Day: December 20, 2007

Let’s face it, the world is filled with pretentious sphincters who love nothing more than to tell you how you should be living your life. While it might be important to know how to face these people in hand to hand combat, that will have to be saved for another day. Chances are you, yourself have a cause or two you like to champion every now and then. Like vermin, you will seek out your own kind and eventually find them. So once you’ve found said group, here’s how to trumpet the cause of your choice.

Tools:
-Open space
-Megaphone
-Thoroughfares

1) Location, location, location.
What’s true of the real estate business is also true of the protest industry, if you don’t have a good, public, eye-popping place, you’re not going to make a sale. You probably won’t even turn much of a profit if you did, now that the housing bubble burst. People are defaulting on their home loans left and–WHOOPS! That seems to be a simile that jumped the tracks.

As we were saying, be sure to find a good public place. Why public? Otherwise it’s a party at your place, or an unlawful assembly on private property, either way the media won’t care. Really, media attention is what it’s all about. Once you’ve got the media there, you’ve got the attention of the masses. This will help you recruit and get the attention of people in charge so they will take you seriously. That last one was a joke, protests are ignored by those in charge.

2) Is this thing on?
A good location will have open spaces for your crowds to gather. Hopefully there will be some kind of a platform or soap box from which you can perch and yell things the crowd knows agrees with already. Be sure to pound your fists a lot and wave your hands around as you speak, all the great dictators do this.

Make sure to have some kind of a loudspeaker or megaphone, otherwise you will be hoarse after a few minutes of ranting, and even then, most people probably won’t be able to hear you. Nothing is worse than a bunch of protesters confused as to what their leader is saying to them. How can they follow a cause if they cannot hear their leader telling them their opinions?

3) Disrupt the workday.
You have to stage the protest on a workday, preferably spanning from rush hour to rush hour. Don’t worry about schedule conflicts with your true believers, none of them will have jobs, because the people who really care about the issues have a lot of free time on their hands, whether on principle, financial backing from parents or drug-induced laziness.

By staging your protest in the middle of the day, you ensure that you and your fellow protesters will disrupt as many lives as possible. Nothing turns people in your favor like causing them to be over an hour late for work. Perhaps as they sit there they will use the time to think about your point. Speaking of which, what is it?

4) Be consistent.
We’ve all seen protests with a message, such as “Stop All Wars” get diluted with other causes like “Let Gays Back Into the Military” and “Don’t Fear All Men With Large Mustaches.” Other groups tack on their own causes and try to hijack the publicity-fest you and your cronies have worked so hard to create.

This is by far the worst thing (besides tear gas) that can happen to a protest. It is important to stay on message. To do this, it would be a good idea to brutally crush all those who threaten the glory of your message. Also, be sure to hand out a bunch of signs that all say the slogan you want. Once everyone is doing, thinking and chanting the same thing, you’ll get your message across.

Now that you’ve got your mini-dictatorship, you’ll be set. Whatever it is you’re trying to do, just be sure of one thing: keep your cause away from us. The Guys are not big fans of causes aside from our own.