My Critical Dissection of a News Item

Activists must be in for the long haul, because change takes time
Rebecca Solnit
Sunday, June 1, 2003 ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/01/IN29968.DTL

I once read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace, the first great anti-nuclear movement in the United States, that contributed to a major victory: the 1963 end of above-ground nuclear testing, with its radioactive fallout that was showing up in mother's milk and baby teeth.

Now, I don't mean to sound nasty with my response to this article, especially since I agree with its author about many of the social problems she mentions; i.e., Monsanto's production and exportation of DDT, for example, is a terrible thing. But the premise of the entire piece--that we must have a great deal of patience for the end of such abuses--smacks of incrementalism, which, I suppose, is a safe enough form of dissent for Hearst to publish. As Ted Rall has said, we are constantly told that "change takes time", yet, as everyone seems to agree, life is short. Should we really settle for minor "victories"?

She told of how foolish and futile she felt standing in the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White House. Years later, she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock -- one of the most high-profile activists on the issue then -- say the turning point for him was seeing a small group of women standing in the rain, protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed, he thought, he should give the issue more consideration himself.

A clearer description of the ludicrousness of petitioning our "democratic" form of government could hardly be written. As long as we live in a society with such a high concentration of power, any group of persons who wants to influence the actions of any government but has no "political capital" must politely request that the pertinent organ of the State change its ways, such as when these women protested nuclear-weapons tests. The Federal Government was unleashing the most destructive weapon ever created on uninhabited parts of the West, without regard for the concerns of the masses, and generating pollution that would remain in the environment long after everyone then occupying White House was dead. So, the pattern goes, after years of petitioning, activists finally convince the Government to make some concession, usually more symbolic than substantial.

A lot of political activists expect that for every action there is an equal and opposite and punctual reaction, and regard the lack of one as failure. After all, activism is often a reaction: President Bush decides to invade Iraq; we create a global peace movement in which 10 to 30 million people march on seven continents on the same weekend.

We sure showed the Bush Administration, didn't we? Once he saw the huge number of Americans and foreigners opposed to its impending military operation, Bush ...went right ahead and did what he wanted.

GROUNDSWELLS OF HISTORY

But history is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences.

I wanted to criticize the above paragraph, but when I looked at it carefully I realized that it was mostly nonsensical platitudes.

Some years ago, scientists attempted to create a long-range weather forecasting program, assuming that the same initial conditions would generate the same weather down the road. It turned out that the minutest variations, even the undetectable things, things they could perhaps not yet even imagine as data, could cause entirely different weather to emerge from almost identical initial conditions. This was famously summed up as the saying about the flap of a butterfly's wings on one continent that can change the weather on another.

History is like weather, not like checkers. A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That's why you can't save anything. Saving is the wrong word. Jesus saves and so do banks: They set things aside from the flux of earthly change. We never did save the whales, though we might have prevented them from becoming extinct. We will have to continue to prevent that as long as they continue not to be extinct. Problems seldom go home. Most nations agree to a ban on hunting endangered species of whale, but their oceans are compromised in other ways. DDT is banned in the United States, but exported to the Third World, and Monsanto moves on to the next atrocity.

While I have to admit this is a colorful analogy, the reality remains that politics is not the weather. We can, for example, "predict" with an extremely high level of accuracy on which date legislative elections will be held and the duration of this occurrence, as it's announced to the public beforehand. You may know that the polls will open on the morning of a certain Tuesday in November and that they will close at 8:00; but Floridians don't know the analogous details for hurricane season this year.

The world gets better. It also gets worse. The time it will take you to address this is exactly equal to your lifetime, and if you're lucky you don't know how long that is.

Um, was this paragraph intended for an adult audience? Perhaps it was included for children who might be reading the paper.

As Adam Hochschild points out, from the time the English Quakers first took on the issue of slavery, three-quarters of a century passed before it was abolished in Europe and America. Few if any working on the issue at the beginning lived to see its conclusion, when what had once seemed impossible suddenly began to look, in retrospect, inevitable.

Indeed, this was an admirable victory in a struggle against a brutal institution. However, it could have been achieved in much less time through an armed struggle, as the plantation owners were greatly outnumbered by slaves and poor farm hands. If the abolitionists were truly committed, then they could have actively supported the kind of measures taken by the likes of Nat Turner and John Brown. And, in the end, if our school texts are to be believed, a civil war was the death stroke for legal slavery in this country.

And as the law of unintended consequences might lead you to expect, the abolition movement kicked off the first widespread women's rights movement. This took about the same amount of time to secure the right to vote for American women, has achieved far more in the subsequent 83 years, and is by no means done. Activism is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark.

Nowadays, thanks to the women's suffrage movement, both females and males can pick which pawn of campaign donors will claim to represent them in the halls of politics.

ACTIVISTS OUT AT DAWN

At the Port of Oakland, on April 7, several hundred peace activists came out at dawn to picket the gates of a company shipping arms to Iraq. The longshoreman's union had promised not to cross our picket line. The police arrived in riot gear and, unprovoked and unthreatened, began shooting wooden bullets and beanbags of shot at the activists. Three members of the media, nine longshoremen and 50 activists were injured. I saw the bloody welts the size of half grapefruits on the backs of some of the young men -- they had been shot in the back -- and a swelling the size of an egg on the jaw of a delicate yoga instructor.

Told that way, violence won. But the violence inspired the union dockworkers to form closer alliances with anti-war activists and underscored the connections between local and global issues. On May 12, we picketed again, with no violence. This time, the longshoremen acted in solidarity with the picketers, and -- for the first time in anyone's memory -- the shipping companies canceled the work shift rather than face the protesters. Told that way, the story continues to unfold, and we have grown stronger.

"Told that way", violence did win. Violence has a tendency to do that, in the long run, the short run, and even the median run. And negative consequences of anti-social violence (as opposed to self-defense) tend to be non-existent for those with socio-economic power, with this case being illustrative. The shipping companies' legally-sanctioned thugs, threatened by the simple presence of protesters, brutalized a large group of human beings. For this crime, they were held essentially unaccountable. If any of the activists, lacking the virtual immunity from prosecution that the police enjoy in our supposedly blind legal system, had acted with such violence, even in self-defense, they would have faced the full brunt of the State. And, in the second round, activists won the following as a result of their effort: the cancellation of a work shift. The commercial shippers must be shaking in their collective boots.

It was a setup for disappointment to expect that there would be an acknowledged cause and effect relationship between the anti-war actions and the Bush administration. We will probably never know, but it seems that the Bush administration decided against the "shock and awe" saturation bombing of Baghdad because we made it clear that the cost in world opinion and civil unrest would be too high. We millions may have saved a few thousand or a few hundred thousand lives.

Yes, that was a setup for disappointment, if anyone honestly believed that the anti-war protests would actually stop the then-impending war. Such protests have never stopped a war waged by the US, even the one in Vietnam, despite popular myth, and they never will as long as our social structures are designed to preserve and enhance an elite caste. Demonstrations are mostly useful as a way to bring public attention to a given cause, but that's hardly a guarantee that the public at large will respond by actively supporting this cause (and by "supporting" I don't mean simply taking part in more demonstrations).

Activists are often portrayed as an unrepresentative, marginal rabble, but something shifted in the media in the fall. Since then, anti-war activists have mostly been represented as diverse, legitimate and representative.

Which media are Solnit referring to here? The coverage I saw in the mainstream press and TV news presented anti-war activists as treasonous, isolated, misguided, vandalizing representatives of a small segment of the populace, illegitimate in their claims that their opposition to governmental policies could matter. I saw no honest, sympathetic portrayals of anti-war sentiments, just more of the same parroting of official pronouncements.

We achieved a global movement without leaders. When your fate rests on your leader, you are only as strong, as incorruptible and as creative as he -- or, occasionally, she -- is. What could be more democratic than millions of people who, via the grapevine, the Internet and various groups, from churches to unions to direct-action affinity groups, can organize themselves?

This much I agree with, considering its anti-hierarchic message.

A PEACE MOVEMENT

We were able to oppose a war on Iraq without endorsing Saddam Hussein. We were able to oppose a war with compassion for the troops who fought it. We were not against the United States and for Iraq; we were against the war, and many of us were against all war, all weapons of mass destruction -- even ours - - and all violence, everywhere. We are not just an anti-war movement. We are a peace movement.

It's unfortunate that the same media outlets that supposedly represented the millions of anti-war protesters with greater accuracy than before actually provided a forum for so many hawkish pundits and officials to equate being anti-war with being pro-Hussein, all the while neglecting to mention the critical support given to Hussein's regime in years past by some of the same Cabinet members who now decried Hussein's contemporaneous reign of terror. And the issue of whether the United States should possess the same weapons of mass destruction that are so abhorrent in the hands of dictators was never even considered a legitimate point of debate.

Questions the peace and anti-globalization movements have raised are now mainstream, though no mainstream source will say why, or perhaps even knows why. Activists focused on Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron and Lockheed Martin, among others, as war profiteers with ties to the Bush administration. The actions worked not by shutting the places down in any significant way but by making their operations a public question. Direct action seldom works directly,but now the media scrutinize those corporations as never before.

Time to take off the rose-tinted glasses. The corporate media are not criticizing these war profiteers or the rectitude of awarding fat post-war contracts to companies with extensive connections to the same officials who waged the war in the first place. In fact, they are scarcely mentioning such things. Nor should we expect the media to, since they are owned by gigantic corporations themselves, with both the obvious interest of not offending such wealthy advertisers as oil companies and the US armed forces and the extended interest of protecting their shared interests as an economic class.

A REVOLUTION OF HOPE

We need a movement that doesn't just respond to the evils of the present but calls forth the possibilities of the future. We need a revolution of hope. And for that, we need to understand how change works and how to count our victories.

I was born during the summer the Berlin Wall went up, into a country in which there weren't even words, let alone redress, for many of the practices that kept women and people of color from free and equal citizenship, in which homosexuality was diagnosed as a disease and treated as a crime, in which the ecosystem was hardly even a concept, in which extinction and pollution were issues only a tiny minority heeded, in which "better living through chemistry" didn't yet sound like black humor, in which the United States and the Soviet Union were on hair-trigger alert for a nuclear Armageddon, in which most of the big questions about the culture had yet to be asked.

OK, some conditions have improved, including gay rights and some cleaner ecosystems. But de facto barriers persist in making women and ethnic minorities unequal citizens (for example, see the numerous studies on comparative pay rates for Americans of different racial categories; or simply ask my ex-roommate how differently prospective landlords treated him when, after talking on the phone, they saw in person that he was black). Nowadays, instead of "better living through chemistry" we have genetically modified food. And the reality is that the USA, some former Soviet republics, and a few other nations continue to point nuclear weapons at each other.

It was a world with more rain forest than now, more wild habitat, more ozone layer and more species; but few people were defending those things then. An ecological imagination was born and became part of the common culture only in the past few decades, as did a broader and deeper understanding of human diversity and human rights.

It's nice that we have "an ecological imagination" and "a broader and deeper understanding" of humankind, but, by the author's own admission, this mentality has failed to halt the destruction of ecosystems or, furthermore, prevented the greater concentration of wealth and political power that we've witnessed in such phenomena as the World Trade Organization and mass media consolidation.

The glum traditional left often seems intent upon finding the cloud around every silver lining. In January, when Gov. George Ryan of Illinois overturned 167 death sentences before he left office, there were left-wing commentators who found fault with the details, carped when we should have been pouring champagne over our heads like football champs. Joy is one of our weapons and one of our victories. Non-activists sometimes chide us for being joyous at demonstrations, for having fun while taking on the serious business of the world, but in a time when alienation, isolation and powerlessness are among our principal afflictions, just being out in the streets en masse is not a demand for victory: It is a victory.

The simple existence of a mass protest in the streets is not much of a victory, although it certainly creates the temporary illusion of the possibility of effectiveness.

GRUMPY PERFECTIONISTS

There's an increasing gap between this new movement with its capacity for joy and the old figureheads. Holding that anything less than total victory is failure, as grumpy perfectionists do, is a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible.

I wonder if I would be counted among the "grumpy perfectionists" for having the gall to not be satisfied with symbolic, insubstantial, and incremental changes.

This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, violence, destruction. In the time it takes you to read this, acres of rain forest will vanish, a species will go extinct, women will be raped, men shot, and far too many children will die of easily preventable causes. We cannot eliminate all devastation for all time, but we can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its source and foundation: These are victories.

Sure, perfection is reserved for a flawlessly-pitched baseball game or an unscratched CD , not for something as complex and messy as an entire planet. But undermining the "source and foundation" of preventable devastation would mean radical changes in our social structures, not the sort advocated by reformists.

After Sept. 11, 2001, nearly everyone felt, along with grief and fear, a huge upwelling of idealism, of openness, of a readiness to question and to learn, a sense of being connected and a desire to live our lives for something more, even if it wasn't familiar, safe or easy. Nothing could have been more threatening to the current administration, and it has done everything it can to repress it.

This "huge upswelling of idealism" et cetera, if it exists, has done nothing to prevent the current administration from curtailing civil liberties, plundering our resources, and invading Central Asia.

THE DESIRE IS OUT THERE

But that desire is still out there. It's the force behind a huge new movement we don't even have a name for yet. Left and right are terms for the time when radicals and conservatives sat in the French National Assembly after the French Revolution. We're not in that world anymore, let alone that seating arrangement. We're in one that for all its ruins and poisons and legacies is utterly new. Anti-globalization activists say, "Another world is possible." It is not only possible, it is inevitable; and we need to participate in shaping it.

The French Revolution happened hundreds of years ago; we don't need to be informed that this is a different world from that one.

I'm hopeful, partly because we don't know what is going to happen in that dark future, and we might as well live according to our principles as long as we're here. Hope, the opposite of fear, lets us do that.

Imagine the world as a lifeboat: the corporations and the current administration are smashing holes in it as fast (or faster) than the rest of us can bail or patch the leaks. But it's important to take account of the bailers as well as the smashers and to write epics in the present tense rather than elegies in the past tense. That's part of what floats this boat. And if it sinks, we all sink, so why not bail? Why not row?

Using the same metaphor: why not directly stop the smashers themselves instead of just dealing with the effects of their violence or blindly rowing away?

Rebecca Solnit is the author of "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West," among other works. A version of this article first appeared on OrionOnline.org.