The 2010 G20: The Day the Music Died?

In the 1960s, protests ended with concerts. It's just one of the ways they were different from today's protests.

There was only one topic of conversation immediately following the G20 summit, and it did not concern what our leaders accomplished. All anyone wanted to talk about was the nature of the protest marches, the security, and the role and actions of the police. I will not dwell on any of this because it is all available elsewhere. What I do want to talk about is the differences between the protests I attended as a youth in Toronto and Washington in the late 1960s and the G20 protests of 2010.

The first huge difference was the current distinction almost everyone made between legitimate protesters and violent anarchists. The police, the media, and community leaders all talked of this difference before, during, and after the G20. But in the marches of the late ’60s, we were all traitors, hippies, and miscreants in the eyes of the police, the politicians in power, and the mainstream media. Yet in our own eyes, we were all part of the “movement.”

I will never forget the police assembled outside of the Justice Department in Washington when there were widespread rumours of an occupation. One had a peace-sign decal on his armour, but when you looked closer, the caption read, "Footprint of an American Chicken.” Badge numbers were sewn over or removed. To them, many in their forties and who had served in the Second World War, we were misguided at best.

Back then, we did not distinguish between classes of protest once assembled. The arguments over violent vs. non-violent protest were discussed in meetings, magazines, coffee-houses, and parks. But now my impression is that there were few if any forums held that included those dressed in black and other communities taking part in the protest to discuss tactics or their merits. This leads to the second big difference between the 1960s and the G20 in Toronto: the public persona of the leadership.

After a week of searching, I have no real idea who the leaders of the protest are or if we can even talk in those terms. There certainly seems to be neither a claim to leadership nor an overall narrative to articulate their goals or an assessment of the results. Few seem interested in assuming this leadership except to speculate on the motives of police and other security officials. In the 1960s, various groups and their leaders in Toronto and especially in the United States wrote books and articles, made public speeches in town halls, and met with media to carefully and meticulously articulate demands to distinguish the differences between sectors and groups. Back then, you knew in detail what the Students for a Democratic Society, the Chicago Seven or “Danny the Red” wanted. The “Weathermen” and the FLQ had visible and very public leadership, and that leadership appeared to have as much access to the mass media as it wanted.

Now we are left with the distinction that anarchists and everybody else want very different things, but I don't know where to go to obtain the tracts, the manifestos, or the books that would give me more than half a page on the different motives of violent vs. non-violent protest.

That leads to the third huge distinction, and that is the role of cell phones and social media. When a crew of us headed off to a Washington Moratorium on a Thursday in 1969, everything was planned in advance and the first time we were able to take stock was on the Sunday morning after at a diner in Maryland.

Social media and email-capable cell phones changed all that, allowing revisionist history to be written minutes after the events took place. People stayed in touch – they could dissemble and re-assemble in minutes. In 1969, that simply wasn't possible, and the result was just one long march that started and ended at pre-arranged places. And that's a good segue to the biggest difference of all: the music.

I simply can't recall a 1960s protest march that did not end in a park with a concert. In Toronto, it was folksingers in Queen's Park. In Washington, it was Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Peter, Paul, and Mary at the Washington Monument. In Toronto, the crowds numbered in the hundreds, while in Washington, the passing of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the urgency of the Vietnam war brought crowds that numbered easily in the hundreds of thousands.

So perhaps Don McLean was right after all about the day the music died – he just had the timing wrong. At this year’s G20, there seemed to be neither performers nor a genre of music to draw people together, resulting in what seems to a totally different look and feel to today's protest venues – neither a strong narrative nor music to give it life. The fact that there was no open-air concert at the end was inevitable.

In the sixties, we demonstrated to force nations to come together to solve their differences, put down their arms, and seek out a common good for the planet. In 1969, the announcement of the creation of a G20 that included the United States, China, and Russia would have been cheered. Now that we have it, we clearly want something much different. So let's start writing the words and the music to define it.