...the greatness of America is the right to protest for right...
Martin Luther King, Jr
The quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. is from a 2015 book called Dissent: The History of an American Idea by Ralph Young. The photograph is from the village green in the town where I live and the man in the picture is a local citizen who is part of a group that has been protesting peacefully every Saturday for the past four months.
I want to make a video about these protesters but I haven't quite come up with the right idea of how to make it. The video, I believe, has to be made from the perspective of an objective observer and it should be more about the freedom to protest than the specific message of these protesters. Whether I agree, or disagree, with them should not be part of the video.
When I'm photographing them I sometimes hear passers-by yelling insults at them and sometimes impugning their patriotism. To be clear, most of the people who bother to say anything are offering words of support.
I want the message of my video to be that the single most important thing in our constitution that truly makes America great, in my opinion, is the first amendment right to peacefully protest the government.
We all have the right to disagree with protesters, but we would be wrong to think of them as unpatriotic or un-American, even if we find their ideas offensive. There is a difference between disagreeing with their ideas and believing that the act of peacefully expressing their ideas is unpatriotic.
Monte