We can not only stop the violence that’s happening now, we can transform our relationship to violence itself
The difference between a protest and a movement
Image by Cottonbro on Pexels
In 2018 I moved into the place I live now. I wanted a garden, and the backyard was flat and square, except for the dogwood tree at its edge. At some point a previous inhabitant had built a stone flower bed at the back, near the fence. The bed was empty, except for two pink rose bushes. Someone had also planted a red rose in front of the bed, blocking the view. All the roses were diseased, and the leaves, yellowed and covered in black spot, fell off in clumps before they could bring any nutrients to the plants.
I discovered a shard of another rose, also diseased, under a gangly bush. It had one flower, and the scent was so deep and potent that it startled me, taking me back to a day in England when I was a teenager and I smelled a rose perfume so strong and accurate that I never forgot it. Here was the rose that seemed like the source of that perfume, its head drooping over a barely alive stem.
At the edge of the yard was a long bed, empty, full of yellow dirt. The only animals who lived there were a few squirrels and a family of blue jays that yelled at me every time I opened the back door. No butterflies; no ladybugs; no worms; no other birds or visiting cats—it was as if the entire ecosystem had been vacated.
I went to the fancy nursery in town, where the plants are so expensive they can afford to hire horticulturalists to work the information booth. The expert told me the best way to fight the diseases and save the roses was to fertilize the plants every week. I could also spray with copper fungicide, for good measure, he said, but the real issue was that the plants were weak, and the disease could take hold because they didn’t have the strength to fight back. The plants looked awful, he admitted, but what he saw was not so much devastation as vulnerability. “It’s like when you have a skin fungus,” he said cheerfully, “it’s not going to kill you. It just means you have to address it.”
I went to the hippie farm store, its asphalt parking lot covered by ragtag plants and herbs, its interior full of books, tools, seeds, and straw-filled pens holding goats and rabbits. The hippies told me to buy as much compost as I could and add it to the yellow dirt. I could start tinkering with the pH levels at some point, they noted, but for now, “Just keep adding compost and turning the soil.”
In both situations, the advice was the same: fortify. Strengthen the existing plant. Build the foundation of the soil. Keep at it, over and over. Don’t worry too much about what you see and how bad things look right now. Do what’s necessary. Trust. Keep at it.
I bought the fertilizer. I ordered the compost. A couple of weeks later a giant truck drove in from rural Washington and tipped 3 cubic feet of compost into my driveway. It filled the entire thing. I had compost sand dunes. It was way too big to cover with tarps. My neighbors, who I hadn’t met yet, slowed when they walked by and looked at it with curiosity. I bought a wheelbarrow and started shoveling.
I’ve been asking myself: what are the ways we can fortify a movement, the way the horticulturalist and the hippies approach a plant? What’s the soil that strengthens it? What’s the regular practice that acts like fertilizer and keeps the movement going, so it can ward off threats? And what are the visual distractions, like black spot, that appear to be the problem but are instead indicators of a deeper and more fundamental weakness of the whole?
Because I’m a trauma therapist, the part of movement building I understand the best is the fight against violence. And yes, I don’t like the word “fight” in this context, but it’s true, we are fighting and the violence is not only interpersonal, but also structural, enacted by institutions that are networked and mutually reinforcing.
The violence now is all consuming, multifaceted, so vast it threatens to push our consciousness into disbelief, even as we are amidst it. The imperative is to fight back and try to stop as much as we can. In the fray of the moment, what can get lost is the question of how we can transform our relationship to violence itself. To build a movement that dignifies and protects those who are being harmed, but that also fortifies the vision and belief that we can overcome violence itself.
I remember the first time I heard about Generation 5. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh! the person said, “it’s an organization created by Staci Haines and others in 2000. Its mission is to end child sexual abuse in five generations.” I felt like all the gears in my brain locked up at once, like the time I discovered the oil change person hadn’t replaced the oil and now my truck had seized up on the side of the highway.
My first thought: “End child sexual abuse? They’re crazy. How is a tiny organization going to do that?” And then I took a beat. “Wait a minute,” I asked myself, “Why don’t I believe we can end child abuse? What beliefs are supporting my certainty that we can’t overcome this? And how is that fatalism influencing my actions, when child sexual abuse absolutely needs to end?”
So then I asked myself: “What’s it going to take to believe we can end it?” That’s when I started asking what ending it in five generations would require. How hard we’d all have to work to get there, but what an amazing result that would be. I’d already been shaken up, just by learning of the mission and the organization’s name.
Generation 5 is a movement building organization. It’s got a long time horizon, one like the gardeners who know they are restoring not just patches of dirt, but entire ecosystems.
I started thinking about the difference between protest and movement building, and how we need both, but they perform completely different tasks. Yes there’s black spot, but you can’t take your eyes off the soil.
It’s absolutely essential to respond to violence with protest. Reacting with speed, force, and numbers builds momentum and reminds those in power that the mass is way bigger. But the protest isn’t the movement. The protest responds to what is happening right now in order to stop it.
Because it is often a “No!” to explicit acts of domination and oppression, the language and goal of the protest often occurs inside the frame that justified or rationalized the violence. Philosophically, the protest is a negation of a pre-existing concept. It cannot liberate itself from the concept, because the protest is only legible because of what it opposes. The energy of the protest appears to come from the crowd. But often, that energy is actually generated by the other side. It’s reactive rather than generative.
A protest carries within it the expectation of its dispersal. Here’s what I mean. Last week when I was marching at the No Kings protest in Portland, I got caught in this strange lull within the march. The people behind me were chanting. Up ahead I could see people on a bridge, calling to the people below. But I was in this odd dead space. No one was talking; no one was chanting; people were ambling along, many of them almost expressionless. I was part of a big crowd, but I felt like I could have been moving through a crowd at the end of a concert, trying to get to the parking lot.
I could feel the imminent dispersal, even as the march was happening. I could sense the people in the crowd starting to think about lunch, that their feet were hurting, that they hadn’t yet done their grocery shopping for the week . . . I felt deflated by the lack of energy, even as it also made sense. Some people, I presumed, were here because they believed it was very important to be counted. They wanted the protest to mean something. They wanted the highest numbers possible, to register the size of the dissent. And on that level, the march “worked.”
From a grossly pragmatic perspective, as soon as that march was made up of 50,000 people, it was a success, and therefore “finished.” I’m being a little cheeky here, but there was a way in which the goal could have been dispatched and checked off, like part of a grand to-do list, as soon as it achieved critical mass.
The instrumental function of the protest seemed like it overtook the embodied experience of some of the participants. Its “job”—to be filmed and put on social media and written about in the newspaper—became more important than the actual political and spiritual and emotional Being of the participants, people gathering together to reckon with authoritarianism and ICE. When I felt like I was no longer at a protest and instead part of a crowd, I was confronting the disparity between the instrumental and the consciousness-raising aspects of a protest.
If a protest is against something (ICE detentions) or for something (abortion rights), it’s clear what the end goal of the action is. And if the goal isn’t met, the protests will continue. But a movement isn’t a discrete action. A movement has a kind of timelessness to it, because it is understood to require generations for its unfurling and revealing of itself.
One function of movement building, for example, is to fundamentally transform our relationship to violence. The movement contains within it thousands of questions about what violence is; how we recognize it; if interpersonal violence is an expression of systems of domination, or something separate and distinct; how we train ourselves to ignore the suffering of others; what forms of violence are acceptable to the public and what kinds break our consent; if the methods of stopping violence are themselves forms of violence. These questions are designed not only to stop the violence that *is,* but also to show us the limits of our current thinking, pushing us to conceive of violence in an entirely new way and fortify our belief that we can stop the engines that produce it.
From this perspective, movement building is about throwing ourselves forward into uncertainty. It’s an opening up, a moving toward, a listening for something that isn’t perceptible yet, the way you think you hear approaching footsteps, but it could just be the wind.
Movement building requires different tools, and different coping mechanisms, than protests. The “time” of movement building is like the time it takes an ecosystem to restore itself. It’s completely outside the timeline of a news cycle, or even a political season. This is why I started this meditation with my roses and my sterile garden beds. A protest is spraying copper fungicide on the blackspot covering the leaves of my roses. A movement is putting three cubic feet of compost in my yellow garden bed and having no idea if any creatures will choose to live there, or if any plants will thrive, or if what happens in the garden bed will transform the rest of the backyard. My puny action can help, or it can make things worse, but whether the ecosystem restores itself is beyond my personal agency.
I’m not going to open this next point up, but I think part of what makes this time of movement building so challenging is that it’s occurring in the context of “collapse” and “polycrises.” That is, there’s the grieving of the collapse, and there’s emergent strategy for what will follow, but it’s easy to see these energies as opposed to each other. Can we be in the grief and recognition of collapse—that is, not in denial, or some kind of spiritual bypassing of the polycrises—and at the same time be gathering and building energy toward what comes next?
If so, what does fortifying movement building in this context look like? If part of the goal is to include ever more people along the way, how do people who perhaps have joined a march for the first time and are feeling pretty pumped about it start to shift their thinking from event-based participation to catalyzing a wholesale regenerative process, one that includes not just human beings, but the more than human world?
What will foster our stamina and resilience? How will we shift our mindset from completing a task to engaging in transformation? Though this is a daunting alteration of consciousness, by changing the timeline and broadening the scope of what is addressed, movements can go beyond questions that are less about transformation and more about power within the current political structure, such as: “What’s the unifying goal people can organize around?” “Who is the credible leader and what do they look like?” “What outcomes will people see as a result of their participation in the work?” “How will we give people hope, if they don’t know specifically what they’re fighting for?”
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the above questions. They help people hone their actions and fight back. They are essential to the resistance to what is, in all its cruel and sadistic manifestations.
But when the leaves keep falling off my roses, and I keep spraying, I might get frustrated and think I failed. If I’m fortifying the soil and, I hope, fortifying the rose bush, I can’t actually know how long it’s going to take til the leaves stop falling off in clumps. Some plants, in fact, look like garbage for a long time when they are actually regenerating, because they’re pulling all their energy “in” to strengthen the center. When all the leaves drop off, people think the plant is dying, or already dead. What they can’t see—what we can’t see, in this tiny moment in time—are the roots.
To develop a movement—and to use protests as an entry point into movement spaces—people who are new must be supported in understanding the difference between the two. They need—we all need—practices to build our stamina; methods to help us stay in contact with violence without turning away in terror and hopelessness; mentorship to enter a long time horizon and still move with urgency in the present; ways to know resilience not only in the self but in relation to others, most of whom we don’t know and don’t yet trust; and humility before the wisdom traditions built on aeons of knowing that are completely outside those the dominant culture uses to reproduce itself, and that can push us off the cliff of our self reliance and into the unknown.