Protesting. The Goal. How to Get to the Finish Line...

Christine Merser, June 11, 2025

This is important for this weekend and the coming weeks. Remember, the police and others are not the enemy. Offer them water and kindness… Commit these rules to memory and pass them along. If we want to win, we must be peaceful and strong and massive. Then they can’t destroy us. - Christine Merser

Peter Coyote

Zen priest, Peter Coyote, on protest.

"I’m watching the Los Angeles reaction to ICE raids with trepidation and regret.

Three years ago I taught a class at Harvard on the “theater of protest”— designed to help people understand why so many protests turn out to be Republican campaign videos working directly against the interests of the original protest.

A protest is an invitation to a better world.

It’s a ceremony.

No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at.

More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is.

The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, Congress,etc.

The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them.

If you win them, you win power at the box office and power to make positive change.

Everything else is a waste.

There are a few ways to get there:

1. Let women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do.

2 Appoint monitors, give them yellow, vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protester sit down.

Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement.

3. Dress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum when you’re dressed in clean, presentable clothes.

They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience.

4. Make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people. Let signs do the talking.

5. Go home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at dawn fresh and rested.

I have great fear that Trump’s staging with the National Guard and maybe the Marines is designed to clash with anarchists who are playing into his hands and offering him the opportunity to declare an insurrection.

It’s such a waste and it’s only because we haven’t thought things through strategically.

Nothing I thought of is particularly original.

It was all learned by watching the early civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s.

And it was the discipline and courage of African-Americans that drew such a clear line in the American sand that people were forced to take sides and that produced the civil rights act.

The American people are watching and once again if we behave in ways that can be misinterpreted, we’ll see this explained to the public in Republican campaign videos benefiting the very people who started this.

Wake up.

Vent at home.

In public practice discipline and self control.

It takes much more courage."

— Peter Coyote Zen teacher and author/narrator, with Ken Burns