Cav's Place

The Green Institute, which is the NGO branch of our Green Party, announced another protest against the Government’s plans to allow the Rosia Montana mining project, but trying to attend just screwed up my entire day for absolutely nothing, so this is largely just to state that before I’ll even consider attending any other events organized by our Greens they’ll need to prove to me that they are actually capable of organizing them. Video proving that they managed to make at least a few dozen of their people arrive precisely on time and be completely involved will be a start, and I doubt anything short of that will do, unless of course some other known activists will guarantee that they’ll be there and take over if needed.
Of course, our Greens, and the current leadership in particular, making a mess of anything they attempt to organize is the norm, today’s embarrassment and the mess from the previous protest being only the most recent in a long series. One may certainly feel quite justified to think that they’re doing it on purpose, actually serving other interests and seeking to undermine and discredit any real efforts made for the environment in order to drive away those who may otherwise be inclined to participate, but they’ve been doing this for so long, following the same pattern and messing up so many times in other ways as well, that I’m inclined to think that they’re simply too stupid to know or be able to learn better and too proud to ask for or even accept help. Then again, there is the chance that they’re smart enough to be extremely good at playing dumb…

The protest itself was originally scheduled for 1 PM, which was terribly unwise considering the high temperatures, not to mention that scheduling it during the day on a weekday is a terrible idea either way. The Government is also pretty much on vacation now, which tends to rule out any potential benefits having it take place near the Government building during working hours may otherwise be said to have as well, but this is the way Remus Cernea and his crowd have always done these things, so it was hardly surprising in itself and it’s quite clear they wouldn’t have changed anything if they wouldn’t have been forced to, regardless of the complaints.
However, the authorities were somewhat wiser this time and did force them to, not allowing anything any later and making them reschedule for 9 AM, supposedly for only one hour. That at least took care of the heat problem, but it actually made attendance even less likely, because who the fuck comes to a protest at 9 AM? Worse, they didn’t even announce the change, which was done on Tuesday, the only way to know of it being to see the notification that event details were changed if you were already on it. Granted, the most recent messages they posted on their pages did mention 9 AM, but by then it was already Thursday evening and anyone who failed to notice the change before then would have had a hard time adapting to it on such short notice, not to mention that at the bottom of the event description they were also asking people to actually arrive at 8:30, to make sure everything will be ready by 9:00, and I doubt more than a few ever read that far at all.

Either way, I meant to do my best yet again, so woke up at 7 AM, after about one hour of sleep, to make sure I’ll get there on time. Actually meant to be there shortly before 9 AM, not keen on the 8:30 part, knowing there’ll quite clearly be nobody there then, but a mix of the metro being already in the station when I walked in and the fact that I left early due to being too sleepy to remember that I can get to the protest location without switching made me end up there at 8:40 anyway. Of course, the only ones around were the gendarmes, so I simply walked past and took a stroll through a nearby park which I otherwise very rarely get to see.
Sadly, what I found when I returned, quite exactly at 9:00, was even worse than I expected, namely a single guy sitting on a nearby bench, with some rolled up banners next to him. Circled around the area and by the time I got back to him there were two others there as well, one of them wearing an European Greens t-shirt, so walked to them and looked up shyly, which prompted the first guy to ask whether I was there for the protest, and if so which one, because there are apparently two scheduled. Replied that I’m there in case there will be a protest for Rosia Montana, but it seems that I bothered for nothing, and also that the other is irrelevant, because that crowd always tries to hijack everything. Got told it’s not for nothing, because at least I show that I care, coming for myself if nothing else, and when I said it’d have been nice if at least the organizers would have been there they said they are, the two who arrived a little later, while the one talking to me said he was a “half-organizer”.
So I sat around a while longer while the two “organizers” kept talking on the phone, apparently trying to get others, possibly Institute or Party members, to come and saying everyone’s busy, except for one who apparently said he’ll be there in about 20 minutes when it was already past 9:30, prompting an “yes, so just in time for the end” from the one who had talked to him. They also unrolled the banners a few times, so I could see that they were proper posters on glossy paper, but they seemed genuinely embarrassed as they did that and rolled them back up very quickly.
A single other person came to stay, around 9:20, and he was one of those I see as hijackers, though he had a Rosia Montana t-shirt on at the time. Two others showed up briefly, a few minutes later, but after having a look and exchanging a few words with each other they decided it wasn’t worth wasting their time and left, so we were a grand total of seven people for about a minute or two. Compare that with the ten or so gendarmes, possibly more if those I saw across the street when I left weren’t the same ones I spotted when I circled around the area the first time, who were standing around and occasionally coming to ask the “organizers” what was going on, and with the size of the area that was set aside for the protesters to use, which could have probably held about 200 and yet was completely empty, seeing as the five of us who actually sat around for a while were around the corner, where we could find some shade.

In the end, I got bored and finally walked away at 9:35, though I did so very slowly and always looking back, so it was past 9:40 when I finally made my way back to the metro station nearby and got back, coming out at a supermarket I thought I might as well check out while I’m out, seeing as the catalog we got in the mail mentioned something about an offer for something I might have been interested in. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the exact kind I wanted, so that was for nothing as well and, as I said, I simply messed up my entire day for no reason whatsoever, which is definitely not what I need when, for example, I’ve recently been doing worse with my writing than I did around this time last year, and that was the worst period I had in quite a while from this point of view.