R.C. Longworth’s excellent article “Hey, hey, ho, ho–protests can surely go” (Perspective, Nov. 17) raises numerous issues that should be debated. Foremost is why the U.S. media and so-called checks-and-balances system fail to reveal the issues raised only when protesters go into the streets. There is a massive failure on the part of those institutions that makes democracy cumbersome if not impossible. A democracy will work only when the electorate is well-informed.
The failure is not recent. It took protests in the ’50s and ’60s to make significant advances toward racial equality. Why would a democracy need a Voting Rights Act that was passed in 1965? That came only after years of marches in the streets.
Numerous other benefits we enjoy today came only after many people sacrificed, suffered and all too often died opposing the system. Those include the eight-hour workday and enactment of child labor laws, to name just a couple.
Protesters realize that communities often incur large costs in the name of “preventing vandalism.” Many of the protesters are in moderate- or high-income brackets and know they will help shoulder those costs. They believe it is worth it to bring safety to the workplace; or to stop their government from ill-advised, senseless incursions into the affairs of other nations, such as Vietnam; or to stop American companies from barbaric practices, such as exploiting children and desecrating the environment.
The protest movement is international. The movement believes in globalization, but not as defined by the Kenneth Lays and George Bushes of the world, who want a global plantation system.
Globalization is coming but not in the form the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue, the World Economic Forum or the World Trade Organization envision. It will be a people-centered globalization, not a property and profit-centered globalization.
