some thoughts on political action: private and public

During a significant portion of the last few years of my life, I believed very passionately in pursuing a life where I dedicated my efforts to making significant change in the world. However, I have also felt somehow displaced when around people that worked in the “lefty” fields of organizing and social change. However, I still held onto to my beliefs. Of late, I feel I have shifted, perhaps a better word is focused my views toward this kind of work.

Previously I probably would have described the pinnacle of my “organizing” life was being field organizer for Turn Your Back on Bush. It was a large action, national in scope. I helped hundreds of people make their way to Washington DC to participate in this demonstration. I talked to press. It was all very glamorous and big. At the end, I walked around the monuments of DC and cried as I felt like I had reached a little closer to their meaning. I had enjoyed the freedoms those founders spoke of. I felt like I wanted to launch myself into that kind of work. What I at the time had viewed as making a big difference may well have been an enchantment with the five minutes of fame from media attention. I don’t think I did make a big difference that day. I do think I exercised my freedom of self-expression and gave others a vehicle to express their own thoughts in a public forum. This is important and valuable, but not enough to change Bush’s policy. At the time I felt my action was necessary. I felt I had to do it because the current circumstances required an immediate and loud response. I viewed this sort of public action as a way to make a visible, media captured event which would lend volume to my beliefs. The problem with seeking volume is often the means to find it. Organizations and political factions go to great lengths to gain volume and thus gain access to other people’s ears and grant them to opportunity to win that person’s support. In political organizing this is messaging. The right made an art of it during the Bush era and in response left organizing groups adapted these methods. So therefore the viewed necessity of a particular action allows for the excuse to follow even the tools of the master’s house.

Several events and circumstances have led me away from this line of work and way of thinking. For one, as an organizer for TYBOB and in other similar positions I have worked up to 85 hours a week. The work is endless. There is always something else to be done. However, isn’t this worth it since it’s for the “cause.” I suppose to some people this sort of unending work is worth it. However, I am married. I need to spend time with my husband. I want to nurture a home for our family. In order to do that I want to be there to prepare dinner, share meals with him, and enjoy my time with him. I want to be able to spend time with friends, inviting them over for a party or long lunch. I want to do these things because all humans deserve these things. But there is more to these kinds of actions. All things, even making dinner for two, can be a political act. The very reason I wanted to be someone that worked for social change was because I wanted to act against systems of injustice, consumerism, corruption, and inhumanity. Is it not inhumane to be unable to eat dinner with your family? The values I believe in are not high and lofty values that are accessible only in books of law. These are basic concepts of how we should live our daily lives. If I work 80 hours a week against the war and then return home to eat a microwave dinner on the couch while watching TV with my husband, am I not in a small way replicating and even contributing to the very evils I fight against? To eat food rife with petrochemicals and shipped with petroleum while not communicating with my husband but preferring to just passively consume something a large corporation thought might be a hit this season with 20 something females. I might as well place my own signature on a declaration of war, become a corrupt business man, and divorce my husband.

The conclusion that I have for now come to is that actions without speakers are indeed just as valuable. To participate in smaller, simpler actions which directly and consistently embody one’s values is indeed a worthwhile goal. Instead of placing my attention on a job working for social justice, I am aiming for a simpler job, but one that I find truly ethical and sound. I seek this simpler job so that I might have time. Time is something I value so highly because time provides me the opportunity to pursue my values through the lifestyle I choose. By having time to seek out local businesses, walk, cook my meals from scratch, make Christmas ornaments, bake bread, and spend time with my husband, I am able to live out my beliefs in a very simple and basic way. I find it more pleasant, because I am able to feel that I am more consistent and balanced between my beliefs and my actions.

Some might feel this sort of small life is too small and there is no hope for making a difference. I suppose this could be true. However, I find in my life when people approached me with pamphlets or told me to support a cause I usually walked the other way. Though I myself was an organizer, I never found the organizing worked on me and I more often than not found it annoying and intrusive. My path was different. I found myself inspired most by people who lived in total accordance with what they believed. The most inspiring people to me were the nuns who ran and taught at my high school. Though I disagreed with them on many issues, I still found their lifestyle and approach to their beliefs deeply influential on my own way of thinking.

The previous point brings me back to why I moved away from ideas of organizing. I have spent some years working in some form in the field of education. Again and again I have been trained and I have witnessed that people are most likely to learn from a demonstration or modeling than from someone just speaking and telling them what to think. A reenactment of history, doing a scientific experiment, providing an example English paper are all better ways of teaching than just telling the information. The same I feel is true in the realm of trying to enact change. Modeling behaviors is much more effective than just preaching them. Showing people how to live with minimal environmental impact, how to support local businesses, or whatever makes each of these things more accessible. I am not sure how accessible it is to a broad audience to do a public demonstration. I think it is important to be able to do a demonstration, but I think the public act is abused. It is rife with its own systems and expectations. It is something for the reporter, the demonstrator, and perhaps the police. It seems it rarely reaches out of that realm. So I am not sure the true value in public demonstrations is in effecting change. I think there is value at times in feeling the freedom to speak in public about a belief. But this is perhaps more on a personal level. The sad reality of our current ideas about public demonstrations is that they are not places of dialogue. People from different factions do not mingle together and talk through the issues. If that were the case than I would say these actions are indeed effective and necessary. I am not sure what I think about the role of public action. As it is commonly approached I do not find it very useful. I am not sure what kind of actions I would find more useful. For the time being, I find living a simple life in total accordance with your beliefs is about the most honest, ethical, and complete way of carrying out a public demonstration.