Big Questions = Big Patience (Occupy This Book Excerpt)
By Mickey Z.
04 April, 2014
World News Trust
Photo credit: Mickey Z.
"If you expect an answer to your question during your lifetime, you're not asking a big enough question." - I.F. Stone
(To follow is an excerpt from Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism, order it here.)
The 1% is killing the planet partly because these elite players have chosen to look no further into the future than the next fiscal quarter. Meanwhile, our spectacle culture exists to train and condition the 99% to maintain an equally narrow and lethal perspective.
Take sports, for example. Every game -- every play, we're told -- is do-or-die and seems to carry deep meaning. A baseball player strikes out and it's time to trade him because he's clearly lost bat speed. That same player gets a game-winning hit the next day and yeah, he's Mr. Clutch.
The same concept applies widely -- as in movies (and their "stars") judged almost exclusively on an opening weekend sales number or presidential candidates going from "favorite" to "has-been" in the time it takes for New Hampshire to hold a primary.
All this social programming adds up to a distracted and impatient general population often unable to distinguish between a genuinely meaningful moment and a cynically manufactured diversion.
As with sports, politics, and other media spectacles, activism is often viewed within a self-imposed vacuum. Movements are declared dead (or reborn) four or five times a day -- even by longtime members.
With Occupy Wall Street, for example, this usually resulted in at least one occupier per week using Facebook and/or Twitter to announce that after much agonizing soul searching, s/he was tearfully/angrily "leaving" OWS. (The average length of such a hiatus? I’d say: two days.)
Gentle reminder: If you organize an event and only a handful of comrades show up or if an alleged ally exhibits what you perceive as rude behavior towards you, this incident doesn't automatically signify that a particular movement is dead and buried.
Surely we can recognize that not every activist episode or anecdote carries profound and significant meaning. Just in case, please allow me to introduce some more perspective:
Personal reality: Life flows in unpredictable waves and control is an illusion. Your favorite movie might bomb at the box office, your sports hero may drop the winning touchdown pass, or your long-planned radical event may go virtually ignored.
Suggestion: Try adding these two words to such statements: "this time."
Global reality: It's gonna take a wee bit more than a couple of years to eradicate a few millennia worth of patriarchy, sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, speciesism, able-ism, ageism, etc.
Suggestion: De-Occupy the myopic conditioning of the 1%.
Let's practice just a little patience when interacting with our allies. Conversely, let's fully reject patience when we discover the frightening truth about modern culture -- the truth obscured by the corporate media.
The revolutionary process involves the nuts and bolts of daily, even hourly resistance -- hard work like reaching out to those who've been heavily conditioned by mainstream culture. This can be an agonizingly slow, inch-by-inch effort -- but it's crucial.
The revolutionary process also involves broadening our scope and making wider and wider connections -- aiming for holistic perspectives and thus, holistic justice across lines of gender, age, ethnicity, species, ability, sexual orientation, class, and more. This is abstract work but no less arduous. For those you already in tune with the activist groove, it's crucial.
Still, as I said above, not every activist episode or anecdote is a profound and significant statement. But all around us, we are confronted with myriad profound and significant statements... all of which we are relentlessly programmed to deny.
Every time a forest is clear cut, it is profound and significant.
Every time, a young black man is stopped and frisked, it is profound and significant.
Every time yet another species (150-200 each day) goes extinct, it is profound and significant.
Every child born into poverty, every woman made to fear walking down a dark street, every calf packed into a veal crate, every predator drone launched in our name: all profound and significant moments.
So, let's be kind to our comrades yet unyielding towards our oppressors -- but if you need a little break from the struggle, by all means, take a damn break. Standing up to the status quo on a daily basis is both mentally and physically draining and hence requires some balance in your life.
But please, spare us the melodramatic public announcements. Save all that rage, passion, and impatience for the escalating battles that lie ahead. Take your break, heal yourself, and come back stronger. We'll be waiting patiently for your return.
#shifthappens
Note: To continue conversations like this, come see Mickey Z. in person at Hunter College on April 24.
Order Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism here.
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Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on a couple of obscure websites called Facebook and Twitter. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here
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