Reply #17: My advice to fellow would-be protesters: LOOK PRESENTABLE [View All]

[Selatius]

You aren't going to be looked upon with as much respect if all your crowd just looks like a bunch of goths, freaks, bikers, thugs, etc. than if they appeared as normal people like those you are trying to get your message to. I know it sounds incredibly vapid and shallow, but if you're going to sell an idea, you've got to be the salesman.

It's harder for the corporate news media and the corporatists to paint you as the un-American lunatic fringe if you look like ordinary, working-class Americans than if you look like a bunch of freaks. If you look at pictures of people who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, you'd see that many of them were dressed semiformally or formally in suit and tie. It gave a more respectable appearance.

Say whatever you want to say, but don't play into their hands and make it easier for them to marginalize you and ridicule you as the radical few based on appearance alone.

The whole reason why people dressed the way they did back in the 1960s was to rail against a socially repressive society that didn't talk about sex, didn't talk about homosexuality, and didn't allow people room to express themselves. That's all changed now. It's post-cultural revolution America. There is no more point in dressing extravagantly anymore to protest against a repressive social order that died at the end of the 1960s.

The point today is to simply be heard. Aside from the fact that we're still far away from accepting gays as our equals, the only social issues we have to deal with are over health care and the environment and public education, not about what you can or cannot wear. This isn't the era where mini-skirts are still considered scandalous and new, for instance.