How I Understand Easy Rider [finally]

Now I had heard the analysis of a very important scene in Easy Rider a few times but I haven’t really gotten it until now. Basically, when Peter Fonda’s character says “we blew it” after Dennis Hopper’s character decides they’ve found the American dream, it means that they blew their inheritance. Now this struck a chord recently as I was thinking about a number of things, but most importantly the nature of protest and blind faith in either side of the political spectrum. To me, this scene in Easy Rider means that despite the positive and lofty ideals of the hippie movement, many of their actions alienated the people who were supposed to listen and act upon these new ideas. Consequently, few meaningful things were done. I look at what was going on then and instead of acting in a meaningful way to change the systems that they disagreed with, many of the people engaged in increasingly irrelevant displays of protest or activities that made them look threatening or foolish in the eyes of people not directly involved. To me, this translates into current forms of protest. Simply by showing up to an event, to say, protest the World Bank or free Tibet, very little is going to happen. Take the more striking example of Bush ignoring several million protesters across the world that showed up to voice their opinion against the war in Iraq. Now whether or not you agree with these opinions is irrelevant, and quite honestly I actually agree with many of these protests. But protesting has not been effective since civil rights. During the civil rights era, protesting was a way of showing up and forcing people to accept truly equal rights. By showing up to a lunch counter, blacks were taking their legal rights to eat at the place of their choice. This was an effective way to show inequality and combat the effects of legal or de facto racist policies. However, when the people who enact negative policies simply have to walk around cordoned off protesters waiving largely meaningless signs, it does not effectively get the message across anymore. Protesting has become an irrelevant way of voicing opinions because you begin to look ridiculous. Whether or not I agree that Tibet should be out from under Chinese rule makes no difference when the people who are activists for this cause are extinguishing the Olympic flame because that will show those Chinese government officials they mean business. The result is actually the opposite. I want to associate less with this movement because of the meaningless and ridiculous gestures they perform to get their point across. I believe that the World Bank and IMF should reinterpret their policies, but there is no way I would show up to a protest because it is a largely meaningless and irrelevant gesture anymore. In the time it took for me to get to the protest site and the basically stand around for a few hours I could have come up with an action plan to start an organization and talk to decision making officials directly in a way that has a possibility of affecting real changes in policy. Being from the DC area, there are several times when I’ve had the opportunity to laugh at the World Bank/IMF protesters, and let me tell you, I have.