Opinion: Cynicism masquerades as insight, but at heart, it's a defence of disengagement
Rick Bell's recent column (G7 protest in Calgary: One hell of a goat rodeo on the streets, June 15) is a classic entry in a long-standing tradition: the takedown of public expression of discontent. Whether it's community members gathering at city hall to protect an urban wild space they've come to know as a commons, or protesters rallying against injustice in Palestinian territories, this column performs the same move — it belittles them.
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With phrases such as 'play-acting and posturing,' the writer seems to ask: What's the point?
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But here's what's telling. In these dismissives, the heroic figure is always the one who does not. Not the one who protests. Not the one who speaks at city hall. Not the one who marches.
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The hero is the one who stays home. Who says nothing. Who drinks their beer undisturbed while the world burns on the livestream in the background.
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It's not insightful to mock protesters for being performative. All protest is performance. It always has been.
But it's also effort, presence and sometimes desperation. It's what people do when all the other doors are closed — when letters, meetings and 'appropriate channels' fail.
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What Bell fails to address is the kind of dissent that erupted in Fort Macleod at the UCP 'town hall' on coal — where 70 per cent of the crowd took vivid, emancipatory glee in tearing apart the optics of a 'consultation,' whose real purpose was to manufacture a media image of monolithic consent.
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That was protest in its unruly, disruptive form. And yet, even that kind of collective defiance is dismissed when it doesn't fit the right caricature.
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And still, I find myself partially in agreement. A young Communist I met two weeks ago said something that stayed with me: That once upon a time, power didn't know what to do when the streets flooded with people. That unpredictability disturbed them.
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Now, norms and containment define protest. Marches follow routes agreed upon with police. Cordiality reigns. The site is remote from where decisions are actually made — just as Calgary City Hall is from Kananaskis.
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And yes, the recent protest was a bazaar of causes. That's what happens when people are told they have one designated chance to be heard — when the system reduces democratic expression to a side-stage act, offered once every few years.
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