I’m sure many of you had the same English teacher in school as I did. Mrs. M taught us how to deliver an effective speech. She expected the speaker to wear appropriate clothes, stand up straight, no slouching, know your subject well enough that you didn’t need notes and to speak clearly, facing the audience. Make your point clear, and then sit down before you got boring. I learned later in life that . . .
most of an audience forgets what the first 20 speakers said. Try to be the last one to speak. Try to use only words that everyone can understand.
The same holds true for a protest. Choose your target audience. Choose one key point. If you try to include too many, some people will object to at least one of your complaints. Don’t overstay your welcome or inconvenience people.
If you stay too long, people have time to scan the protesters and pick out a few troublemakers who you shouldn’t have brought that may have ulterior or political motives.
Be professional and courteous. Leave it as clean as when you came. If you protest too often, you or your group will be identified as chronic complainers.
Know who your protesters are. Some very well organized, special interest groups can take over a protest as we noticed on Capitol Hill and on Parliament Hill, and your group, who had good intentions, may not even know who they were or what their real motive was.
Recently in the news, we have been told that the two largest complaints today are the high price of gas and food. Then the next complaint that we are shown are block long lines of people trying to get a passport to go on a vacation that will cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of people in airports trying to get through long custom lines created by too many employees off work because of covid related sickness. At the same time, other people are protesting against too much covid restriction.
It soon becomes very obvious that the wealth in our country is not too well spread around. A little more investigation finds that both the price of food and gas in North America are less than half the price of food and gas in all the other countries in the developed world. Correcting these problems will not be very popular to quite a few people.
It has become apparent that our country has been continuously confronted by special interest groups, many of whom have been mistreated in years gone by, but too many of us have forgotten some of the very basic lessons in life that we learned in kindergarten. If you have not read the book, it’s a great read.
We have had the opportunity to live in the best part of the most regarded country in the world. Let’s demand that our leaders keep it that way. Keep buying and feeding your family safe, nutritious, real food. Our Canadian farmers have dedicated their lives to producing it.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
