Commentary

The art of protesting

June 19, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

It was in the 1500s when the art of protesting was a fledgling. In Western Europe, there were growing challenges to the papacy in both religious and political thinking, with the rise of Protestant thinking and reformation.

The Renaissance, a period of great cultural awakening, began in Italy in the 1300s and eventually moved across Western Europe, where it brought many of the greatest artists, writers and thinkers of all time. From this explosion of tremendous creative energy began our evolution into an epoch that saw us move from “the Middle Ages to Modernity.”

A movement in thinking and a certain freedom grew with us as humanity, to believe in common people as worthy of having their own opinions and the freedom to express them. In Western society, this freedom has been confirmed in law and the list is long indeed of protests that changed history in surprising ways.

When Europeans began their ruthless advancement into and brutal colonization of the “new worlds,” once there were enough of them to establish their colonies’ governments and increase control of the countries they had taken, the laws granting protests came with them, mark you, only for the invaders, not for the people who were already living there.

In those days in the early 1700s, protests led to complete political overhauls. The American Revolution in the mid-1700s, effectively ousted British rule in America, south of Canada.

In France only a little later, protests against the opulence of royal living exaggeratedly contrasting to the hardships of the lower classes erupted into the French Revolution, when royal heads did their role and a republic was born.

Why this very brief history, you may well ask. I offer it as a reminder in a time when too much is controlled by leaders who seem to be experiencing a longing for the kind of tyranny that history books describe.

In their modern dress of suits and ties is ancient thinking and a re-born trend to reassemble laws so that restraints melt away and the leader has voted in power outside the laws, voted our balanced laws virtually null and void.

Right before our eyes and in real-time. 

And we are protesting and I confess – in this day and age – all we know and can know is at the touch of a click – anything, everything – all about what is good and what is bad for us, for our children and for where we live here on planet Earth. It is as though the brain disease that must have possessed those first invaders and mad brutes as they “discovered” these lands and did as much harm as they could, all the way right up to 1997 with the closing of the last residential school.

Early on there were savages among those early explorers and it seems they planted similar seeds growing still today. Then, they did as much harm as is unimaginable and now, here we are again at the side door, one might say of equal brutality, equal brain-sick destruction when we know full well and with no doubt that the current regime in this moment is taking a dangerous, unfeeling and even crazed grip on the other members of this world’s inhabitants. Now we are about new aggression that sees no barriers – not only by the humans living in the many areas to be depleted and ruined but also by the creatures living there.

Here is the giant puzzle: that click under our fingers tells us for sure that this earth needs those creatures – indeed, we need them to survive. Every endangered species pushed that one step more to die out completely is an irrecoverable loss, another stab in the heart of the planet. 

Every grove of trees trashed for logs, for mining or to service the makers of luxury toilet paper depletes our access to breathable air.

Click – read it for yourselves – we are allowing our government to steal and destroy at will everything that really matters and – for what? Industry. Where the profits grow in proportion to the damage.

Am I talking about the Ford government’s Bill 5? You bet I am.

A person I recently interviewed about Bill 5 could not exaggerate the dangers of it, not only for the cavalier way in which it dismisses the need to protect our land and wildlife but for the wholesale dismantling of our legal system here in Ontario: all the power in the hands only of the cabinet. A full-scale attack on the rule of law, sneaking in – as all such attacks are made – by promising that which sounds good but actually leads to a complete reversal and betrayal.

My interviewee was emphatic, instructing us to make our protests about this egregious bill personal. He urges us to speak to our MPPs wherever we see them and tell them that if they don’t rescind Bill 5, they will not be back in parliament next election.

“Go ahead and be loud,” he said. “Ask them in public why they voted for it – do they understand what it really says.”

He made the point that politicians have the duty to account for themselves and as long as we are civil, we are within our rights to ask hard questions.

It is personal when our laws are trampled, the wildlife is put in extreme danger and precious land and farmland is dug under concrete because so, then are we, our children, our home. The right to protest is still ours. Let’s use it.

Click – youtube.com/watch?v=6Lj7ZqlPIGM

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