#blacklivesmatter — What I’ve learned from protests in my home country over the past few years

I want to put the most important part of this article first, so that even if you don’t have much time to read through it, you can still skim the list.

Here are some things you can do to decrease your vulnerability in a protest, based on my experience and the recommendations pertaining to the current pandemic (in no particular order):

• always wear your mask — you don’t want to get the virus and you also do not want to get tear gas near your nose or mouth (in case the police uses excessive force and starts raining tear gas; it might get in your eyes, but it will not get in your airways, at least);
• keep your distance from other protesters that are not in your family or group of close friends — this one is as much about the virus as it is about unknown people infiltrated among the protesters with the sole purpose of starting violence;
• always keep an eye out on the people around you and always distance yourself further from people who look like trouble; you can even read it in their eyes — if they’re bloodshot with fury; watch out for people violently making threatening gestures, shouting other messages than most of the protesters, or generally trying to kick or push other people. In such cases, warn those around you to stay away from these individuals and go find a police officer. They are required to extract such people from the crowds and they should have the training to do so. Do not engage these people on your own!
• keep little kids at home (let’s say under 5)— while it is amazing to teach your kids how to be active citizens from a young age, they are also the most vulnerable. They may get emotionally overwhelmed (I know I would have, as a small child, as I still do as an adult), overloaded with sensory input (especially noise, as protests do tend to get noisy) and easily hurt if the authorities decide to attack the protesters with water cannons and tear gas (because of their own incompetence in dealing with a protest, most of the time, not necessarily because of a ‘higher up’ ordering them to do so, although there are cases). This has already happened and it is likely to happen again, as the authorities are overwhelmed and have nearly zero training in dealing with crowds.
• urge those around you to keep their calm — a non-violent protest is a legitimate protest. The message of a non-violent protest is the strongest. Remember what Gandhi said and did (or read up before you go out if you don’t remember — this is only one article, but it gets the point across) and do that. Repeat this message to your fellow protesters. A ‘zero violence’ protest is not easy to maintain, but it is the most fulfilling in the long run. It shows that you have the willpower to rise above your instincts of physically fighting when you are hurt, and to create long-lasting change by creating and upholding the rules for a democracy that truly respects the rights of its citizens.
• film everything and post it live on social media platforms — I cannot stress just how important this aspect is. So much abuse goes unnoticed because there is no evidence for it. When you make live recordings of events on social media, those stay online and available to the public and the justice system long after the event has been consummated. You can provide critical evidence in cases of police brutality on unarmed and non-violent protesters, for example. If you see it, film it and stream it. Bring a power bank with you on your protests and make sure you have enough bandwidth to upload videos. News outlets will take your videos and make news stories with them, spreading your message further. We have the technology now to make visible to the whole world exactly what is happening right now in our communities, let’s use it!

These are the main points. If I remember anything else just as important, I will add it to the list. I hope this helps you even a little bit to be safe and pass on your message to the world. If you are in the #blacklivesmatter movement, please know I support you with my whole heart and being.

Please be safe and may your message grow and multiply and reach the whole world.

If you want to know a bit more about my experience with protests, my thoughts about them and why I think I’m qualified enough to make those recommendations in the list above, please read on.

Protests that ask for the human rights to be upheld should not be violent.

They are generally not violent, except in cases where expert ‘protesters’ infiltrate peaceful protests, instigate violence and create chaos that is later an excuse for the authorities to use excessive force to hurt and scatter the otherwise peaceful participants to the protest.

At least that is my personal experience.

I cannot guarantee that this is the case now with the current protests happening in the US, which have been sparked by the police killing of several people of color (on camera, even), without any reason and without any real consequences.

The police force should be the one to protect people’s rights, not the one hurting and killing people (and yes, I mean both the black people that have been killed by cops based on profiling and not any actual threat, as well as the protesters that have been abused by the police).

I wholeheartedly support participating in protests and have been heard many times shouting ‘get out of your houses if you care!’ and ‘justice, not corruption!’ along with the thousands of protesters that I joined every time I’ve had the chance during the several last years. I’ve been a spectator from afar (because I was in another country at the time) and I’ve also been an active participant in protests in Romania for over three years, starting in early 2017.

After returning to Romania in mid-2017, I started participating in protests for justice as part of a civic group that was formed that year. I was involved in planning, writing, designing and disseminating information about the current events on our social media platform, as well as filming the protests and streaming them live on the same platform. Our highest reach from one protest was over a million for a live video that lasted almost two hours. I know it may not seem like much, but for a Facebook page with less than ten thousand fans to reach a million people it takes a lot of emotional investment. That was what drove everything.

Photo by Sandor Lucas

The emotions of the people feeling cheated by the system that was trying to create special islands in the justice system for the most corrupt politicians that had stolen public funds without the slightest tinge of regret. The emotions of the people that were crushed by the injustice of the Parliament drafting laws only to offer clean slates to some well-connected individuals who had used public funds as their own pockets. They were angry and that brought them out into the streets.

We did not have a single violent incident in the city where I lived and protested day by day, after work during the week, on the weekends, in the afternoons and evenings. We had no social lives, we did nothing else but protest. Sure, there were still people that didn’t care, but we made a lot of them care.

The only violent incidents happened in the capital, where professional bullies infiltrated the protests and tried different tactics to create chaos. Most of the times, they were easily spotted, isolated by the rest of the protesters in a circle and then extracted by the authorities.

On the 10th of August 2018 this did not happen and general violence ensued. The perpetrators, were, unfortunately, the authorities themselves. Instead of acting as usual, to protect those they were there to protect, they allowed the bullies to start a riot and then retaliated with water cannons, tear gas, pepper spray and gas grenades on the whole mass of protesters, that was composed of, among others, children and elderly. To this day, not even one person has taken responsibility for these crimes. I am still waiting…

I know protests work, if not to create legislative change (which is, after all, the point of any protest), to at least create a movement in the people that may be too indifferent to the hurts of their fellow humans to do anything about it. Protests are a great platform for distilling a message and for spreading it out to as many people as possible. No conventional medium can achieve that. Transmitting a strong emotion along with a very important message.

In Romania, the protests have been effective. At their peak, they gathered over a million people out into the streets around the whole country (some people claim that a million are not that many, but have you ever seen a million people? It’s a lot of people). They did not achieve their purpose on the spot. The change was slow and is still happening. But they did motivate more people to vote during the two elections held in 2019 and hopefully it will motivate the same people to vote in the elections this year (which are even more important in the long run than last year’s elections).

The protests showed the public that they do have power and that their power does not reside only in voting once every four or five years. It prompted civilians to write, support and get voted a project for modifying the Constitution so that convicted criminals may no longer make laws (it still hasn’t passed the Parliament, seeing as the majority in the Parliament is made up of convicted or soon-to-be-convicted criminals), as well as many other smaller projects.

But in order to be effective, a protest needs to be safe for its participants. The success of a protest stands in its proliferation across the country (sprouting more and more smaller protests that cover a larger area, spreading the message to more isolated communities) and in its repeatability.

A successful protest will not be snuffed out or scattered in a couple of days. It must go on for a long time until it becomes so prevalent, so obvious, so all-present, that its message cannot be ignored even by the most ignorant or uncaring of people (we do not count here the anti-activists, those are a completely different group that will always try to uphold the status-quo and to prevent the protesters for a just cause from getting their results — you will never reach these people with your message and you should not even knowingly come into contact with one of them).

In order to have a large and long-standing protest, you need to keep yourself and those around you safe. The police force that is deployed to a protest should be there to protect you and your fellow protesters, not to beat you up or arrest you (unless you do become violent and a threat to other people, but I hope you will not do that).

So please follow the above guidelines to keep yourself and your loved ones safe. Please encourage others to protest safely, for the sake of their own lives and health and for the sake of the results of this movement. Because there will be results, even if we cannot yet see them. We just need to keep on going!