Protests.
Yesterday, I attended the Black Lives Matter protest organised in Hyde Park. As with any event in which thousands of people congregate, many things caught my eye. However, two aspects stood out:
- It was a young movement
- There were no tangible demands
It was refreshing to see young people gathering with a common grievance and clamouring for change. The crowd was mostly compromised of teenagers and early twenty-somethings. The energy was palpable, the air was thick with a cocktail of anger and frustration. Sounds of the helicopters hovering above were drowned out by the various cries chanted with consistent vigour.
This protest had mostly been organised on social-media and away from the traditional authorities of political opposition. This may explain why most participants were overwhelmingly below the age of 30. Many of the audible chants were influenced by the uprisings in the U.S.A, following the murder of George Floyd by the local police force. The backtrack of the protest varied from “I can’t breathe”, “Say his name”, to “No Justice No Peace”. Many of those who were chanting also carried placards with various exclamations of varying wittiness.
A few of these people seemed to be treating this as a photo-op, posing with their masks and raising their placards high to the sky. Overall, there was a sense of kinship amongst the ages and races. The despair could be heard in many of the voices that filled the chants. When the protest was led out of Hyde Park to fill the streets of London, there…