One of the great things about our movement is that it understands the importance of drama in the social change process. The confrontations of Seattle and since assume what every playwright knows: the heart of drama is conflict.

I'm not wanting to downplay the value of other kinds of social change work: day-in, day-out educational outreach, culture work, developing alternatives that show better, more community-centered ways of functioning, and so on. In my study of societies where social movements pulled off progressive change, though, nearly all of them required at some point major confrontations. Drama does what nothing else can do: it arouses the attention of otherwise occupied parts of the citizenry, it educates them on a gut level, it motivates them to find ways of acting that make sense in their terms, and it even attracts many of them into the movement itself. (4)

Drama in the streets is, however, different from an off-Broadway play. A sophisticated theater audience might prefer characters to be multifaceted, without a clearly defined "good guy" and "bad guy." The social change drama of the streets cannot be so subtle: it really does come down to "the goodies" vs. "the baddies" -- in our case, those who stand with oppressed people vs. those who stand with greed, privilege, and domination.

Of course political radicals already know who are on the right side in this play, but when we plan we can forget that most people don't make our assumptions! The moderate audience in the mainstream watching the drama in the streets is surprisingly open-minded about who are the goodies and who are the baddies. Maybe the goodies will turn out to be the protesters, and then again, maybe the police will be. Since drama motivates, some in the audience are curious to see who will turn out to be who.

The protests at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia provide a clear example of this. Some widely publicized police violence prior to the convention damaged the police image. Those of us organizing the Convergence training in the week just before the Convention did effective media outreach, receiving highly favorable publicity. The result was, going into the Convention, that the burden of proof was on the police to reestablish their credentials as responsible and controlled, and the protesters occupied the moral high ground. A succession of three clearly peaceable marches in three days sustained this, even though the marchers on the third day had been promised arrest. The group organizing that third march, the Kensington Welfare Rights Organization, also took care not to be politically isolated, so that their civil disobedience would bring allies out in support. The police felt they had to back off the arrest threat on the third day, lest they confirm their image as "the baddies."

The second phase of the Convention actions, beginning August 1, reversed roles. The police did not have to be lambs; in the context of public fears and expectations, they only needed to show restraint, flexibility, and control. This they did, avoiding tear gas, major pepper spray, rubber bullets, charges with or without horses. Protesters were caught without a style that would put them in stark contrast with the public behavior of the police. The protesters looked . . . well . . . disruptive. (Which we'd said over and over was our goal!) And the police were helping the public by getting traffic moving again. The police chief, who had on national television been on the defensive, became a folk hero. The Philly mainstream could breathe a sigh of relief that "our hometown police are much better than those brutal, out-of-control Seattle police, and where did these protesters come from, anyway?"

The great lesson to be learned here is that the drama of the streets cannot carry a complex analysis that requires long dissection and persuasion. The drama in street confrontations needs the simplicity of contrast between the protesters' behavior and that of the police.

The symbols used to heighten contrast depend on the situation. Black student sit-inners wore dresses and coats and ties, and remained calmly seated at the counters while hysterical white racists hit them. Gandhi designed a raid on a salt works in which demonstrators calmly walked across the boundary where they were beaten down by soldiers. (5) Vietnamese monks sat in meditative positions in the streets of Hue, in front of tanks, to help bring down the dictatorship in 1963. Philippine participants in "people power" mass action overthrew a government partly with flower necklaces for the dictator's soldiers.

Again, our power lies in our choices. We can choose to design our confrontations using appropriate symbology so that the part of the public we most want to influence will see us as the people standing up for justice. It's our choice.

The Republican National Convention in Philadelphia again shows how much we need to learn about this dimension of direct action. The reaction of the membership of a largely African American activist group of poor and working class people to the direct action was significant. These Philadelphians use civil disobedience themselves, and are experienced in tactics of blockade and occupation, they also have their own experience with media distortion and police brutality. Nevertheless, the members felt no empathy or solidarity with the Convention disruption. The Convention direct actionists didn't set up the contrast between ourselves and the police to be clear and dramatic. Chanting "police state" is utterly unconvincing to bystanders who see with their own eyes an unusual degree of police restraint, especially if the bystanders know personally how bad brutality can get.

Police are sometimes sophisticated enough to be quite intentional in reducing the contrast. The Albany, Georgia, police chief defeated the African American 1962 civil rights campaign led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Martin Luther King by carefully restraining his police and reducing the contrast. He astutely used his police to prevent Ku Klux Klan and other forces from beating up demonstrators, again to hinder black people from gaining the moral high ground. Dr. King applied the learning from this lesson in the following year's Birmingham, Alabama, campaign, and SNCC's most dramatic use of this lesson was in 1964 in Mississippi.

The police strategy of lessening the contrast between their behavior and ours is one more challenge to our creativity. The British Empire tried a similar strategy during the mass direct action campaign in India called the Salt Satyagraha. Tired of beating and jailing demonstrators, they massed their police in the road in front of the marchers and did a nonviolent sit-down blockade! The marchers stopped and a stalemate ensued. After hours of uncertainty, night fell and allies of the marchers went off in search of food and blankets. When they returned, the marchers took the food and blankets and passed them over to the police. This proved too much for the police, who abandoned the street, and the marchers proceeded to a midnight victory celebration. It was another example of Gandhi's emphasis on staying on the offensive; when confronted with nonviolent resistance, the marchers escalated their nonviolence! (6)