I sat on the concrete steps in front of the Chapel Hill post office, surrounded by microphones, amps and liberals. My friend, who had organized the protest as a community get together to speak out against the wild political flurry of recent events, chatted to two news reporters with blue Christian Broadcasting Network coats on from across the gathering space, which was already filling up with people almost an hour before the protest was to begin. He finished with the interview and calmly walked through the cool night back toward me, instructing me to mingle with the other protesters. It was a strange request, as I had never been to a protest before, and I was far out of my comfort zone. What do you talk about at a protest? What if you disagree with someone? How am I to blend in at an event meant to make people stand out? I pondered these questions silently.
Throughout the night I was surprised by the lack of dialogue between people. Most protesters marched over the sidewalks chanting the same thing as those next to them, quieting down as the crowd around them did and shouting at the top of their lungs when in style. Apart from the protesters were the bystanders, watching from the sidelines not for the message of the people or their thoughts on any one thing, but for the spectacle, for something to capture on their phones.
Of course, while thinking about all this, I was no different than any other part of the crowd. I chanted, I marched, I cheered with the flow. Funnily enough, I did this more to disappear, and even funnier was the success I had in my deindividuation. But, rather conveniently, everyone has their limits. There was a slight change of plans, and the crowd overwrote this change in favor of its own mind. The people marched onto the streets, blocking the traffic previously flowing throughout Chapel Hill and grabbing the town’s attention by force. More onlookers gathered; some were angry motorists throwing out retorts such as, “Go out and vote,” others were in the all-too wise police force who were redirecting all the cars they could. I silently stood on the sidewalk along with those who refused to go out into the road, the night’s chants being muttered under their breaths.
By that point, as my friend who had been leading the protest prior to the mutiny walked out once again to join the party, I could no longer call myself one with the crowd. Instead, I walked around the perimeter of the commandeered intersection, soaking in the fall atmosphere and finally mingling with those in the same position as I was. For the second time that night I was quite surprised by those around me. The more people I chatted with, the more the image of a unified protest broke apart. It seemed that, while they were all mostly liberal minded (and so was I), none of them could totally agree on anything. Of course, my views always seemed to align to theirs, no matter what they spoke of. “Oh yes, oh yes,” I’d say to them, not actually considering their words. Perhaps that cows-mind I had experienced earlier was nothing more than a façade, a costume to make the protest more easily palatable to those in it. This foreign attitude towards the nature of protests, seemed to be one of the few things shared with those I met, and that it was something to be enjoyed rather than to be endured. A community get-together, so to say. I ironically felt very apart from the community by the end of that night.
I would never have expected for my first protest to be an experience of listening rather than speaking.
– By Parker Pschorr