Staying on Message

Apologies for blatantly disregarding Alex's call for a 'lighter note' but I hope I may be forgiven for sharing some troubling thoughts based on today's rally. The event was billed as a "Protest to Defend the People of Lebanon and Palestine", the very matter I have spent a significant amount of time on here. The title, then, was promising.

The first sign that something might be amiss was the list of groups endorsing the event. The groups on that list of particular concern to me were the likes of the Freedom Socialist Party, the International Socialist Organization, and the Socialist Alternative. My experience has shown me that these organizations are notoriously bad at putting forth a unified message. Indeed, because of their non-mainstream and unfocused messages, they are sufficient to destroy the legitimacy of an event. I would go so far as to argue that having them at a rally is worse than having no rally at all - we aim to persuade those who are not yet on our side, but their messages alienate mainstream members of society. More on this shortly.

The second sign that something was awry was that I found out there was another rally for the same purpose in Kirkland at the same time today. Now this should never, EVER happen - especially not in a city the size of Seattle. Perhaps the problem is that there are just too many organizations in Seattle all working on this same issue - ANSWER Seattle, the Arab American Community Coalition, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, Voices of Palestine, Youth Against War and Racism, the Council on American Islamic Relations, etc. I'm not necessarily saying they need to consolidate, but there absolutely must be better communication amongst them.

So this is the my state of mind as I arrived. And then I saw this...



Upon closer inspection, I found a number of signs perfectly demonstrating what I mean about unfocused messages. Keep in mind that this was a rally to 'defend the people of Lebanon and Palestine'.













These signs all failed to communicate the message that we must end the suffering of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in this conflict. Don't get me wrong, the Iraq War is a great parallel, where a nation is struck and retaliates not only against the wrongdoers, but also against hundreds of thousands of uninvolved civilians, but that dog sign, along with all the other signs, detracted from the true message of today's rally. Even the speakers were suspect. We heard from a man from New Orleans decrying practices agaisnt African-Americans there; we heard about the American occupation of the Philippines; we heard all about why we should vote for a particular candidate. But there were streches of 20 minutes at a time where we heard nothing about the people of Lebanon and Palestine.

This issue is too important for progressives to sabotage the message through dilution. Solidarity is important, but not at the expense of spreading a unified message on a particular subject. We must learn to support one another's causes, not hijack them for our own ends. Until we can do that, success will continue to elude us.