Community Or Success?
The other day I was doing laundry. I heard what sounded like a crowd a few blocks away. If I focused, I could make out what they were shouting, a call-and-response chant. Someone with a megaphone led the crowd: “What do we want?” “Justice!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”
I couldn’t tell what they were protesting. I still don’t know — it could have been anything from police brutality to the end of the eviction moratorium to the mayor’s refusal to resign after opposing the protests last year. But whatever it was, the same people would have shown up. They would have done the same chant with the same fervor.
When critics of the protest subculture compare it to a religion, that’s what they mean. Tent revivals use call-and-response. Churches dust off the same hymns and prayers for all kinds of different occasions. It reminded me of being a teenager at my very first protest: marching against the death penalty in front of the Texas governor’s mansion. We waved signs and shouted and cried out to the heavens for justice. I hope the heavens were listening, because the governor sure wasn’t. I mean that literally — the mansion had been damaged by a fire a couple of weeks earlier. It was still closed for repairs, so the governor and his family were temporarily staying somewhere else. No one was in the building who wasn’t on a maintenance crew.