Right to protest — maybe we have it good here?

–Hey so, what’s with the mermaid?

She’s not a mermaid. She’s a person dressed up as a mermaid.

–Oh… Umm… OK… what’s with the person dressed up as a mermaid?

She’s a wildlife protector.

–Oh. Umm… So… what’s with the mermaid?

It’s a little bit of theater to go with the protest. Never hurts. Let me explain.

A little while back Hayden Panettiere did a protest with some of her surfer friends to prevent the needless annual slaughter of dolphins outside of Japan. Yes, I know… cultural privilege. Long tradition. Blah, blah, blah.

Pointless slaughter is pointless slaughter. It’s not cool. Screw tradition when it’s wrong. Here’s the thing, though. All the demonstrators did was go out in the water and form a memorial circle for a while on surf boards. I’ve seen photos. they didn’t even take up that much space. Yet the fishermen were furious. Furious!

As soon as I heard about it, I was 100% on the surfers’ side, and the more I dug into it the more convinced I became that they were in the right. It was a courageous act, because protest is never really fun, always courageous, they were in a foreign land, against tradition and, for some, like Panettiere, kind of putting their nascent career on the line. That’s enough to earn the Bravery Badge, but it turns out that it goes further than that.

Yesterday, Hannah Fraser (mermaid, pictured above) left a comment on the site defending what they had done against others who’d popped up and said it was nonsense. I emailed her off-line to see if the comments really came from her. They had.

So, here’s the crazy thing: in one of Fraser’s photos you could see a bruise on her leg. She wrote in to tell us (among other things) that the bruise was from a fisherman actually attacking her with a long pole as they paddled and swam out to form the surfer circle in the water.

It made me think. You know, I’ve done a lot of protests. Protest is, well, it’s what I do. In all the protests I have done, though, I have only ever felt physically threatened once. And there were cops around in that particular instance. Cops that I feel pretty sure would have stepped in to prevent anything bad happening (though, this was a Philadelphia election protest, so who knows).

I have been known to say out loud that I sometime regret the ease with which modern America accepts protest. You’ve got to run a pretty good action for it to have any real impact in most of the country these days (especially in cities and on campuses), because most power players are so accustomed to it. That is, though, a sign of freedom.

It is remarkable that the surfers protested in a society so completely out of sync with free expression that a modest demonstration would cause the kind of freak out that this did, there. I mean, I mentioned that we had the cops at the protest I was at, right? Well, the cops in Japan have a warrant out for Panettiere’s arrest.

Crackers, son. It’s just crackers.

So this mermaid took a hit for her cause that day and I never have. It’s a helluva thing.