'miss golightly i protest'

So the Anti-Crime marches in JHB and Durban weren’t the quite Million Man marches which were predicted and in some circles expected. Approximately 50 concerned activists in each city vibrantly protested on our behalf for a safer living environment. Shout outz, Bigupz and kudos to you but to the organisers I suggest the following:

1.Acknowledge that it’s kinda hard to mobilise the tax paying middle class, they like to protest in boutiques.
2.You have got to glam it up, I would have gotten a few corporate sponsors; hampers which included a tres kool, yellow and red, protest t-shirt and there would have been a Platinum Card VIP area with access to special toilets – basically I would have made a few people pay for the privilege of mass protesting.
3.Finally, these marches needed to be in the middle of a working week, nothing like patriotically skipping a few hours of work for the cause.

Anyway, despite the poor turn-out, crime is a real problem and I think that it is on the political agenda. This in itself isn’t enough and we need to sensibly exert our influence in order to make this place much-much safer, I wouldn’t purport to know how we do this exactly but it should be via as many channels and forums as possible.

That’s the point really, back in the day, good ol’ protest marches were one of the better ways to exert influence and mobilise sentiment but today as a result of all of this struggle, many more platforms have been opened up for dissent, Radio; Television; The Internet; Financial Institutions placing adverts in the Sunday Papers blah de blah green tea.

This puts the subject into the public discourse, it puts it on agendas, it gets people focused and begins to build models which can be replicated to solve this multi-faceted problem. Things happen at grassroots, things happen at a macro-level and in between we complain about it not happening fast enough – “Where is all of this money that I’m paying to prevent anarchy going?”

I said before that we don’t know what we don’t know and that that is one of the major problems that we face, we don’t know what it really feels like to be safe in our own environment hence it’s very difficult to fight aggressively for that end state of which we have been robbed.

I wasn’t there, I did however wear these cool t-shirts this weekend, sometimes there is as much of a message in the accessories as there is in the means.