something, anything!

Paul Waldman had an interesting post on Code Pink which was linked by Andrew Sullivan:

…this week, which will see the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, Code Pink plans to “step up the pressure,” as its leader Medea Benjamin said. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Code Pink has a full roster of activities planned for the week, including: yoga every morning at 8:30; organic potlucks every noon; nightly movies and popcorn; a bike ride around Berkeley on Tuesday; an open-mike musical jam on Wednesday; and a ’send-off’ to the Marines on Friday, when protesters will bring suitcases and pink berets for traveling.” How the Bush administration will be able to resist is anyone’s guess.

Any effective political movement has to engage its participants in a way that makes them feel their contributions are meaningful and redefines their sense of self. But if those contributions aren’t actually meaningful, if they amount to an extended series of circle jerks that accomplish nothing, then the movement will inevitably be confined to a small group of self-deluding members with a lot of time on their hands. There are tens of millions of Americans who want to end the war in Iraq. But how many of them see something like Code Pink protesting a Marine recruiting station and say to themselves, “I want to be a part of that”?

Ridiculous, pointless nonsense can in fact do more harm than good, and more harm than nothing would do. It can create sites like this that attempt to intentionally reverse the original pointless stupidity with more pointless stupidity. Occasionally it is countered as Berkeley’s marine recruiter debacle was, with stripping of federal funding, resulting in the City Council backing down in response.

We see the cry for “something, anything!” often when there is a tragedy of any scale. School shooting? We must do “something, anything!” to fix it by banning Doom and Marilyn Manson. One deranged individual shooting up a college campus does not require a response, and certainly not an ill-reasoned “something, anything!!1!” response.

If you want to feel good about yourself by flailing your arms about so that mass-media will see you, at least be willing to put your money where your mouth is.