50501 CO Update - 6/15
Bringing Coloradans the latest protests and actions
Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of our 50501 CO newsletter!
In this newsletter you’ll find information on upcoming activities from the 50501 calendar, actions you can take outside of protesting, and also find out about additional ways to connect with us.
See you on the streets! ✊✊✊
Actions and Activities
(The below list contains details on all actions this week which have been submitted to our 50501 CO calendar; click the link above for more details and the full calendar)
All cities
6/17: 5:30pm - 6:30pm - Understanding Executive Orders and Their Impact (Virtual)
6/18: 1:00pm - 2:00pm - What’s the Plan? A Weekly Discussion with Indivisible’s Co-Founders (Virtual)
6/18: 4:00pm - 5:00pm - Team ENOUGH Welcome Session (For Young People Under 26) (Virtual)
6/18: 5:30pm - 6:30pm - How the Executive Branch "Should" Operate (Virtual)
6/18: 6:00pm - 7:30pm - After We March, We Organize! Solidarity Warriors Indivisible Action Group (Virtual)
Denver
6/18: 5:00pm - 7:00pm - Denver Indian Health & Family Services PRIDE Party (2880 W. Holden Place, Denver, CO 80204)
6/21: 1:00pm - Fox Takedown (100 E Speer Boulevard, Denver, CO 80203 US)
Fort Collins
6/20: 6:00pm - 9:00pm - Juneteenth - Freedom Day - Teen Night & Opening Concert (Foothills Mall for Concert, Cultural Enrichment Center for Teen Night)
6/21: 10:00am - 9:30pm - Juneteenth - Freedom Day - Celebration Continues! (In and around the Foothills Mall - 215 E. Foothills Parkway. On/near the lawn. Inside the old Payless space.)
Johnstown
6/21: 12:00pm - Gabe Evans Town Hall Meeting (Johnstown YMCA, 165 Settler Way)
Littleton
6/17: 4:30pm - 6:00pm - Tesla Takedown Tuesday (5700 S. Broadway, Littleton, CO 80121)
Loveland
6/20: 4:00pm - 8:00pm - Loveland Pride Celebration (Mehaffey Park, 3285 W. 22nd Street)
6/21: 12:00pm - 2:00pm - Stand Up, Loveland (N. Lincoln from Sprouts to Tesla, Loveland, CO)
Northglenn
6/18: 4:30pm - 6:00pm - Gabe Evans Protest (104 Ave I25 pedestrian overpass, 39 E 104th Ave, Northglenn, CO 80234)
Windsor
6/21: 12:00pm - 1:00pm - Windsor Community Protest Hour (7th St and Main St)
Non-Protest Actions Bingo
The below bingo card contains a list of actions you can take (other than protesting) to help further the cause. If you get a bingo (or heck, a blackout), tag us on social media to let us know!
Do Protests Matter?
If you were able to attend one of the numerous protests yesterday, you may have heard someone ask this question. It’s a common enough refrain, and sometimes difficult to answer in a satisfying way. I myself asked this while attending a Women’s March protest after the Dobbs decision.
Did it matter? It didn’t feel like it did then. We still live in a post-Roe world, and the Colorado legislature would have arguably responded as they did regardless of how many protesters showed up. So, how do we know if our actions had an impact?
In an ideal world, protesting allows us to:
Demonstrate our numbers. When several thousands or millions of individuals take to the streets, it shows leaders that large swathes of the population feel strongly about the issue in question. In a democratic country, this can convince representatives to side with the protesters to avoid getting voted out of office. In more authoritarian countries, leaders can still be convinced to capitulate due to fear of stoking a more forceful response.
Demonstrate our will. Protesting is hard in many ways. You have to set aside the time to attend; you have to make a sign. Someone has to find medics and safety officers. And as suppression tactics ramp up, protesting becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous. When large numbers turn out despite the difficulties, it proves to those in power that the protesters’ cause is not a transient complaint.
Drag political conversations into the light. From Occupy Wall Street to the MeToo movement to Black Lives Matter, protests have proven successful in capturing the public zeitgeist in America. People who normally avoid thinking about politics are forced to, as news of mass protests (and frequently the protests themselves) force their way into everyday life.
Prepare for bolder action. Above all else, protests are mass gatherings. They achieve the goal of bringing together likeminded people, many of whom will be unhappy with simply attending a protest (leading them to ask questions such as the one which serves as this article’s title). Some of these people will inevitably go on to join other groups; to join in boycotts; to plan strikes. Protests can serve as the jumping off point for any number of direct actions which are even more harmful to those in power.
Given these goals, we can break the initial question into four more targeted ones (one for each point). Instead of asking, ‘Does this protest matter?’ we should ask, ‘Did we demonstrate our numbers?’, ‘Did we demonstrate our will?’ And so on.
No one can say for sure how many attendees are required to properly demonstrate numbers. No one can say how rough the treatment from police must be in order to demonstrate will. Likewise, we will only know after the fact if the protests made it into the zeitgeist, or if they inspired action beyond themselves.
But there are examples of successful movements among those I’ve already named. MeToo inspired countless women to speak up and face their accusers. The height of the Black Lives Matter movement coincided with the launch of Denver’s STAR program. Farther from home (but more recently), mass protests in South Korea resulted in the ousting of their would-be autocratic president.
More than five million people attended one of the thousands of No Kings protests yesterday, making it one of the most attended mass-protest events in history. We certainly put the ‘crowd’ at Trump’s birthday parade to shame.
So do protests matter? Potentially. Any protest can effect change. Whether or not it does in the end… well, we’ll have to wait and see what happens next.
Connect with 50501 on Social Media
