Mother Davis takes out her stopwatch and thinks,
I’m glad that our Irregular Times writer J. Clifford has been making an extra effort to focus on activism lately. This morning’s post about the anti-McCain protest taking place in Pittsburgh today, and his work on the new blog Activism Across America are examples of this focus.
Seeing that any activism is taking place at all makes me feel better about the condition of civic life in America today. I’m grateful to those who still organize protests, and to J. Clifford for pointing them out. I take this positive vision with a lump of salt, however, because I have observed a strong decline in American progressive activism over the last few years.
It does not make me happy to make this observation, but I would be dishonest if I did not. People who were once activists have now become passivists. From 2002 to 2004, they turned out. They worked hard. They gave it their all.
Then, most of them gave up.
A quick look at once-healthy centers of online protest such as Radicalendar, United for Peace and Protest.net shows that street protests rallies, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and other active kinds of political demonstrations have been mostly replaced by passive events like book discussions and movie screenings. In these new events, people sit and listen to someone else tell them how bad things have gotten. Then, they get up and leave, having done nothing.
These events maintain a sense of community among the disgruntled, but they don’t make America’s problems any fewer. There’s nothing wrong with these events in themselves, of course. What’s wrong is that there are so few other events in which true action takes place.
George W. Bush may be a lame duck President, but let us also look at ourselves in the mirror, to see what we have become. We have become lame duck activists, resigned to not getting anything done, and just waiting for Inauguration Day 2009 to come along, with a leader who will fix all the problems for us.
It is not a flattering portrait, but in these American times, flattery is false.
Putting her ear to the watch and realizing that it stopped running a long time ago,
Mother Davis
Two things i always seem to point out when talking about the demise of activism:
1. It doesn’t help if there is no media coverage, no Congressional mention (let alone action), and nothing changes over YEARS of time.
Most people get frustrated and either take matters into their own hands (like so-called “eco-terrorists”), or simply give up due to the apathy around them.
2. When your job is in jeopardy, or you don’t know where your next rent or mortgage payment will come from, your health is declining, you have too many responsibilities (like providing primary care to an elderly parent or mentally or physically ill child), can’t make ends meet, are hungry or homeless, or are a member of the working poor (just to mention a few examples) you won’t tend to worry too much about these “big picture” issues.
3. The rest of the citizenry is monumentally distracted by everyday living in the sea of media, sports, entertainment, and getting their own little piece of the pie to get involved with a government that does what it wants anyway.
notice i can’t count!