Cav's Place

I did take part in yesterday’s March Against Monsanto organized in Bucharest and stayed all the way to the end, but I certainly wanted to leave as soon as we started marching and really felt out of place there throughout. The problem, of course, was that the very first thing Alex said when we finally got going, more than 30 minutes late, had to do with the shrinking population of Romania and how it’s not just because of poverty, a bad welfare system and poor health care that makes people die sooner, but likely also because of eating food that causes infertility, which includes genetically modified organisms. Worse, that was followed by a chant that would translate as “Monsanto, if you want to know, will leave you without children”, which was also what was shouted most often during the march, inasmuch as anything was shouted at all, since most of the time we were just silent, and while you could take that as meaning that GMOs are more dangerous to children, which is in fact probably true, the context made it obvious that its intended meaning was another.
I clearly feared that this will happen, seeing as the two issues are very frequently related in the minds of those who consider that reducing the population would be a bad thing, which are the vast majority, and I know for a fact that at least some of the leading participants, including Alex, hold this opinion and are actively involved in that crap about fighting the “depopulation agenda”, so was extremely edgy about attending, but I did anyway and wanted to see what will happen. The plan was to simply leave if it will actually be brought up, or at least if it’ll be brought up in any other way than as simply one element of some random speech made by someone before or after the actual march, but since that’d have meant to not attend any part of the march whatsoever, I just glared at Alex while he made that little speech at the start and then just put down my sign, cursed mentally and tried to go more towards the edges of the group whenever they chanted that slogan again, plus that I also walked largely with the group that was taking the lead and frequently walking a bit too fast for the others, which tended to occasionally open gaps and make even this one chant, which was otherwise one of the only two that were picked up in earnest by the participants, not always carry through to them as well.

There were other issues as well, starting from the fact that only about 150 people attended, and even that may be a slightly generous assessment, and continuing with being spread thin due to being forced on the sidewalk and having to weave among parked cars, with the confusion about the starting point, with the scandal caused by some guy in the nearby spot where most people had gathered, even though it wasn’t the actual place that was finally chosen, and with the fact that the only one out of the known or potential leaders who acted as such was Alex, and even he was very late, finally arriving after 4 PM, when we should have started marching already. The usual problem is that there are too many people pulling in different directions and competing about whose is longer, thicker or harder, yet yesterday we just sort of stared at each other until Alex finally came and then it was all thrown on his shoulders when it was definitely too much for one person to handle, especially when we were spread so thin due to the lack of space on the sidewalk.
And then there was what Alex did say when he managed to get a few moments away from all the people trying to tell or ask him things during the march, after that brief speech at the start, which at the time certainly seemed to me to focus on the wrong things, as in those that I was saying in my previous post may be better to be avoided in order to focus on what can’t exactly be challenged by anyone. He made a far better speech at the end, touching on just what I was talking about in that post, and there was another person there who got a few words about a potential solution in when he asked if anyone else has anything to say, so at least that part made me feel slightly less “soiled” by attending the event, but it was too little to wash away how I felt up to that point.
Admittedly, when I posted a rant last night in which I also brought up the fact that he didn’t focus on what we should have been focusing on the most, he said he did touch on those issues during the march as well, but he was limited in how much he could say, so it’s entirely possible that those moments came when I was too far ahead and didn’t hear. Yet whether those topics were also brought up then or not, the fact that it started with a rant about population and that the chant referring to that was one of the only two that really caught on made me feel something like I’d imagine a gay nationalist would feel while attending a protest organized by right-wing extremists, and I do apologize for the comparison but I couldn’t think of a better one: What we agreed on may be important, but what we disagreed on defined me, so what the fuck was I doing there?

This isn’t to say that, for a start of a campaign that never got any real traction around here before, this didn’t actually go reasonably well. They managed to get something going on relatively short notice, those in charge aren’t exactly to blame for most problems with the exception of this focus on the impact on population, and it may just mark the start of a movement, especially since we certainly had pretty good media coverage and they also handed out plenty of fliers to people, but this is a personal post about how I felt, not an objective news piece, so I’ll say again that I felt that I really shouldn’t have been there… And the fact that a girl approached me while marching to ask what is this all about and I was likely too frightened by needing to talk to a stranger like that to make proper sense, leading her to say she didn’t understand a thing, certainly didn’t help with that feeling.
I should also mention that I did spell out exactly what bothered me so much in a message I sent Alex after he asked, in his reply to that rant I posted, what was I talking about when I said I heard exactly what I didn’t want to hear, so let’s see what the result of that will be. I didn’t post it in public because when I did get into discussing my stance on the population issue with someone I met at a protest I was told I should be executed for thinking this way, so while it’s easy enough for anyone to see what I think about it, I’d rather not directly provoke a reaction from people I’ll probably end up actually meeting again. I’m quite unsure whether I’ll be meeting them again when GMOs will be the issue, however, because yesterday’s experience is making me seriously consider sitting out any further events that have to do with this. The risk of the situation repeating itself is simply too great and unacceptable when reducing the population is my top priority.