The Tyranny of “The Proper Way”
La Liberté guidant le peuple. (Liberty Leading the People) 1830, by Eugène Delacroix
On July 14, 1789, fearing that King Louis XVI would shut down the new National Assembly, a crowd of Parisians stormed an old fortress that had been used since 1659 as a state prison. The event has been known ever since as "Storming the Bastille", and it changed the world forever.
The people in France were poor, hungry, and rightly fucked off with the king. The Bastille was seen as a symbol of his power, and rumors of large numbers of half-dead prisoners being tortured to death inside the walls caused the people to act.
As it happened, there were only 7 prisoners inside, four forgers, two "lunatics," and the Count de Solages, a sadistic pervert whose own family begged the king to lock him up without trial to stop the scandal of his horrific pastimes. Hardly the romantic freeing of the unjustly imprisoned.
Symbolically, however, as a protest it was fucking gold! Storming the Bastille kicked off the French Revolution, and showed that ordinary people could stand up to a powerful king and make real change.
The Reign of Terror that followed the revolution was a brutal time in France when thousands were executed, including innocent people, as fear and violence took over society.
But that is not the point. “Storming the Bastille led to the fall of the king and helped shape modern ideas about equality and government. People made history by refusing to shut up.”
That day wasn’t just about a prison. It was about telling power to get fucked. And that same spirit lives in protest today.
The right to protest is an absolute necessity for a civilised country. Protest is often how the world changes and overturn the injustices piled on by the pricks in power. Around the world there are attacks on the right to protest. Here is Australia, non-violent civil disobedience can land you in prison and up to your eyebrows in fines. But it's not just those harsh laws stifling protest. In Australia, respectability is used as a weapon to silence those who are standing up for their rights.
Formality has become a muzzle—just another excuse to ignore all the shit they don’t want to deal with.
Remember when the kids went on a school-strike for climate change and that ghastly fuckwit Scott Morrison said, "learning gets done in schools, and the learning gets done in understanding the many other facts that I think are very important to this debate." Those kids got some learning. They learned that the LNP couldn't give a fuck about their future. Morrisons implication was that there was a proper way of doing things and that way was keep out of the fucking way.
School students protest against the climate crisis in Melbourne, May 2019. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images
When asylum seekers fled their homelands, piled on a milk crate and voyaged shark-infested water to try to ensure their kids had a future, Darth Potato (Peter Dutton) called them illegal "queue-jumpers." There is no fucking queue and Peter Dutton knows it. He also knows that there is nothing illegal about seeking asylum.
Governments often talk about the "proper" way to protest, using this argument to limit or prevent direct, public demonstrations because they know that the "proper way" they're talking about does fuck all to change things. They want you to think that your outrage is a problem and that if you only used a soothing voice and a PowerPoint presentation they'd listen to you. They won't.
They'll call your anger as "divisive," your grief as "hysterical," and your need to survive as "aggressive," the lying bastard.
And yeah, anger is uncomfortable. That’s the point. If you’re more outraged by the tone of protest than by the reason for it, then you’re not actually interested in change—you’re just interested in peace and quiet.
So don't tone it down. Don't sugarcoat it. If their comfort depends on your silence, Tell them you're not interested. It's better to be heard screaming than respected and ignored.