Sometimes when Drama Teen has his full Captain Ranty Pants costume on and is railing against the world and everything in it, I will politely suggest it might be more successful to fight one battle at a time. The G20 protest march through Brisbane today left me with much the same impression. I will say at the outset (and I hope I am not premature in doing so) that the protesters were a well behaved and good natured bunch. Having seen riots from previous G20 gatherings this lot showed what peaceful protest is all about (they were even handing out ice creams which on a day like today went down an absolute treat). But if I had to sum up with protest it would be something like this. "What do we want?" Well ... World peace and Indigenous rights and an end to poverty and action for the environment and an end to the persecution of Falun Gong in China and a free Tibet and greater human rights in Ethiopia and that's probably just the tip of the ice berg. There was a shopping list of calls to action with no clear idea of just who is supposed to deliver these things. I did learn that the protest movement needs to think of itself as mosquitoes - you may be small but you have the power to irritate a lot and through that bring change. Problem is, it just became all too confusing - are we talking malaria mosquitoes or the dengue fever ones or the Ross River Fever ones or what? There were a lot of very, very worthwhile causes being brought to the public attention under the blazing Queensland sun today but I feel they all got droned out in the buzz.
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