Protest or PROTEST? hmm.

Did you know that the word protest was first used in 1913 to describe the march that Gandhi organized to protest the restrictions that had been imposed on the Indian population of South Africa, the first massive civil disobedience campaign. Over the following decades, "protest" would be intimately linked with those new techniques of political resistance. By the 1930's, people were using phrases like "the literature of protest" and "social protest" to suggest the whole range of progressive agitation. But it wasn't until the sixties that the notion of "protest" entered the mainstream of the American vocabulary. That was the moment when songs with political messages began to make their way out of the coffee houses and hootenannies and onto the airwaves. By the time the Vietnam War ended, the notion of "protests" was losing its connection with the old tradition of social protest. Protests are back however there's a clueless even-handedness in those uses of "protest." I don't mean that the word can only be used of the left. There's nothing odd in talking about a conservative campus group holding a protest over the university president's support of affirmative action. That may not conjure up the old notion of Protest with a capital P., but it's clearly a form of resistance to the established order.
But it sounds a little weird to talk about a protest in support of a war that's about to be initiated by the Administration in power. Maybe that's just semantic sloppiness, as if "protesting" nowadays were just a question of getting together to yell slogans as if saying why should the other side have all the fun? Or maybe it's a strategic blurring of historical memory. But you'd hope that "protest" would retain some of the sense of resistance that it acquired at the beginning of the last century. Up to now, after all, protest has been the only political action that power can't engage in.