People are planning for potential protest problems at the Democratic convention in Denver, as well they should. Having seen much protesting in my activist city, I know that the police are usually the ones who get out of hand at these things.

But as much as I agree with the sentiments of protesters, and I agree with their right to do it, I’ve never actually done any real protesting myself. For one thing, I guess I don’t see the point of standing around in a large group, holding a sign and chanting about being united. The people in power don’t really pay any attention, and it usually just serves to make you feel like you’re doing something when you’re really not.

And secondly, I generally eschew marching or gathering in these things because my whole philosophy of taking on the things I disagree with is simply to let them go. Not to try and take them down, or fight them, but to simply abandon them.

I realized many years ago that I didn’t need religion, and so I let it go. I realized I didn’t need to kill animals for food, so I let it go. I realized I didn’t have the same ideals as the Democratic party, and so I let it go. I realized I didn’t need popularity, or wealth, or to be like everyone else, and so I let any desire I had for those things go. Like that scene from every movie or TV show, where they show the clothes successively piling up on the floor as the camera moves closer and closer to the bed where the couple is sharing their naked coital bliss, I just let those things fall to the floor and I move on to something more important.

This is why I am always amused at the notion of the angry atheist, or the angry vegan. Because why would we be angry about something we don’t do? We’re not angry at meat eaters or the meat industry, and we’re not angry at god or religion. We simply don’t participate in those systems or share those beliefs.

When I was a little kid, I never had any real trouble with bullies. Yes, I occasionally got picked on, maybe pushed around a little bit, but I never got beat up or any of the other really unpleasant experiences that a lot of other nerds seem to have had in their younger days. And I think this is because I realized at an early age that the only real power anyone has over you comes from what you give them. Do you show them fear? They like that. Do you show them anger? They like that, too. They feed off of it. And so I determined that I was simply going to let the bullies taunt me however they liked, and then when I showed that I clearly didn’t care one way or the other, they would give up. I never ran, I never cried, I simply realized that they were small-minded, insecure idiots who validated themselves by picking on people they thought would be afraid of them. So, I simply let go of that fear and, after a while, they didn’t bother with me anymore.

And so, on the one hand, it might be fun to go to Denver and protest the Democratic corporation. But on the other hand, showing them or the Republicans that you’re that angry or afraid or upset about them will only make their resolve that much stronger. And it also tends to make leftists and anarchists look like wild, shouty people whose main political philosophy is defined by what they’re against, much like atheists and vegans are often thought of in mainstream culture.

I suppose there are things that should be taken to the streets, so to speak. I would have liked to have been able to participate in the Walk to Freedom, for instance, or to have been at the Lincoln Memorial for the I have a dream speech. But perhaps the civil rights movement’s most productive tactic wasn’t anything they actively did, but rather it was something they actively stopped doing: namely, the Montgomery bus boycott. Simply by giving up riding the bus, they achieved what marches and protests might never have achieved. Yes, the underlying racism was a protest-worthy issue, of course. But looking at it practically, if you were a black American living in the south, and you couldn’t ride the bus the same way white people could, then the practical solution was to just give up the bus - let it do its thing while you do yours. By not riding the bus (and withholding all of that revenue), they took away the power the bus company and its segregation had over them, and they sort of sidestepped the bigotry of it altogether.

So, my dream for the Democratic and Republican parties is this: I have a dream that one day, people everywhere will wake up and realize that they’ve never been happy with any of the candidates that either party has ever produced, and they’ll simply let those parties go. They’ll stop responding to emails, they’ll stop sending money, they’ll change their party registration and, most importantly, they’ll stop voting for the candidates those parties produce. Then, those parties will either change (as the city of Montgomery eventually did) or they’ll just fade into history.

No protests, no fuss, no muss. That’s change we can believe in, and yes, we can.