The event featured speakers, prayer (see the second photo below), chanting, and smudging.
If we measure the success of a protest in terms of its ability to connect the participants to each other and their cause, then the protest gets an A.
But if we measure that success in terms of how much attention a protest calls to the target problem and how much of an impact it has, it's not clear the protest earned anything higher than a C-.
Passing cars honked at us in a show of support, so we definitely reached people who weren't participating in the protest.
But I'm not sure we generated much media coverage outside the local area--which is a pity, since the people on the front lines of Standing Rock need to know that they have support way down here in Texas.
In this blog, I've often commented on the scant and misleading coverage given to progressive causes by mainstream media. That problem is more significant than most people recognize because it doesn't simply mean that uninterested people remain uninformed about what's happening. More damning is the fact that highly interested people can remain uninformed about important things that are happening elsewhere in the country--even if those things relate directly to the causes that are nearest and dearest to their hearts.
Of course, we can use alternative media to overcome this deficiency. But no one in Austin seems to be doing so (at least not in an effective enough way for me to have discovered their efforts).
So for what it's worth, I've included a series of photos from the protest in this blog post. But since my readership is small, I would love to pass these photos along to a local or regional progressive blog aggregator of some kind. So if anyone knows of such a thing, please provide me with a link in the comments below.
