What you’ll find with a lot of these early topics that we’re covering, we did talk about direct action. It’s just one of those initial spokes. More than anything, it’s just important that you can talk to others, share your ideas, go in front of people and talk to them about it and join in coordination with other people who feel the same way. This is like the last piece of that puzzle because we’re talking all about tactics at I want you guys to understand mobilization and also understand some of the dynamics that you are likely to face while protesting. When it comes to direct action, you will often be in situations where you need to improvise. Anything that involves so many human beings standing together at once means that the situation can change very quickly and you might have to just completely adapt. In this kind of situation, the best thing that you can have is knowing who you’re there with, knowing who you can trust, being prepared.

If you are serious about joining any kind of protest, especially something that’s effective and forces anyone’s hand, it is best to connect with an organization. You being here means you’re in this one, but if you leave this one because you’re bored, don’t like it, I don’t care, but be a part of one if you’re going to do this kind of work. It may sound a little goofy, but probably the first piece of advice I can tell you is dress appropriately. You need to dress in a way that allows you to blend in and move freely. Your comfort needs to be priority number one. Don’t dress in an outfit. Don’t wear black block, especially if you don’t know why you’re doing it.

Don’t wear a costume. If you’re dressing like the Joker or something, not here. You want to, being able to have your freedom of movement is priority one when it comes to your personal safety. And you know, if you’re wearing block, you’re doing it with some kind of reason, someone told you to, not just because you had this idea when you got out of bed that that was like what you were going to do. If you get arrested, I don’t want you to stress. You will definitely be known to the organizers, especially if you go with us, you’ll be on a list.

We will get you out of jail ASAP. It’s important for you to remember that you are outnumbered by the police. If you ever go to any protest, you will find like a dozen times more cops than people. So it’s important for you to be well practiced and well prepared. Start practicing, mobilize in low pressure situations. This is part of why we had to go to city council. But you can also go to a park with your friends and talk about how to move as a group, how to stay together without like going super into it.

It’s a good practice situation because it gives you room to work on these things. Generally, when you have a protest, you want people to have different roles. If somebody can speak well, that person has a PA or a phone. Typically like chants and things like that, speeches, things like that that are prepared and coordinated. A lot of the time when there’s a protest or an event like that, a lot of the people are just there just out of sense of whatever. You know, they haven’t prepped. So if you are holding a phone and you know what you’re about to say and you are plugged into a microphone, people will pay a little bit more attention to you.

You want eyes. A marshal is someone who keeps the group together and navigates through obstacles. If you’re holding the event and organizing it yourself, you’ll want to think about getting some vests and having someone in the marshal role. It’s also good to have people in an observer role. If they are just taking notes on what happens or recording what happens with their phone, if anything happens, you have just that cover. It’s also good to have first aid responders if you’re going to something that’s high risk. Generally, if you’re at anything that’s that high risk, it’s going to be a coalition event and there will probably be an organization that’s there that specializes in it.

But it’s also good to have some basic knowledge of, hey, these are core roles that you’re going to see at these events. Practice, you know, being able to walk in line. More than that, pairing yourself up with a person. The buddy system is really important. You don’t want to be in a situation where, you know, you’ve gone to go check on something and your friend is going to go check on something and you’re in two different directions and you’re trying to communicate and find each other while you’re surrounded by strangers. That’s not smart at all. So definitely have your phone charged, be in the same room, you know, on signal so that if you ever get separated, you can say, hey, where are you?

Know where all of the streets are. Know how to leave. Know where the exits are. Sometimes people bring whistles or noisemakers for quick signals, but odds are that you won’t need such a thing. Just the more that you do it, the more that you will, first of all, you’ll see a lot of the same faces all of the time, which I guess is good. You’ll see the same people around and that’s just what it is. The more that you’re there, the more efficient you’ll be, the more that you’ll know people, the more safe you’ll feel, the more prepared you’ll be, and just the more experienced you’ll be, the better.

I want to talk to you a little bit about just the ideas that go into this, which is you want momentum driven organizing. You want something that doesn’t just, isn’t just us in a group, but is larger groups of people than even our organization. The idea is that you want to create a wave of actions that cannot be ignored. You want to keep issues in the public eye so that when something happens, there’s a picture, there’s a group of people, there’s a message beforehand, there’s a message afterwards, and there’s always a next step that people can take. You also want escalation and disruption, and every event that you go to won’t be an event that’s escalating and disruptive, but it is definitely something that an organization has to think about strategically. Petitions and demonstrations are how you build that groundswell, and eventually in the right situation, you put more pressure on the people in power, and you do actions against. Really think about who’s sponsoring the issues that are going on in the city, because those are the entities that tend to be most responsive to direct pressure.

If you read the book, This is an Uprising by Mark and Paul Engler, they use the concept of trigger events, and these are things that you just can’t expect, and they happen all the time. You really have to understand that everything isn’t a trigger event, but when something happens, you want it to be an opportunity to mobilize people, but you also have to have some pre-built perspective for people to plug into, so that when they’re there, they can channel what they feel into action in the same way that you did coming into here. It’s also very important to recognize the concept of the ecology of change, which means that different people play different roles. There’s a mainstream organization that’s going to engage a broad audience. There will be more radical groups that push boundaries. There will be support networks that work behind the scenes. You’ll find support from out of state, out of town.

You’re part of a national struggle, and collaboration just helps you tackle different challenges. You want to understand where you are in the larger ecosystem. Cover all of your bases. Find people who can negotiate. Find people who can agitate. Find people who can pass in public. Find people who can sustain your work behind the scenes.

You really want a 360 degree, fully circular path to action, where anybody can take anything from any point. When you have that kind of support network, people can guide themselves, and it becomes a lot easier. One thing that Engler and Engler emphasized is also the idea of strategic discipline. This means knowing when to do something and when not to. When you do that, you’re not going to everything or doing everything so that you can feel like you’re doing something, but that you are working to be effective in the long term. This means you are using momentum, narrative, and discipline all together as a tool to continually challenge the status quo. What you have here is the toolbox for doing that.

You’re going to have some cards here. It’s just always a continuing, rolling opportunity to be a part of mobilization. I hope that that helped. Yeah.