The Great Normalization of Activism
We should have shows about activists. Or, shows where some of the characters actually engage in politics, and it’s not a quirk, or a phase, or otherwise made ridiculous. I think civic engagement deserves a sitcom character who genuinely cares about the world or society they live in, and does something about it.
I know that politics seems gross, or scary, to lots of people. It brings to mind seedy politicians, backroom deals, and above all, a world that is fully out of our control. It’s easy to call to mind TV images of protestors as bit-part angry people. Or on the other hand, there’s maybe your one activist friend, to whom you occasionally, say, “oh, you’re so good.” There’s this sense of activism as massively idealistic, as out of touch and out of reach. It’s imagined as this endless timesuck, a sort of godless religion where the whole thing is either indulgences or charity.
But most people don’t have time for that. Why engage on something that you believe at the outset to be miserable, ridiculous, and arduous, that you believe will come to no result?
Activism takes time, certainly. But it is the problem of society that we have constructed a system where only a very few have the privilege of making social change. Those people are: folks who can do this for money (or with money), and folks who have enough spare time on their hands to do the work anyway. (And if you had that, why would this be where you would spend it?) So really, it ends up, very often, as the wealthy versus the desparate.
I think, when I knock on doors, or hang posters, or otherwise walk a neighborhood in a political way, people assume I must be paid, because they cannot imagine choosing to do this work for free.
The best lies have seeds of truth, and the picture I’ve painted above is such a sprout. What does it really look like, to do movement work? What is the day-to-day of grassroots political change? Most people have no idea.
I describe my activism work as my “other, other thing,” that is, the thing I do after my full-time job and squeezed around my grad school courses. I know this sounds like too much, but most people in activism have to do it as their other, other. Some people have young or old humans to take care of, or health issues to manage, or incredibly long commutes, or any of a thousand other priorities.
This is the social problem, I think. There is something here about work as civic participation. We describe employment as “being productive members of society,” but we are not encouraged to give our labor with intentionality as to the ethics of our workplaces — or even more so, to the priority, the urgency of the challenges these workplaces address with respect to society. How is it that climate change and racial equality movements can be placed at odds in a (false) zero-sum fight for priority, but we unquestioningly devote most of our energies to some workplace whose ultimate goals we regard with ambivalence? How can we call ourselves a democratic society, when almost nobody feels free even over the work they do for most of their lives?
There is something here about Puritan work ethics, something about capitalism as an end in itself. Capitalism is supposed to bring efficiency, and hard work should keep the devil at bay. But the cracks are showing in this image of the world — and as Hemingway writes and Cohen sings, that’s how the light gets in.
We are seeing a world in great turmoil, but I think it is a hopeful world. We have seen people refuse to accept their working conditions, and leave their jobs or unionize. We have seen people reprioritize what it means for a place to be good to live in, leave cities, move closer to their family communities. We have seen changes in remote work, in free public healthcare (vaccines), in greenhouse gas emissions, that we had been told were impossible — and we have seen these changes recede again. We have seen great denial, and great disillusionment.
When you face down a great danger or feel a great loss, but then emerge again, you do not emerge unchanged. Very often, a change follows: a recentering. A re-evaluation of what matters in a life. Over the past decade, I think my country as a collective has experienced this type of catalyzing change. We cannot unsee the flimsiness of our imagined limits, and we are, on the whole, rising up.
I want us to move with the wave, inch it further — we should all be civically active, engaged. We should teach civics in schools — not “how a bill becomes a law” but how to talk to people on the street, what’s active with your city council. We should have high school students choosing causes to champion with their class time, and when they disagree, they should be learning how to disagree.
I am tired of this foolish idea that politics is a game meant for the few. If we are free, let us all take freedom and use it to shape our society: what do we dream? Not, how can we grind through life, but: how beautiful can we make it?
I want activism to be normal, to be the reason we can’t go to work today. I want people to see characters doing activism in books and movies and shows and think, I could do that. I want them to think, that is right. That is what it looks like to live with your whole heart. That is freedom. And I want it to go further, become so ordinary that people turn away from their civic engagement only to ask, with genuine confusion, “how else could we possibly be?”
