Compost Studios

Everytime I see a protest, even an unpopular one, I smile and think “Democracy in action!” Thank God for protestors. Even the ones who stop traffic and delay us. They’re trying to get our attention. Let’s at least listen for a few minutes and consider their issues. And more importantly, let’s consider what issues we’re willing to raise our voice to address.

I’m thinking about protests because I just got an alert from the American Embassy about upcoming protests in downtown Brussels. Approximately 70,000 members of the Socialist, Christian, and Liberal unions are marching to express their displeasure with proposed changes in retirement benefits. While they’re marching from one major rail station to another in the city, a much smaller protest consisting of 300 Congolese will take place, highlighting the lack of human rights for women in the Congo.

Many years ago, the Congo was a Belgian colony, and King Leopold committed untold atrocities in his quest to maximize the resources in that African country for the benefit of Belgium’s citizens. My husband’s grandmother was quick to settle in the Congo, happily leaving behind Brussels and the social constraints women of her century faced. She was ambitious, and in the Congo she was free to run a number of successful enterprises. But eventually the trampled Congolese rose up in a bloody fight for independence. My husband, Eric, a Belgian citizen born in the Congo, lost his father in what some said was a suspicious plane crash in the aftermath of the revolution. His grandmother lost everything.

His mother remarried, to an American working for the Embassy, and Eric soon left the Congo and his Belgian citizenship and relatives behind, living in Algiers, Greece, and Turkey before settling in the U.S. as a teenager.

And here we are, thirty years later, living in Belgium. The Congolese, once exploited by the king of Belgium, are now abused by their own. And the Belgian workers, with one of the highest standards of living in all of Europe, are irate because there will be a delay in collecting their generous retirement benefits. If the government has its way, retirement age will bump up to 60. (I think it’s 58 now.)

There are 70,000 people willing to spend a day protesting the age at which one can collect retirement benefits and only 300 souls willing to fill a street to protest the treatment of the estimated 40,000+ women who have been raped during the six year civil war in the Congo (figures from Amnesty International). The BBC reports that these women are emotionally and physically traumatized, exposed to or infected with HIV, rejected by their husbands and families as being “unclean,” denied medical care and justice, and often burdened with caring for the children conceived in violence.

Many were abducted from their homes and held for days, even weeks, being raped repeatedly. Some are as young as 12. Some, after being raped for hours, drag themselves down the road to get medical care for their serious injuries—and encounter more men who rape them all over again. Many are mutilated as well.

In America, as in Belgium, we’re quick to holler or sue if someone threatens our piece of the national pie, the American Dream. Show me an American who isn’t willing to stand up and explain what they’re entitled to, and I’ll show you a dead American.

But what we’re “entitled” to is getting to be ridiculous. I read on CNN that Congress is in heated debate over a broadcasting law change that will eliminate analog TV signals at the end of 2006, meaning owners of older TV sets will have to purchase a $100 converter to continue to get network TV. Keep in mind that according to MSNBC, 85 percent of Americans receive their TV signals by cable or satellite and will be unaffected by the switch from analog to digital broadcasting in 2006. Still, this “issue” that affects 15 percent or less of the U.S. population has many Congressmen red in the face as they declare the INJUSTICE of this proposed change and ask how the government is going to fund all those signal converters that people MUST have in order to meet the American standard of living which means freedom and TVs for ALL. We all know it’s impossible to expect those affected by this change to SAVE $100 over the next 14 MONTHS and upgrade their OWN precious TVs. You can see this is a BIG CRISIS worthy of tuning in to C-Span. Maybe this will be just what Bush needs—he can bring all the soldiers home from Iraq under the guise that they’re needed here to install signal converters in the homes of underprivileged Americans that own multiple analog TVs!

OK, let’s face it, we all know the Congressman's rants really have nothing to do with the poor and their TVs, it has to do with the business interests of those manufacturing expensive digital TVs, the interest of others in re-developing those abandoned analog channels, and of course the business interests of the broadcasters, their advertisers and the power of their political action committees. After all, what will politicians do if they can’t reach that 15 percent of the population with cleverly produced ads of half-truths and lies? Those political ads can determine which politicians get to plant or keep their porky asses in the leather chairs on Capitol Hill. Can we risk losing access to the 15 percent who may base all their decisions on what they see on TV? Maybe the rest of us can—the pols can’t.

So today in America, the difference between the haves and the have-nots boils down to the value of your TV and your ability to watch Desperate Housewives and Monday Night Football in 2007. This is what our politicians are fighting for. In Belgium, it’s about when you get to stop working and enjoy a comfortable retirement. And in the Congo, a handful of women are risking their lives to ensure that others will one day be able to live without suffering multiple gang rapes, and that today’s victims will have access to medical care to deal with their injuries.

Does the injustice of all this make you want to scream? To hang your head and weep? To hit the streets yourself and protest? It should. Our hearts should curl up with shame over some of the things that preoccupy us and incite our outrage. We should all ask ourselves what’s worth fighting for—and then fight the GOOD fight wherever and whenever we can.

October 28, 2005