First Contact Day, Hands Off, and the Fruitfully Inscrutable Effects of Protest

 

A shot of the Hands Off Protest in Chattanooga, TN, April 5, 2025.
You can see me in the street on duty as a crossing guard. (Credit: Sophia Cowan)

Yesterday, April 5, 2025, saw the the confluence of two events. For Star Trek fans, it was First Contact Day, a day that celebrates first contact between humans and Vulcans, which in most Star Trek timelines will take place on April 5, 2063 (a mere 38 years from now!). Yesterday was also a Hands-Off protest with over 1000 individual events around the US, including here in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Millions of Americans nationwide protested the recent dramatic actions of the Trump administration and his ally Elon Musk.

How on Earth (or any other planet) could these two events be connected?

Does Protesting Accomplish Anything?

I'll start with the least interesting connection: Elon Musk was once mentioned on Star Trek: Discovery in the same breath as the Wright brothers and Zephram Cochrane. As someone pointed out, it's a testament to how deeply uncool Musk is that so many people dislike him despite having done some cool things in the past. (And if you know the specific context of who says this line, it may even be an indication of what timeline we're living in now...)

For possible other connections, let's start with the frequently asked question: Does protesting accomplish anything?

This question is often asked in bad faith by people who don't like a specific protest (along with absurd accusations that protesters are paid or all unemployed or whatever). I'll set that sort of bad faith question aside. Because: ugh, enough already...

But even in good faith, I think this question is often misguided. At best, it's asked out of honest ignorance about what protests are and how they work. At worst, it's an excuse for laziness or cowardice. Often when I don't want to do something is precisely when my brain goes into overdrive to produce reasons against doing that thing. I can't take out the garbage because it's raining, I can't feed the cats because I'm writing a blog post, etc.

My answer to the question, "Does protesting accomplish anything?" is that protests do lots of things. But to see this you need to expand your scope beyond a small number of big, dramatic possible outcomes.

Yesterday's protest is not going to make Trump or Musk immediately stop what they're doing. It's not going to immediately get legislation passed. It's not going to immediately change leadership at the federal, state, or local levels. It's not going to immediately change the minds of the President's most die-hard supporters.

But that's just not what protests do. 

What Do Protests Do?

Let's start with that adverb immediately.

Is it true that the March for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963 (where MLK delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech) did not immediately cause the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to be passed? Yes, of course. But is it also hasty to say that that protest had nothing to do with the passage of that law or the Civil Rights Moment in general? Also, yes. Is it narrow-minded to assume that the only thing this protest did was enact legislation? Yes, once again.

I picked one of the most famous protests in American history out of convenience and the benefit of historical distance (although not as much distance as you'd think given recent "anti-DEI" nonsense that might soon prevent students from learning the real history of the Civil Rights Movement). You could make a similar point about American protests for women's and LGBTQ rights, against the Vietnam War, the Occupy movement, the George Floyd protests, and so on.

My point is that we need to think more deeply and broadly about causation in the social and political realm. This is something my immersion in Buddhist philosophy has done for me, but you don't have to read Vasubandhu or Dharmakīrti to get the basic point.

Once you start paying attention to the vast web of cause and effect, it gets easier to see that causes and effects are vaster and more deeply connected than we tend to think. I'm writing this on a laptop made in China with materials from around the world. My cat is sitting by feet as I type this (we adopted her because we saw her at a satellite location of the local humane society at a mall when we lived in Tucson, Arizona). We're in Chattanooga because I got a job here in 2014, my spouse later got a job here in 2017, and the pause in student loan payments during a global pandemic helped us save enough money to buy a house in 2022. 

I only had any idea that one could even become a philosophy professor because of my excellent professors at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN in the 1990's. My K-12 education was only possible because public education had become mandatory in the US decades before my birth. While I was born too late or in the wrong country for free higher education, I did get financial aid (state grants, federal Pell Grants, and student loans), which resulted from programs enacted by federal and state legislators.

I became a Star Trek fan because Star Trek: The Next Generation was syndicated on one of the local TV stations in the Twin Cities in the early 1990's, and I watched it every weeknight at 9pm. I was a volunteer at the protest yesterday because I met my friend Sophia at Connooga several years ago. I likely would have been at the protest without that connection, but I would not have been in touch with the organizers without that personal connection.

I'm using these backwards-looking personal causal relationships because they're easier to see ("write what you know" and all that!), but if all of these connections led to me writing this blog post, what happens when you turn this around from backward-looking to forward-looking causation? What happens when you imagine causal connections from the present boldly going into the future?

Now that we're paying attention, here's a list of just a few possible effects of yesterday's protest. 

• It might show people disturbed by what's happening in the US government that they are not alone, which might embolden them to do other things (contact representatives, talk to friends, run for office, etc.).
• It might be a morale boost for activists and others working in myriad ways to make this world a better place for all of us.
• It might show the rest of the world that many Americans do not agree with what our national government is doing, that there is hope for this country yet.
• It might protect the media, universities, and other institutions by showing them that there has not been a massive sea change in public opinion: many of us still value these institutions.
• It might exercise our constitutional right to freedom of assembly, which like any muscle has to be exercised lest it atrophy, especially in the face of possible future crackdowns.
• It might actually change someone's mind to see millions of regular people taking a stand, especially in that "squishy middle" of the vast majority of Americans who lack the time or inclination to pay much attention to politics. They may think, "Gee, maybe I should look into this. It seems serious."
• It might prompt discussion about the demographics of this particular protest, which here as elsewhere tended to be older and whiter than other protests, which might lead to interesting discussions of privilege, police presence, whether people really get more conservative as they age, the limits of protest, lessons to learn from past protests, how to combine protests with other actions,  how to find solidarity across diverse political philosophies/histories/methodologies/causes, and so much more.
• It might inspire someone somewhere to do something even if they can't or won't attend a protest. And that, in turn, might cause lots of other things, if only a bold answer to the age-old defense of the status quo that "you can't do anything" and "nothing you do matters."
• And who knows? Maybe it will drive a demand for legislation or changes in leadership at local, state, and federal levels? Stranger things have happened.

The Effects of Protest are Fruitfully Inscrutable

I'm not saying all of these things definitely will happen. I can't know that! Nobody can. My point is that the effects of protest are fruitfully inscrutable. The fact that we don't know all of the possible effects of our actions is a cause for hope at least as much as it is a cause for fear or dread, maybe even more so. After all, if you don't know what the future holds, it could, for all we know, change for the better over time in surprising ways. (My fellow philosophers might consider this as a positive, ethically-constructive use of philosophical skepticism about the future.)

I'm drawing here on the metaphor of seeds and fruits, which is the primary metaphor for cause and effect in classical South Asian philosophy. My point, then, is that we are constantly planting seeds in the present that bear fruits in the future. We can't be sure which fruits will sprout from our seeds, yet this very uncertainty can be a source of hope.

Positive change seems more likely if you're out there doing something, planting some seeds. It doesn't have to be attending a protest. It can be anything. As Gandhi didn't exactly say, you need to be the change you want to see in the world, which is a way of cultivating the seeds we plant. 

Besides, who benefits right now from Americans doing nothing? Who benefits from widespread fear and helplessness in any society? Who are the winners when we have a disengaged public? Whose fruits will we harvest in the future if we stop planting our own seeds now?

Boldly Going toward the Lotus of a Star Trek Future

And lest you think I've forgotten about Star Trek, dear reader, I'll point out that Star Trek is perennially popular in large part because it presents a human future without poverty, hunger, war, or exploitation (at least for those of us on Earth; galactic conflicts are too good for the plot to pass up). And in the Star Trek universe, humanity arrives in that future through a past worse than our current present.  (Is Star Trek depressing because of this? Or is this an invitation to try to do better? I'm not sure.)

So, let me add another bullet point to my above list:

• Yesterday's protest might, just might, become one of many, many seeds that will yield eventual fruits of something closer to a Star Trek future for humanity.

Obviously that's not something I have any evidence for at the moment. But if the effects of our actions are fruitfully inscrutable, maybe it's not completely irrational to hope that out of the evil muck of our present there might emerge a lotus of something like a Star Trek future. But for that to happen in the future, we need to keep planting some seeds in the present. Who knows? Maybe First Contact Day will be a fruit of the seeds planted yesterday at the Hands Off Protests.