Pointless Protests

I'm convinced that some people protest just because they have nothing better to do. There is no way, to cite a recent Mexican example, that anyone can seriously believe that daylight saving time damages our health. And yet, only days ago, thousands of people marched through the streets of Guadalajara, Mexico's second city, waving banners bearing such ridiculous slogans as “Put our health before the environment”. This is stupid on two counts: Firstly that an hour's less sleep doesn't damage your health; scientists say that in very extreme cases it takes no more than 72 hours to adapt your body clock. Secondly, the amount of pollution that is avoided by daylight savings time (e.g over 1600 tons less of Carbon Dioxide) can only benefit our health.

This example leaves two possible explanations. Either everyone wanted a day off whatever they were doing with their evidently very mundane lives, or there are just thousands upon thousands of complete idiots. Whilst I like to believe that I'm a charitable person, this means that I have to classify this massive section of the population as either lazy and boring, or simply dense. Not only do I dislike having to be so mean to so many people, I'm also stuck: I can't decide which is more likely.

The stupidity is self explanatory: If anyone who thought that DST is dangerous for our health got hit by a bus, shot, or lynched I would probably consider it natural selection – idiocy is annoying, but I can put up with it. What makes me angry though, is people that jump on the bandwagon just for the sake of a day out or a day off. There was clear evidence of this a few years ago in England. Suddenly, when protesting against the war in Iraq meant that you could get a day off school, hundreds of thousands of apathetic teenagers became politically minded. Now I'm not saying that nobody should have protested; they definitely should have, and many of the students who took time off to protest had real and valid convictions that they were rightly upholding. But thousands didn't, and those thousands have forgotten the privileges that generations of people fought, and are still fighting, for.

The other thing that bothers me about these spurious protests is that they give us an excuse to ignore anyone who has a serious political point. I'm the first to admit this fault, and I'm sure that most people have dismissed some very serious protest as “just another”. The real problem though is not that you and I ignore protesters (although this is real enough), but that it gives governments, who can really do something to solve issues, a reason to ignore any complaints that don't suit them.

We are playing a dangerous game with one of our most important rights – freedom of speech. This right obviously means that I can't ask people to stop protesting, nor can I or anyone do anything to stop them. What I am asking though, is that people actually think before they decide it would be a gay day out to make a fuss about something insignificant. It's like the boy who cried wolf: after a while nobody cares any more.

No related posts.