victory from the digestive tract of defeat."

The Civil Rights movement kicked some ass and then marched on Washington when they were really rolling - how about we get something done first and then go party in DC?

I don't want to read your funny signs anymore

"Regime change starts at home"
"War is god's way of teaching Americans Geography"
"Read between the pipelines"

Who, exactly, are you talking to? Who's your audience? Your fellow marchers? They're already on your side. The media? Well, yes, reporters like the funny as much as anyone, I suppose. But when a thousand people walk by, each with their own humorous little take on foreign policy, our message isn't just muddied, it's drowning in verbage. And I don't mean get all morbid with your signs, I mean stop making signs. If your protest needs a caption to explain it, stop right there and figure out a different way to protest.

Where did the Suffragettes go when they fought for the right to vote? To the voting booth. How did the Freedom Riders integrate the buses? They rode them, black and white, side by side. Action speaks louder than words, and we can be louder if we take action together.

(I promised hope, here's hope: ANSWER was smart when it decided to put soldiers at the front of their march. By putting veterans from this war and past wars up front, and by declaring beforehand that those vets were leading the protest, ANSWER was able to get some articles about people who know this war from personal experience turning against it. )

The next time you're planning a protest, stop and ask yourself: last time we did this, did we feel like it worked? Were we happy with the media coverage? (We all know the media is biased and shallow – suggesting your protest didn't work because the media was biased and shallow in its coverage is just bad planning.) Did we make a difference? No? Then, for the love of god, why would you do it again?