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Why This Moment Feels Different
What marks these protests is their longevity and camaraderie
In the last week, I have been party to a dozen or so eye flushes. It’s a simple act, using a water bottle to clear someone’s eyes of chemical irritants after they’ve been tear-gassed. The volume of eye flushes signals, for me, a rapid development in protesting — I performed only two eye flushes all of last year. There are people in my city (Columbus, Ohio) and likely in yours, too, who are attending their first protest and performing their first eye flush on the same day.
All across the U.S., protests are being organized. In the days since George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police Department, there have been demonstrations in all 50 states. More than 300 cities have erupted in protest, with the National Guard now deployed throughout nearly half the country. Protesters across the nation are in the streets demanding justice, and I am one of them.
Because of this influx of new comrades, the way information is shared around protests has fundamentally shifted. No longer can organizers rely on static channels of communication to share details about a march or rally. Because the core of the movement is by its very nature decentralized, organizers who otherwise might have painstakingly planned out every possibility are pushed into a new position: that of working with the totally unknown and unpredictable in real-time.
We are now engaged in a movement based in action as opposed to one that is meticulously planned and centrally messaged. This evolution is represented perhaps best by what I have seen countless times in the last few days: the person who is handed the megaphone and leads an impromptu and engaging series of chants on the fly. We don’t have anybody singularly in charge, and that is part of why it’s working.
I was naïve and not at all well versed in security culture at the time of my first high-risk protest in 2017. The people showing up today, a large number of them teenagers and young adults, are not. Where I once didn’t know to mask up to avoid identification, the people showing up at the statehouse every day this week have been careful, covering their faces not only due to the pandemic but to avoid detection. While I sent unencrypted messages and left…
