Our society has forgotten everything important is worth fighting for

In North America, we don’t do enough to fulfill our civic duty to protest.

According to The Economist, 60 per cent of Americans disagree with Trump’s administration, yet they don’t seem to be unified enough to make change, to boycott, to protest, to force anyone’s hand.

When I was living in Istanbul in March 2025, the Mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was arrested in a politically motivated attempt to depose President Erdoğan’s main political rival. In response, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered in Istanbul, resulting in the largest demonstrations Turkiye had seen in over a decade.

A month later, I witnessed 300,000 protesters walk through the streets of Rome, condemning the genocide in Gaza and calling for more action from the Italian government. This August, I saw the “Flamingo Revolution” protests, a movement where thousands of Albanians protested corporate land privatization and governmental corruption.

But where are the protests in the United States, a country that’s directly affected by the destructive choices of Trump’s administration?

While there have been some protests in recent times, most prominently with the “No Kings” protests, it’s not significant enough to garner enough traction to create true change.

And it’s not just the United States; Canadians also haven’t done our part to protest.

Take Queen’s students as a prime example of this. In 1987, the University divested from the South African Apartheid after almost a decade of student and faculty activism — including almost 60 students, faculty, and children storming a Board of Trustees meeting, demanding divestment.

Nowadays, however, despite the noble work of some activist groups, there’s simply not enough of a push on Queen’s administration to get the University to truly consider divesting from Israel.

And this is despite the fact that we have access to more information than ever before.

We have seen a genocide in Gaza unfold before our eyes, and we saw footage of ICE murdering Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. A massive uproar shouldn’t only be justified — it should be expected.

In our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we have the right to “gather and protest,” because of how fundamental it is to protect democracy and hold our leaders accountable. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” “There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”

As a democratic society, citizens can grant power, but that also means we can take it away when it’s corrupted. We can create change by protesting. It works. Just last year, Nepal’s youth-led protests brought about a significant political overhaul and the resignation of the Prime Minister. Protesting is what’s helped get women the right to vote and to legalize safe-sex marriage.

If we stop exercising our civic right to protest, we are slowly letting the governments and people in power get away with impeding on our rights. In doing so, we’re sacrificing democracy — the thing we, as North Americans, preach as the key to an equal, fair society. The lull in unified protests is exemplary of how complacent and apathetic we’ve become.

It’s important to remember that when we work together, we can hold our leaders and our society accountable. We have more power than we think we do. As English writer Percy Shelley wrote: Ye are many — they are few.

Eva Sheahan is a fifth-year English and History student and The Journal’s Managing Editor.

Tags

action, American politics, boycott, protests

All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to eic@queensjournal.ca.

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