Journal 8
The Health of the Nation Depends on Protest
Joan Blackwell
University of Houston-Downtown
ENG 1302: Composition II
Dr. Wedes
November 9, 2020
Abstract
This paper argues that protest movements which form to improve the economic equality and health of a nation should be looked upon as positive, hopeful forces for change and have government support. Movements protesting economic inequality like the Order of the Phoenix should be looked upon positively because they are the only hope of reversing injustice in nations where the government can be bought by the wealthiest 2%. Protest movements against economic inequality should be supported by the majority of citizens because protesters do not instigate violence, government authorities do and they help end racial profiling by forcing government agencies to retrain workers in more effective, non-racially motivated methods of criminal detection. Health privilege protests must gain more traction than they currently have so that when a health crisis such as spattergroit arrives the majority of a nation’s citizenry can get care that not only allows them to survive, but does not render them bankrupt. It is unreasonable for the Ministry of Magic to insist that protests be genteel and peaceful when they do nothing to care for the bulk of its citizenry. This paper recommends that libraries and community centers pool resources to provide classes which explain how government policies destroy livelihoods and teach about the role of activism in a democratic republic. The paper further recommends that citizens should join a protest movement of their choice in order to see for themselves how protest movements work from the inside.
Keywords: protest movements, economic inequality, healthcare protests
The Health of the Nation Depends on Protest
On this earth there is a nation where only 2% of the population can afford to get seriously ill. When this population gets life-threatening illnesses like spattergroit or serious injury from broom accidents, they must appeal to their equally poor friends and family to donate their hard-earned galleons to a Gofundme they have set up or else suffer debilitating, often devastating, life changes. Moreover, of the 98% of poor people in this nation, a further 52% are afraid to report criminal activity for fear of being racially profiled as criminals. This nation is today's Wizarding Community, where the majority of the nation lives in poverty and fear (Potterwatch, 2020). Fortunately, these injustices cannot be perpetrated in secret. People of decency and morals see what is happening and fight, via protest movements, to correct these injustices. Research shows that 72% of protest movements grow out of injustices ordained by the government that severely affect a nation’s health and livelihood (Lupin & Black, 2010). Thus the Wizarding Community, where 98% of the population lives on the brink of financial ruin, is rife with protest movements such as Potterwatch and the Order of the Phoenix (Potterwatch, 2020). Nations that force large populations to the edge of survival should expect to be set upon by massive protest movements. This paper argues that protest movements which form to improve the economic equality and health of a nation should be looked upon as positive, hopeful forces for change and have government support.
Literature Review
Many researchers have been puzzled by how government policy leads to protest. Although many causes have been explored, researchers have had a hard time pinpointing an exact formula leading to protest due to a lack of accurate data (Patil et al. 2018, Lovegood, 2016). Journalism such as The Daily Prophet and journalists like Rita Skeeter cannot be trusted to accurately depict protest movements because they tend to view protests through emotive, rather than objective lenses, in their efforts to stir up emotions and increase readership (Potterwatch, 2020). Also, reports on protest movements are usually slanted towards one party (Potterwatch, 2020), protest leaders often operate in secrecy out of fear of retaliation and are therefore hard to find or interview (Granger, 2013), or, the protest leaders themselves are emotive rather than factual (Patil et al., 2018). All of these factors lead to a dearth of data concerning protest movements.
Various arguments have sprung up around the question of the formation of protest movements in restrictive nations. According to Snape and Dumbledore (2010), 62% of government-inspired protests stem from when a government fails to act against a clear injustice, such as when the Ministry of Magic failed to denounce muggle-born racism , or when it fails to protect its people against an internal threat, such as when Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge denied the return of the wizard calling himself Lord Voldemort. Snape and Dumbledore’s (2010) data, however, disagrees with Karkaroff’s (2012) figures, claiming that protests form against a government mainly due to the level of fascism and autocracy exhibited by the platform of the party that controls the nation.
Two specific types of privilege are most likely to spark needed protests: economic and health (Lupin & Black, 2010). Economic factors that form protest movements are linked to the privileging of one race, one religion, and/or one gender over all other races, religions, and/or genders (Weasley & Weasley, 2007). Protests over economic factors such as these have affected 77 countries and countless civilizations (Snape & Dumbledore, 2010). Health privilege protests, on the other hand, usually center around the rights of women to control reproductive rights (McGonigall et al., 2017), but also cover situations such as pandemic control, pharmaceutical drug pushing, and inadequacies surrounding national healthcare plans (Pomfrey et al., 2020). If more nations stood in solidarity with economic and healthcare protest movements in restrictive nations, restrictive governments would be less likely to form because they would know that the world is watching and judging them (Lupin & Black, 2010).
Argument
For the Wizarding Community, the year 2020 has been fraught with protest movements and along with these movements come criticism. Many have claimed that because violence breaks out around protest movements, the protesters are to blame, but few look at the ways in which the unjust government is responsible for the violence. If the Ministry of Magic had not passed a resolution where muggle-borns were not alloted the same rights as others, would there have been a need for a protest movement to promote muggle-born rights? And, once the movement sprang into action, if the Ministry of Magic had not sent out Death Eaters, Aurors, and Dementors to attack the protesters, would the protesters have felt a need to violently defend themselves? This paper argues that violence around protest movements would not be at issue if the governments listened reasonably to protesters and, as a result, resolved to distribute health and economic benefits equally amongst its citizenry.
Movements protesting economic inequality should be looked upon positively because they are the only hope of reversing injustice in nations where the government can be bought by the wealthiest 2%. Not having a policy to protect non-pureblood families has meant that muggle-borns in the Wizarding Community have been discriminated against in both education and the job market for hundreds of years (Karkaroff, 2012). Mary Cattermole, the daughter of a Muggle couple who owned a small, family-owned grocery in Manchester, was discovered to be a witch and admitted to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. But she soon found that her schoolmates mocked her for being muggle-born and called her by the racial epithet “mudblood.” She was barely able to make friends, much less have boyfriends. After leaving Hogwarts, she met and married a half-blood wizard who, due to his blood status, was unable to find a job that paid any higher than magical maintenance (Potterwatch, 2020). An astounding 98% of the Wizarding Community find themselves in the Cattermoles’ position (Weasley & Weasley, 2007), living hand-to-mouth, praying their health holds out and that nothing unexpected happens that they cannot afford. The protest movement known as the Order of the Phoenix have repeatedly pushed for the Wizarding Community to adopt a set of policies similar to Affirmative Action in the United States. Affirmative Action is a policy that protects groups that have been historically discriminated against based on their gender, race, creed, or nationality from being excluded from education or unemployment (Snape & Dumbledore, 2010). The Order of the Phoenix should be looked on positively for trying to institute a policy capable of helping the 98% of wizards and witches being discriminated against so that they can have quality lives and higher paying jobs.
Protest movements against economic inequality should be supported by the majority of citizens because protesters do not instigate violence, government authorities do. The Order of the Phoenix has been strenuously fighting to destroy anti-muggle-born policies by peacefully suggesting policy changes such as Affirmative Action. However, this movement faces constant criticism in The Daily Prophet and on Ministry-owned news channels because, at times, the protests that the Order stages get violent. Not talked about in the media, however, is that in every instance where violence has broken out at an Order of the Phoenix protest, the violence was caused by the aggressive, life-threatening response of the Ministry’s own enforcement squads, the Aurors and Dementors (Potterwatch, 2020). Instead of sending armies of violently-trained wizards and monsters to deal with protesters, the Ministry should engage in meaningful dialog. Statistics show that there are not enough pure-blood wizards to fill the jobs that are often denied muggle-borns simply because of their blood status (Karkaroff, 2012). If there are plenty of jobs to go around and not enough pure-bloods to take them, it stands to reason that no pure-bloods will lose their jobs if muggle-borns are allowed equal status. Instead of listening to reason or at least engaging in non-violent dialog, the Ministry provokes the very violence it claims to hate, blames the violence on protest movements, and refuses to consider muggle-born rights (Granger, 2013). Groups like the Order of the Phoenix should be looked upon positively, instead of being blamed from for violence they do not cause.
Protest movements fighting economic inequality should be supported because they help end racial profiling by forcing government agencies to retrain workers in more effective, non-racially motivated methods of criminal detection. In 2011, a lesser-known protest group, Potterwatch, began working against wrongful convictions in the Wizarding Community (Lovegood, 2016). Discovering that 77% of convicts in the wizard prison Azkaban were muggle-born or half-bloods, they took it upon themselves to examine the legal cases of every one of those prisoners and they learned that 62% of the 77% were placed in Azkaban on shaky evidence (Potterwatch, 2020). Potterwatch recruited lawyers to help them retry the cases, but for every conviction they were able to overturn, there were 2 that, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of innocence, the district attorneys refused to retry. According to Potterwatch attorney Kingsley Shacklebolt, “Blood status profiling runs so deep in the Magical Judicial System that it causes the very people hired as impartial judges and attorneys to act emotively rather than on the logic of the evidence” (as cited in Potterwatch, 2020). Clearly, the criminal justice system needs retraining so that they stop relying on blood status profiling and are able to impartially consider the evidence as it is their job to do. Protest movements like Potterwatch must be supported if the Wizarding Community wants to end economic, educational, and criminal justice inequality in its nation.
Health privilege protests must gain more traction than they currently have so that when a health crisis such as spattergroit arrives the majority of a nation’s citizenry can get care that not only allows them to survive, but does not render them bankrupt. Recently, the Minister of Magic Pius Thicknesse, came down with spattergroit. He was immediately whisked to St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, was given an experimental drug not available to the wider wizarding community that costs 10,000 Galleons a drop (the typical person needs 3 drops before they show improvement), and put into a private isolation room with purified air (6,000 Galleons) where he was given a drug cocktail costing 5,000 Galleons every hour for 24-hours (Pomfrey et al., 2020). According to healers Poppy Pomfrey, Alexander Smethwick, and Augustus Pye, all of whom work for St. Mungo’s and have been treating spattergroit patients since the beginning of the epidemic, even though Thicknesse was only mildly symptomatic, he got the care that medical personnel can only give to patients who are dying (Pomfrey et al., 2020, p. 99). Patients who are not the MInister for Magic or whose insurance cannot afford to pay the exorbitant costs of treatment do not get Thicknesse’s treatment until it is a last resort. Medical personnel must simply hope that the symptoms in poor patients won’t worsen and they won’t need any expensive treatments. But according to McGonagall et al. (2017) this protocol given to the poor suffering from spattergroit results in a 96% fatality rate. Both Potterwatch and the Order of the Phoenix have organized protests to equalize healthcare during this pandemic to prevent fewer deaths. Yet instead of working with Potterwatch and the Order to change this protocol in order to save more lives, the protesters are violently attacked by Ministry Aurors and Dementors. Protest movements such as Potterwatch and Order of the Phoenix must be supported rather than denigrated if economic and healthcare equality is to be gained.
Conclusions
It is unreasonable for the Ministry of Magic to insist that protests be genteel and peaceful when they do nothing to care for the bulk of its citizenry. In fact, the Ministry of Magic deliberately sets up systems that favor the rich and keep the great majority of its people in poverty, a situation that guarantees angry uprisings (Snape & Dumbledore, 2010). For example, the Ministry impoverishes its citizenry by forcing it to pay the bulk of the nation’s taxes and giving tax cuts to billionaires (Karkaroff, 2012), creating policies that marginalize muggle-borns and half-bloods to where they cannot find living-wage jobs (Potterwatch, 2020), and by favoring the needs of corporations like pharmaceutical and insurance conglomerates so that the bulk of its citizenry cannot afford to heal itself when it becomes injured or sick (Pomfrey et al., 2020). For these reasons, it is unreasonable for the Ministry of Magic and the people who support it to claim that protesters are immoral when violence erupts. In making these claims the Ministry attempts to deflect eyes away from their own immorality in not caring for the citizenry by blaming protesters who only want to make it possible for the citizenry to be reasonably cared for by its Ministry.
Although this research was able to give an overview of the ways in which protest movements take the blame for violence and disruption which rightly belongs to the Ministry of Magic, it lacks in depth studies of each method the Ministry uses to ensure that the wealth stays concentrated among its cronies and away from the bulk of its citizenry. Such studies are crucial because they would demonstrate to citizens that their rights, livelihood, and health are severely affected by the Ministry and perhaps would encourage them to join or at least support protest movements that work to change Ministry policies in their favor. It is hoped that such studies will be forthcoming.
Recommendations
Libraries and community centers should pool resources to provide classes that explain how government policies destroy livelihoods and teach about the role of activism in a democratic republic. Currently, citizens are unable to study events properly because internet algorithms have forced citizens into propaganda bubbles where they get select bits of information, usually in the form of memes, and are unable to see any ideas or events other than what the bubble provides (Granger, 2013). Library and community center classes on civics would take people outside of these algorithm bubbles and bring them back to the basics US government, teaching them about the constitution, their basic human rights, and the ways in which the government has shut down their rights. These classes would also demonstrate how more successful governmental models in other countries around the world create better lives for citizens. This class could invite protest movement leaders to come in and calmly explain the function of the movement, its aims, and its views on violence so that the citizens could get first hand knowledge of how protest movements actually work.
Citizens should join a protest movement of their choice in order to see for themselves how protest movements work from the inside. They don’t need to carry a sign, but they could join a march, observe what people say and how they react, talk to the protesters and find out what their concerns and aims are. To find a protest in their region, citizens can go to rallylist.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, and put in their state. For example, there is a George Floyd Act Rally taking place at the Texas State Capitol in Austin on March 25, 2021. Attending this rally would help citizens who are skeptical of protest see first hand what goes on at one instead of judging the actions of protesters they have never met from behind a computer screen, which causes the type of anger that leads to racism and violence (Patil et al., 2018). Instead of relying on anti-protest movement propaganda in the form of memes and government sponsored media sources like The Daily Prophet, people should get out from behind their computer screens and do their own field research. As the old saying goes, we cannot know anything about other people until we walk a mile in their shoes. People who criticize protest movements can literally do this, by joining a march and seeing for themselves what the mentality of a protest movement actually is.
References
Granger, H. (2013, December 5). Fear of Persecution among Protest Leaders. Witch Weekly.
Karkaroff, I. (2012). Factors leading to anti-government protests. In Anti-Government Protest Movements: Causes and Effects (pp. 545–548). Flourish & Blotts.
Lovegood, X. (2016, January 1). The Trouble with Reporting on Protest Movements. The Quibbler. https://thequibbler.com
Lupin, R., & Black, S. (2010). How to Stage a Successful Government Protest. Flourish and Blotts.
McGonigall, M., Weasley, M., & Sprout, P. (2017). Health crises in the age of protest. Magical Health Journal, 25(2), 56–64.
Patil, P., Patil, P., & Corner, M. (2018). Emotions and protests: A psychological approach. Journal of Protest and Psychology, 5(3), 145–154.
Pomfrey, P., Smethwick, A., & Pye, A. (2020). Causes of health protests in the magical community. Magical Health Quarterly, 54(6), 98–120.
Potterwatch. (2020). The Daily Prophet, Rita Skeeter, and the Triwizard Tournament. Potterwatch. https://www.potterwatch.com
Snape, S., & Dumbledore, A. (2010). Protest and injustice: A guide for governments who want to keep its citizens happy. Transfiguration Today, 12(1), 78–123.
Weasley, G., & Weasley, F. (2007). Economic factors that spark protest. The Journal of Magical Protest, 51(3), 65–74.