StandingWater Creations

Vice President Dick Cheney has been asked by the administration of Brigham Young University to be the commencement speaker during graduation at the end of this month. This announcement, that actually came through local and regional news sources a couple of weeks ago, has been confirmed through the school as well as through Vice President Cheney’s office. In short, Dick Cheney is coming to Provo to speak to one of the highest concentrations of his voting base in the country.

Utah County has one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in the country. This place is the hotbed of conservatism. It is also pretty significantly dominantly LDS. Since the LDS faith is a conservative religion people (pretty much) assume that they must be a part of a political party that touts conservatism. In short, LDS equals Republican in many people’s mind; but there is more to it than that. The Republican Party is trying to liven up its base of supporters for the forthcoming primary elections and then the general presidential elections in about 16 to 18 or 19 months.

V.P. Cheney is trying to build support for one of their candidates (now) by going around to conservative basis around the country and speaking.

What makes this interesting isn’t that V.P. is doing this, but rather that a protest was planned and approved and participated in on campus against his coming.

I think the protest was stupid. Well, maybe not stupid; I think the people participating in the protest are complete idiots. Yeah, that’s a bit better. They didn’t do anything today.

What I saw (and heard a lot of people talking about) on campus was a group of individuals gathering together and holding signs and being this pretty big nuisance. They were literally in the way of people walking to and from class. They stood in one of the quads and made a mess. And they drew the media outlets from the area to report on the protest. BUT they did nothing. They affected no change. They caused no one to care more about stopping V.P. from coming. And in the end, they stood around and occasionally lofted signs higher into the air.

Nothing was gained today.

Vice President Cheney will still be coming to Provo. He will still be speaking at commencement. He will still be an honored guest. And in the end nothing will have happened that will have changed anything.

Other than appease their consciences and feel as though they’ve done something, the students who protested Vice President Cheney’s coming accomplished nothing today…

That is, unless you count the number of people that were annoyed and put out with their antics. If you want to count the people who were fence sitters who are now supporters of the V.P. coming to Provo, you can probably count a higher number of students who care more that he is coming and who support the action than those who stood outside in the sun and kind of held signs aloft.

The protestors did nothing.

And that is where we lead into the question: What Happened to the Protest?

Well, first off, they planned it.

Yes, yes. I agree. A protest actually has to be planned. It has to have permits. It has to be approved by those who are in charge. We’ve come a long way since the 1960’s and you can’t just make a sign, sit down in a public area, and declare you are against something – and then encourage those who support you to be against it as well. The protest was a bust because they planned it and advertised it and it was a bust because the advisor over the group that planned and executed it (students) was opposed to it happening.

It was a bust because they made no real noise. They didn’t advertise ills or wrongs. They didn’t let the public know what Cheney had done to receive their ire. They did nothing except block foot traffic and occasionally hold up signs. No one knows more, now, than they did before about why people are protesting unless the curious individual walked up to a protestor and asked a question and then politely listened to the individual tell them what they thought about the V.P. coming here.

A good rule of thumb for a protest: If your audience doesn’t get your message quickly, and the message is more than a sign declaring something, than your protest doesn’t/didn’t work.

Finally, they made no noise. The people protesting against the V.P. coming made no noise. They didn’t chant or sing. They didn’t draw good attention to themselves. They did nothing that would cause the audience to stop and wonder what was going on further limiting their message from being delivered to the campus or the administration.

On top of that, the administration allowed an anti-protest to take place from those who supported the V.P. coming and speaking on campus. They allowed the anti-protest to take place in the same spot as the protest. And, this is genius, the anti-protest wore (from what I understand) shirts that stood out so that when you looked at the milling group of individuals your eye was drawn away from the white space (the signs) and to the bright color.

The problem with trying to protest is that you want your message to be heard by the right people. The right people, in this case, are the administration on campus and the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If either of those parties had heard and became sympathetic to the message, then something might have changed. But, in neither case was the message made clear to those parties. There was no noise made near the administration building. The students didn’t draft a letter and ask for signatures to be sent to both the administration and the board of directors of the university. The protestors (on both sides) did nothing to elicit the kind of change or recognition that would affect anything and, as a result, the protest was a bust.

That’s all it was. It was a futile action by young adults who look back over forty years and see that change can take place, and that their membership within the LDS church, and their attendance of BYU required them to jump through hoops; and, at the same time, that nothing significant was meant to have changed as a result of their actions because – in the end – their actions garnered nothing when held up against the need for change.

At the end of the day Vice President Dick Cheney will speak on BYU campus unless a real war is declared. His speech will be the hallmark event for the Republican Campaign season and may give Mitt Romney a brief boost in the polls (I am currently contending that Romney is the 2008 poster child for the Republicans). And in the end, no one will remember the protest or why they felt strongly enough to spend hours in the sun in a week or in a month.

The sad thing, for me, is that you can’t say, “Well, at least I did something,” because, again at the end of the day, nothing was done. Nothing was accomplished. Your voice was not heard.

The protest, by making it more mainstream, is really (and truly) dead. Congrats.