Monday, March 09, 2009

Missed Opportunity

In a stroke of luck (bad or good depending on your perspective), the WBC protest was right during my Property review session, so I missed them entirely. What a shame -- I wanted to blow a kiss at them. But instead I just studied more arcane Property law.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

most of what you missed was an opportunity to speculate whether this group has recently decided to radically change their tactics, or whether they have been deliberately misrepresented by the media and/or their political opponents.

I think the first is fairly likely and that the second is almost certain. Not that I like them. But geez-given that they were there to inform us that we were all going to hell, I thought their behavior was entirely reasonable. They just stood their with signs and sang unless approached, and from what I saw they were pretty decent to people that approached them.

Maybe they just weren't warmed up yet?

-Grant

6:31 PM
PG said...

If they were on school property, I imagine they wanted to avoid getting kicked off it. Harassing people is a good way to have that happen. Being quiet and waiting for people to engage you is pretty safe. (And of course on a campus, signs of just about any type are unexceptionable. At a funeral, not so much.)

6:34 PM
Anonymous said...

I'm mostly responding to the several mass emails that were sent by various student organizations and even my residence hall about how WBC gets all its money by provoking others to commit torts, and please reroute yourself to stay away from them. When I said I was going to go chat with them, people would tell me things like "be careful-don't let them provoke you!"

The WBC people didn't respond to a couple of taunts from bystanders that were annoying enough where I thought a response was justified. Their showings were only a half hour a pop (they never picket one place for more than an hour). They had room to be a lot more abrasive than they were without getting kicked off. They didn't even have chants, and they were somewhat friendly to people that approached them.

I know this wasn't them at their worst. Protesting at funerals is going to be MUCH more provocative, and I'm sure they get out of hand sometimes. You protest how ever many hundred things per year with a message like that and plenty of them are going to get out of hand, especially where there are meaningful counter-protests.

But these guys just came across as wackos with law degrees trying to get their wacko message out. They didn't quite seem like disciplined, calculating Draculas who were going to cleverly provoke me into committing a tort so that they could continue their parasitic existence of leaching money out of the system and injecting hatred into it. Which is what was strenuously advertised.

-Grant

12:15 AM

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