What's that guy been up to?So, he's readying a proposal for a free speech zone -- an area for protesters [of the G-20 Summit] with a stage and a public address system -- near Liberty Avenue, perhaps between the Doubletree Hotel and 10th Street. (P-G, Mackenzie Carpenter)
That's your news.
Suggested Discussion Question: In addition to thank you -- those are some nice amenities, the least Pittsburgh could do -- how about the right, within reason, to protest peacefully wherever one has a legal right to be? May I walk around with a sandwich board elsewhere? What if I'm carrying puppets, but I'm not loitering?
Apparently if you support a free Palestine, you can screw with Oakland traffic pretty much whenever you want.
ReplyDeleteThe notion that one needs a permit to exercise a fundamental right, as specifically stated in the Constitution, is absurd.
ReplyDeleteI agree Adam.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm not being cynical enough about this, but it doesn't sound to me like Ferlo is trying to limit the protests to his free speech zone; rather, he's trying to go out of his way to facilitate protests in that particular area.
ReplyDeleteBram, you could still take your puppets and sandwich board anywhere you want; but if you go to the free speech zone - and I admit, I do get a little bit of anxiety typing those words - then you can have access to a stage and a microphone.
Perhaps the question is whether we should be suspicious of government-sanctioned protest areas, and of course we'd need to know if Ferlo's proposal will carry with it a restriction on protesting outside the zone. But as it's presented in the P-G article, it seems okay for now.
Like I said, maybe my cynicism needs to be sharpened (needs sharpened?).
Feel free to rant and organize and connect dots at the wiki established up for G-20 in Pittsburgh.
ReplyDeletehttp://G-20.wikia.com
The right to do so exists. The freedom do so is the point of discussion. Perhaps Senator Ferlo might want to engage some of the identified protestors prior to the conference and work WITH them for a peaceful response, rather than work FOR them.
ReplyDeleteChris Peak suggests:
ReplyDelete"you could still take your puppets and sandwich board anywhere you want; but if you go to the free speech zone - and I admit, I do get a little bit of anxiety typing those words - then you can have access to a stage and a microphone."
Which as I said are nice amenities, but my hangup is that by protesting in The Zone, one would be:
1) Preaching to the converted
2) And only to those people who've decided to stop by and check out the freaks.
If the issue is getting the message out, I'm not sure that The Zone is a hindrance. The way I see it, the success of a G-20 protest is measured more by the numbers who join in and the publicity the protest receives than by the number of passersby who are moved by what they hear, particularly in an American rust belt city of 300,000.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, The Zone could be helpful in the push for numbers and publicity by gathering the protesters in one central, localized position, where they can be louder as a group and the TV cameras can know where to go.
As long as The Zone doesn't translate into a restriction on protesting elsewhere, I think it's an okay idea bordering on a good idea.