· By Jean Hodgkinson

Every silver lining has a cloud -Mary Kay Ash

In recognition of massive street movements “everywhere” the editorial staff of Time Magazine has selected “The Protester” as its 2011 Person of the Year.

An annual exercise at the magazine since 1927, this year’s choice was explained as follows: Is there a global tipping point for frustration? Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough. They dissented; they demanded; they did not despair, even when the answers came back in a cloud of tear gas or a hail of bullets. They literally embodied the idea that individual action can bring collective, colossal change ... The root word of democracy is demos, “the people,” and the meaning of democracy is “the people rule.” And they did, if not at the ballot box, then in the streets. America is a nation conceived in protest, and protest is in some ways the source code for democracy – and evidence of the lack of it.

This explanation is profoundly deficient. Street protests aren’t the embodiment of “individual action,” poetry is. Protesters are people who, collectively caring about the welfare of people besides themselves, refuse to live isolated from their neighbours and band together in large boisterous groups. Surely Time’s managing editor is aware that for years now we’ve been told success or failure are entirely the result of an individual’s own choices and efforts. Before withdrawing from the Republican presidential primary contest, Herman Cain gave voice to this delusional smokescreen. “I don’t believe racism today holds anybody back in a big way,” he said during an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

The explanation’s second glaring falsehood is the claim that “America is a nation conceived in protest.” Those in charge at Time may want to pay closer attention to their own traditions for, as Mark Twain caustically observed, in the United States “we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”

The late historian Howard Zinn knew a little something about protesting, however, getting himself jailed for protesting against the Vietnam War and fired for protesting in favour of the Civil Rights movement. “Civil disobedience is not our problem,” he asserted. “Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country.” Perhaps the folks at Time could use a little historical refresher. Luckily Evergreen State College in Washington offers a course called “Zinn and the Art of Protest.” Here’s a brief synopsis:

We will study how ordinary people, from pre-revolutionary America to the present, have stood up to power in order to redeem the Bill of Rights’ guarantee of protecting people from the government ... Along with our study of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, age, disability and sexual orientation that continues to defy the constitutional promise of equality, we will examine how political dissent, so essential to correcting these inequalities, has been suppressed and criminalized from the 18^th century’s odious Sedition Act to the 21^st century’s reactionary U.S.A. Patriot Act.

When stacked up against all the serious issues requiring immediate attention the protests of 2011 have achieved passable, not overwhelming successes. And when they’ve accomplished these few successes mainstream media pundits have opted to present them in the context of backward nations finally taking their first tentative steps towards democracy, still peddled as America’s gift to humanity. But the brutal efficiency with which the Occupy protesters were cleared out of their encampments in cities from New York to Oakland should warn against embracing Time’s hackneyed optimism.

Hosni Mubarak was chased into retirement yet this hasn’t prevented ordinary Egyptians from having their heads cracked by soldiers. After years of right-wing governments looting the national treasury, ordinary Greeks are now the ones being forced to bear the brunt of austerity measures, despite the intensity of their protests. “Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man’s awareness of it,” warned Albert Camus in response to the madness routinely promulgated by governments, CEOs and their lickspittles at outlets like Time.

What we witnessed in this year’s outbreak of street protests wasn’t “leadership coming from the bottom of the pyramid” as Time would have us believe. It was a logical, visceral reaction to the ongoing economic and ecological collapse which is disproportionately affecting people at the bottom despite the fact fault lies with the people at the top.