The Besz Dispenser - This Week's Rant

For the week of July 14th, 1999

Protesting 101

I don't understand people. So many people I know are working in situations they don't like, with people they dispise, and are not doing anything about it. Personally, I'm getting fed up with nothing but complaining and bitching. If you don't like your situation, change it. But no one does anything. They just bitch, backstab, and live with it in an angst-ridden, apathetic daze.

What has happened to protesting? What has happened with caring, for that matter, about things that need to be looked at? Is winning all there is for people, and if that is seemingly unattainable, you give up before you begin? What the fuck is that?

I used to be that way. I used to hate life, school, jocks, etc. just like every other teen on the planet (save the jocks, who hated...um...me and anyone who wasn't cool and fun). But I'm 21, I don't have time for that kind of shit anymore. If I don't like something, I try to change it. I work with it to make a compromise. I do something. I don't quit if I don't get my way, I don't give up. I keep trying until I've done all I can, then I leave, or live with it. Usually I leave, because if I've done everything and nothing's happened, something must really be wrong with that job. Time to go.

However, I find that people don't care, or care but do nothing except bitch and whine to anyone with an ear to hear and do nothing, they quit as soon as they can to get away with it, or they protest. And the protesters usually aren't doing anything actively to change anything, but just rant, bitch, complain until they get their way like a kid having a temper tantrum. Here in Ontario, we just had an election, and the party in power had almost every union, every university student, and every doctor and nurse pissed off at him, asking that everyone vote against him. The funny thing was they never said who to vote for. They just figured that if they went on strike illegally, if they sat in front of their campaign bus chanting "Dictator!" at the top of their lungs (in the middle of a DEMOCRATIC campaign, no less), and generally bashed the leader of the party enough, they'd get their way.

Guess who got pissed off at them? EVERY ONE ELSE. Those parents who saw the teachers acting less mature than the students they teach, as students who obviously haven't learned that a dictator usually is a military leader, and doesn't hold a democratic election for things, and patients who just want a competent doctor with a good medical system that isn't wasn't bitching. The moral of the story is: when you protest the wrong way, who actually are shooting yourself in the foot, because people are tired of hot air.

How do you protest something? Open a dialogue, FORCE THEM to talk to you, using methods that get people to side with you, not against. Most of all, if you want to get your way, learn about their ways, their methods, and then beat them using what you learnt. Not only is it the most effective way, but it really pisses them off. And in the end, that's what you wanted, right?

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