Sigh.
What can you do (non-rhetorical question). Three hundred and fifty organisations beg everyone to come to a march in London. “Thousands” (presumably a few tens of thousand?) do.
Reminds me so much of the 2009 climate march catastrophe, the “Big Wank” or “the Big Naive” or whatever it was called (“the Wave”, btw).
It was, to quote Brian Cox’s character in The Bourne Supremacy “always going to end this way.” Here’s a snip of what I wrote in 2017, in an article Peace News published. It was a thought-experiment/scenario-planning exercise.
“Marches were planned and held, with the specific of David Attenborough’s plea that people take action locally lost in the more familiar ‘we must show world leaders that we care’ message.”
Marches are about the only thing a broad (but shallow) coalition can agree on (and even that has some of the more small-c conservative organisations clutching their pearls). They offer opportunities for people to feel good together (less lonely). And there’s selling newspapers, rubbing shoulders with “celebrities” etc.
But as “demonstrations”, what they demonstrate, once they start shrinking, is the end of an issue-attention-cycle, or at least a movement cycle (the two are not synonymous, though I’ve made the mistake of conflating them in the past). It reminds me of the scene in chapter 7 of Animal Farm where the animals, having again realised that they are getting shafted.
But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled. It was not for this that they had built the windmill and faced the bullets of Jones’s gun. Such were her thoughts, though she lacked the words to express them.
At last, feeling this to be in some way a substitute for the words she was unable to find, she began to sing Beasts of England. The other animals sitting round her took it up, and they sang it three times over–very tunefully, but slowly and mournfully, in a way they had never sung it before.
marchudson.net 
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