I have mixed feelings about protests. While I definitely support non-violent protests and the right to speak out under the provisions of the first amendment, I have to confess I’m skeptical about the effectiveness of non-violent protests. At the same time, it’s fairly clear that non-violent protests that result in violent suppression efforts by authorities have sometimes been effective in moving society, not always for the better, and sometimes seem to have had little or no impact.

In my life, I’ve been involved in exactly one protest at a single time. In 1965, when there were more than a few antiwar protests on college campuses, and I was a senior in college, four or five of us decided that the motivations of quite a few of our contemporaries who were protesting were, shall we say, less than pristine. In our youthful ‘wisdom,’ we organized a counter-protest just to prove that one could get attention with only a few people and a catchy slogan.

So, we — all five of us, as I recall — invented the “Student Committee for Restricted Escalated Warfare in Vietnam” or SCREW in Vietnam, as an attempt to point out that even a few students with a ridiculously oxymoronic name could get publicity. We had just five people, two posters, and a few hangers-on while we protested the protestors, just once.

That one single counter-protest received mentions in the local college paper and TIME magazine, and I didn’t realize it until much later.

I’ve often thought of that over the years, especially when seeing how large and even well-funded non-violent protests often seem to have little or no effect, even when there’s significant public outrage.