Nonviolent Method 18: Displays of Flags and Symbolic Colors

So, today we’re gonna look at Nonviolent Method Number 18: Displays of Flags and Symbolic Colors. 

Now, I went to a rally for the climate movement on February 19^th and everybody was wearing black.   I’m sorry but black has been done to death.  Yes, everything looks good in black but it doesn’t really set you apart as a supporter of the movement.  I mean everybody wears black.  It just makes everybody look like a bunch of hipsters.  Black doesn’t really make a statement like it used to.

So, I might like to suggest a couple alternate colors.  One would be green.  You know, the Green movement.  Hello!  We want to protect God’s green Earth.  I’m big on green.

The Iran uprising two years ago used green and it was really cool! 

But there’s one color I’m even bigger on.  Now just hear me out cuz it might sound a little weird at first.  It’s…Purple! 

Now you’re like “Why purple, Pete?”  ‘Cuz!  First of all, it stands out, not that many people wear it, so if they had a movement or rally one day and everybody was wearing purple, people’d notice that! 

You know if you had a purple flag people would be like “Oh, wow, I get it.”  If you had a black flag people’d be like “What, you’re a pirate?  You’re death?  You’re against ants?”  Black has come to represent so many other things!  We can do better. 

The other thing is polar bear’s tongues are purple.  And since polar bears have become a symbolic representative of why we need to stop climate change, even though it affects everybody, polar bears are the first ones getting big time affected.  So, since polar bears have purple tongues, I suggest we use the color purple.

Before actions we could hand out purple popsicles.  This would have two effects, one: everyone loves grape popsicles (I guess you could do grape juice too, or wine, or even blueberries.  Why don’t they call ‘em purple berries!  Urrh…)  And then you could tell the people who are with you because they’d have purple tongues.  And we could do that Maori warrior thing where they stick out their tongues to look scary. That’d be a fun thing to resurrect.

If we all showed up outside of Exxon-Mobil and did the Maori thing with our purple tongues, that’d just scare the crap out of ‘em, right?  Well, okay it probably wouldn’t but it would make for a great picture, and we’d get on the news and we’d show the world we had a sense of humor, which is important.  The leaders of Serbia’s Otpor learned that if you had 200 people marching down the street that wasn’t news, but if you had 200 people doing something ridiculous – THAT was a picture!

So that’s my pitch for purple, but I’m open to green too, and I know that lesbians do lavender, but lavender is different from purple, so, I don’t think we’d be steppin’ on anybody’s toes here. 

Anyway the other part of this method is flags.  The first flag I would suggest using is Old Glory – ‘cuz you’re trying to protect America’s future! I’m aware that somewhere along the line the hardcore right-wingers appropriated the American flag for themselves – which is so not fair to Betsy Ross!  Could you imagine?!  “Hey, that’s my flag, you can’t use my flag for your stupid…ignorant buttheadedness!  Seriously, stop it!”  The people who created the American flag created the American government – they like our government, they don’t hate it like these flag usurpers.

And you’re not just protecting America, you’re protecting America’s standing for all of history.  We don’t’ want to go down in history as the country that spewed the most greenhouse gases and stopped all action on climate change – we want to go down in history as the cool country that saved the day!

So that’s my pitch for Old Glory.  Alternates could be, say, a flag of a Pissed-Off Polar Bear…(Okay I won’t self-promote) Uh…a flag of 350, a flag of, like, the Earth Guardians (who I very much admire), the clenched fist of resistance.  Or you could do mock flags.  Go to a Tea Party rally and they’re holding up that cool Don’t Tread On Me snake flag, which again they’re trying to appropriate, don’t let ‘em!  Make fun of ‘em!  Make the snake a sheep, because they go along and believe anything the Fox News noise machine wants them to believe, like the melting ice cap is no big deal! 

“Don’t Tread On Me-eh-eh-eh!”.

Okay, so that’s Displays of Flags and Symbolic Colors.