Pro tip: counter protests don't always have to be loud to be effective

I stood at a counter protest last month at the University of Michigan where a guy was yelling about immigration with a megaphone. Instead of shouting back, a group of students just stood quietly holding fact sheets about refugee resettlement numbers and handed them to anyone who walked past. The yelling guy got frustrated after 20 minutes because nobody was engaging with his anger. Has anyone else tried a quiet approach at a campus speech event and seen it work better than confrontation?

3 comments

3 Comments

christopherw341mo ago

Huh, I guess that's one way to handle it. But honestly, is a guy with a megaphone on a college campus really worth all that planning and paperwork? Seems like a lot of effort to prove a point to someone who probably wasn't listening anyway.

jamieb801mo ago

You said "a lot of effort to prove a point to someone who probably wasn't listening anyway" and that's exactly what I was thinking. I remember back in college, this guy used to stand outside the student union every Tuesday with a sign about the end of the world. He'd yell for like two hours and nobody paid any attention. But one day, the dean's office actually put up a permit process for using a megaphone on campus. It was this whole thing with forms and signatures from three different departments. I asked a friend who worked in admin why they bothered, and she said it was because one parent complained about the noise during a campus tour. So all that planning wasn't really about the message, it was about covering their own backs. Kinda feels like that here to me.

lily_torres311mo ago

Wait, @christopherw34, isn't that just how most rules in life get made?