The Witness Chronicles, 10/22/24
Effective activism does not deal in absolutes
How to Be An Activist Without Being An Idiot
Start by questioning your own logic and knowledge
The world, to put it bluntly, is not black and white. Nor is it only pro-Palestine or only pro-Israel. Or even Trump v Harris. Effective activism is activism based on reality, not just passion. Because effective activism is activism that causes doubters to think there may be another way to see things.
In other words, you have to know and enter their world and respect it. It’s easy to scream slogans mindlessly because you are angry. I know, because I’ve done it myself as a very young protester during the Vietnam war, a pretty obviously black and white issue. At least to me, a young teen who could not see any reason for us to be there.
But if I was going to change minds, which is the goal of activism, you have to make sense to those minds on some level and that requires common ground. You are not going to change minds by simply telling people they are wrong.
Or yelling at them or turning large groups into a monolithic enemy. By claiming something like ‘all Jews are bad because of Netanyahu’, you descend into the same level as your worst adversaries.
I realize that right now, with the extreme polarization we see from Trump and Vance, where there is zero acceptance of the validity of any opposing views, that this may all sound ridiculously idealistic. But with Trump we are dealing with a mental illness, narcissism, rather than any actual belief system or conviction.
This is, unfortunately, a common problem with dealing with the followers of autocratic dictators. You are not dealing with logic, passion, or belief, you are dealing with mentally ill humans who have been brainwashed into stopping thinking or trying to deal with reality.
Frankly, converting the already converted is not your best use of your energy and passion around an issue. Successful activists create doubt among those who are sitting on the sidelines or unsure about what they feel. Screaming at them will accomplish nothing. It may attract others who also share your view, but that is not changing minds.
Ironically, activism that orders people to change their minds attracts power hungry ‘professional’ agitators who simply get a kick out of stirring things up. We saw that at the Columbia University Palestine protests last year where as many as 20% of the protestors there were allegedly not students, but ‘professional’ agitators who were known to show up at events on both sides, simply to make noise.
That’s a whole different topic. And, if true, a terrible statement about humans in general.
You change minds by making people think. Martin Luther King Jr., was a master of this. I would argue that he changed the way many people saw African Americans by his own actions and the respect he always showed for those with different views.
Which brings me to a difficult fact about activism. It is an incremental process that starts with something small like a person asking themselves if maybe, just maybe, there is another way to look at an issue. In the case of George Floyd’s murder, on the streets activism kept the story alive but it was the constant exposure to the excruciating video of his death that changed minds.
It is also vital to be extremely careful about parroting phrases used by extremists, because it does not show commitment on your part and often hides positions that are, in reality, horrifying. The obvious recent example is the slogan or chant ‘from the river to the sea’ regarding Palestine. It actually turned out to be the mantra of terrorists devoted to the genocide of all Jews.
Yet it was embraced wholeheartedly by young people here in America without any understanding of its history. That embrace of a terrorist slogan undermined the seriousness of how those young people felt about the issue. It destroyed any credibility they had because they were essentially being used by extremists for political and terrorist purposes.
When we are inflamed by an issue, logic often goes out the window and we are susceptible to those who know better. And we risk being used by those who we should be questioning as part of our activism.
And that, I think, is the core of true activism, the questioning of assumptions and assertions by those in power, the public questioning of those things. When we hear a man like Donald Trump stating outright lies and fabrications, like the assertion that illegal Haitians in Springfield, Ohio are eating pets, we should be saying WTF?, (after we stop laughing).
And when we see others apparently believing the things he says, we should be asking them the same WTF?. Because activism also starts by asking each other if something being repeated makes any sense in the real world.
I’ve lived with quite a few cats and there was nothing appetizing about any of them. Activism is often simply pointing out the absurdity of what someone is saying or doing.
Or pointing out the plain truth, without parroting hysterical slogans. Just ask yourself, does this make sense, is this the right thing to do, do I know the facts? Then use that knowledge when you protest. And don’t be an idiot, because that only makes things worse.
My writing is my activism. Does it change things? Probably not, but a goal is to be a voice of reason in a world where reason and civility seem to have lost their authority for many. I mention Trump in this piece because he is today’s example of why being an active voice of reason is essential to our survival as a democratic and free society. If you know your history, and human nature, you know there have been many before him. And the only thing that stops them is the truth.
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