In North America, we don\u2019t do enough to fulfill our civic duty to protest.<\/p>\n
According to The Economist, 60 per cent of Americans disagree with Trump\u2019s administration, yet they don\u2019t seem to be unified enough to make change, to boycott, to protest, to force anyone\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n
When I was living in Istanbul in March 2025, the Mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem \u0130mamo\u011flu, was arrested in a politically motivated attempt to depose President Erdo\u011fan\u2019s main political rival. In response, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered in Istanbul, resulting in the largest demonstrations Turkiye had seen in over a decade.<\/p>\n
A month later, I witnessed 300,000 protesters walk through the streets of Rome<\/a>, condemning the genocide in Gaza and calling for more action from the Italian government. This August, I saw the \u201cFlamingo Revolution\u201d protests, a movement where thousands of Albanians protested corporate land privatization and governmental corruption.<\/p>\n But where are the protests in the United States, a country that\u2019s directly affected by the destructive choices of Trump\u2019s administration?<\/p>\n While there have been some protests in recent times, most prominently with the \u201cNo Kings\u201d protests, it\u2019s not significant enough to garner enough traction to create true change.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not just the United States; Canadians also haven\u2019t done our part to protest.<\/p>\n Take Queen\u2019s students as a prime example of this. In 1987, the University divested from the South African Apartheid after almost a decade of student and faculty activism \u2014 including almost 60 students, faculty, and children storming a Board of Trustees meeting, demanding divestment.<\/p>\n Nowadays, however, despite the noble work of some activist groups, there\u2019s simply not enough of a push on Queen\u2019s administration to get the University to truly consider divesting from Israel.<\/p>\n And this is despite the fact that we have access to more information than ever before.<\/p>\n We have seen a genocide in Gaza unfold before our eyes, and we saw footage of ICE murdering Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. A massive uproar shouldn\u2019t only be justified \u2014 it should be expected.<\/p>\n In our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we have the right to \u201cgather and protest,\u201d because of how fundamental it is to protect democracy and hold our leaders accountable. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in \u201cCivil Disobedience,\u201d \u201cThere will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.\u201d<\/p>\n As a democratic society, citizens can grant power, but that also means we can take it away when it\u2019s corrupted. We can create change by protesting. It works. Just last year, Nepal\u2019s youth-led protests brought about a significant political overhaul and the resignation of the Prime Minister. Protesting is what\u2019s helped get women the right to vote and to legalize safe-sex marriage.<\/p>\n If we stop exercising our civic right to protest, we are slowly letting the governments and people in power get away with impeding on our rights. In doing so, we\u2019re sacrificing democracy \u2014 the thing we, as North Americans, preach as the key to an equal, fair society. The lull in unified protests is exemplary of how complacent and apathetic we\u2019ve become.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to remember that when we work together, we can hold our leaders and our society accountable. We have more power than we think we do. As English writer Percy Shelley wrote: Ye are many \u2014 they are few.<\/p>\n Eva Sheahan is a fifth-year English and History student and The Journal\u2019s Managing Editor.<\/p>\n Tags<\/p>\n \n action<\/a>, American politics<\/a>, boycott<\/a>, protests<\/a> <\/p>\n All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and\/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to eic@queensjournal.ca<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In North America, we don\u2019t do enough to fulfill our civic duty to protest. According to The Economist,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[14691,4301,17460,9,24,63,4648,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-356998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-action","tag-american-politics","tag-boycott","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-protests","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}