Never before have I ventured on a protest march or rally but to this one I did. On Saturday I joined another 35,000 people and marched from Parliament Square to Hyde Park on the Put People First march for Jobs, Justice and Climate ahead of the G20 summit in London this week.
It’s not that I feel particularly strongly about this cause but that I’m starting to realise the need to be more vocal when I agree or disagree with a particularly important sentiment - rather than leaving it to others to do the talking for me. Part of this is because numbers are important and part is because it tends to be extremists and fundamentalists that are more vocal and so it becomes even more important to speak out as a self labelled member of the moderate public. Yes - the government needs to become responsible and take sensibles actions, but no - we don’t need to hate them or blame them for absolutely everything that is wrong with the world.
On a wider note - quite simply I regret not being in the protest march against the Iraq war. If people like me had been there and we had doubled or quadrupled the size of that march would it have made any difference? Maybe not - but in the same way Pontius Pilot tried to relieve his guilt by the symbolic washing of hands, it is possible to say “I stood against this in public”. I didn’t.
Read more about the G20 protests over the weekend at the BBC, Guardian and Times.