artificialities replied to your post âA Sign that Iâve read too many terrible Les Mis fanfics is that every...â
Yeah, in my experience a rally is "stand around listening to speeches and occasionally cheering/chanting, usually with signs, usually in front of a govt building or something" and a march is "walking from X to Y with signs and chants." Often there'll be one followed by the other.
soundingonlyatnightasyousleep replied to your post âA Sign that Iâve read too many terrible Les Mis fanfics is that every...â
....do most people eat during speeches in uk?????????? Bb
So yeah, the standard âmarchâ is âyou walk from A to Bâ and gosh I really need someone to teach me the song that someone in my political group made up about this because itâs good. But then at the end of the march there are usually speeches, and occasionally the beginning also (which makes sense, because people are standing around waiting for people running on different extremes of Leftist Time to turn up, itâs the equivalent of having magicians in the queue) but these would usually be considered part of the march, IDK. They vary in formality from âIâve set up a stage in Hyde Park and everythingâ to âWeâre standing around in a circle in Parliament Square listening to someone who is speaking un-amplified in the middleâ. Generally the sound quality is poor either way tbh; I think the only march Iâve been on that didnât have this problem was a really big climate change one, they had a second screen for people far away from the stage and everything. My audio processing is not by any means Terrible but it is rarely ever up to the job of figuring out what tf is being said.
This may well feature in my decision to eat sandwiches at this point; my honest answer is that I donât know if itâs something that âmost peopleâ do bc at this point Iâm generally so wildly overloaded that Iâm not really doing the social anthropology thing. But I donât think itâs wildly outside the norm? These are generally points when thereâs a bit of a drop in energy, people have been walking and yelling for a while and are kinda Tired.
Itâs pretty rare to have a political action without some kind of A-B movement, but if you do itâs called a âdemo[nstration]â, although a âdemoâ could encompass a range of things in addition to âstand around listening to speakersâ, and is sometimes used as a catch-all term for a political Thing, which might include marches! Also âdemoâ is slightly uncool terminology that I persist in using for Reasons, a lot of the super cool leftists would probably use the term âactionâ instead because they are cool. I think the other important thing is that like, if thereâs a March it tends to be really formal and the police have to be notified of the route, but a demo/action is more likely to be impromptu, not highly publicised, etc, and may range from ânot technically illegalâ to âhighly illegalâ.
So I guess that what Americans call a ârallyâ would either be considered part of a âmarchâ or occasionally be a stand-alone âdemo[nstration]â. Or possibly to fall in the category of âpublic meetingâ? Those tend to be indoors though. As I write all this stuff out itâs occurring to me that the background of this is almost certainly the fact that in the UK things can very easily turn out to be cold/rainy and so you generally want to incorporate some Movement into your plans or everyone will be freezing and grumpy.
This may have been more information than either of you wanted.
