In People I Trust!

To be more precise, I bank my trust on the power of people's protest. Yesterday, I was part of a group that was protesting Dow's presence at at a career fair at our school. Dow Chemical owns Union Carbide, that was responsible for the worst industrial disaster ever, 22 years back in Bhopal, India. After 25,000 deaths, 100's of thousands continue to suffer due to polluted ground water and lack of medical attention. Both Dow and the Indian government are to blame. To ascertain moral and ethical responsibility is easy. But the road to get the perpetrators to act is fraught with hardship. Here is where the power of protest is effective. However, a large dose of patience is recommended.
Growing up in India where strikes and hartals are common, I was taught to associate protests with lazy bums unwilling to do their job and always wanting more. This attitude was engendered from a comfortable and carefree life. This was the very same attitude that many Indians had to Gandhiji's freedom movement where he put civil disobedience to use, and the same people who welcomed Indira's emergency rule—India's brief affair as a dictatorship. In spite of this indifference, protests have worked and continue to do so. I see two things that can remedy this and get more people actively involved: awareness and the comfort zone.
While one of the ideals of any protest is to raise awareness on the issue, it is hard to gather the masses unless they know about the issue and care enough—an obvious boot-strapping problem. Once a degree of awareness has been raised and apathy overcome among a critical mass, the protest can begin.
Rabble rouser or the svelte diplomat? This was a debate we had at the 11th hour of our protest. Each person has a comfort zone for protesting and pushing them beyond this gives diminishing returns. A protester lacking conviction to their form of protest is like a deflated balloon. A friendly accosting of a stranger to talk about the issue can be as effective as a heated debate or wild shouting or something more adventurous. Such options make the protest more broad-based and credible.
In all, we had a satisfying time being out in the cold, talking to our peers about the "reckless negligence" and "diabolic disregard" that Dow continues to have towards human life and safety, and getting over 100 pledges from students not to work for dirty Dow. Getting under the skin of the Dow reps was the cherry on the cake! IDS and Herald-Times had good coverage of the event and the sunny day helped with nice visuals.
In closing, Carl Sandburg's poem, I am the People, the Mob, which I read at school, never ceases to inspire me. "When I, the People, learn to remember ... use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year ... then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: 'The People,' with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision." The mob—the crowd—the mass—has arrived!