For any political movement of any political stripe, gaining traction among the public at-large isn’t necessarily a painless process. It’s one defined by flighty magic markers drying up without so much as a warning smudge. In the pre-digital days, many rallies were destroyed by fed-up FedEx Kinkos employees, frustrated at their lack of inclusion. Inadequate copying services often did what the FBI couldn’t – stop the protest in its stacks. Participants want flyers. Otherwise, they return home emptyhanded, without a record of what they’ve done. Nothing for the scrapbook or the grandkids. It’d be like attending a Broadway show without receiving a Playbill. It’s just not done.
In my analysis, however facile and cursory it may be, I’ve come to accept that too many of these grand social projects are generally hemmed in by the public spaces they strategically take over. These public squares, limited by a cruel geometry, control the people and put them at odds with each other. Squares haven’t been considered cool since the fifties. So you’d think we would’ve retired them alongside others errors of the atomic age. Nuclear fallout shelters and sunken living rooms immediately come to mind.
We need more shapes, more angles. More places to hide with the tear gas falls. More crevices to run to when the “please disperse” announcement comes blaring from a nearby megaphone. The shape of the future isn’t something as strict as the one of the past. These simple plazas with their harsh right angles and inconveniently placed fountains do not belong in the 21st century. Two decades in, we should have adopted something bulbous, something amorphous, something complex and confusing. Euclid be damned. If it’s weird to us, imagine what law enforcement will think when trying to map out the event. They’ll give up when confronted with too many alleys and asymmetries to count.
Since the public isn’t square anymore, their squares shouldn’t be either.
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