Letters to a Young Activist by Gitlin Todd;

Author:Gitlin, Todd;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

I confess I was once partial to the image of upheaval: Having inherited a losing position in an unsatisfactory game, turn over the board! What I learned is that when the old game collapses, the pieces do not discriminate: they fall on innocent heads. The next game might well be worse. I learned to reject the conviction that the next game will be more favorable simply because it’s the next. Recoil is not a poet’s career problem, but it is an activist’s, because the canvas on which an activist works is society, a vast, messy, interdependent whole. In the artist’s studio, there’s only room for one brush—yours. In your solitude lies your exhilaration. In a movement, your brush has to work in harmony with others. If enough of you paint together, you imagine that you are the people—or worse, God’s people. Ah, the ring of the words. But society is full of would-be artists with all their clashing desires. What is to be done about those inconvenient souls? At the dead end of this logic, they are expendable. Politics, like hell, is other people. In a world bound together by media, investment, migration and violence, consequences ripple outward far and wide. So in politics, you need to channel your impulses, frustrate your spontaneity, think as well as feel, settle for less than the ideal result, because you live alongside others, because they are the field of your action, because consequences count and history is unforgiving.

If you object (perhaps in the name of freedom of the will) that no one can really control other people’s reactions, that overbearing fear of a terrible recoil is paralyzing, that you can talk yourself into passivity, I can only say you have a point. Endless passivity encourages the arrogant powers to think that they can get away with murder. Fear of failure becomes overwhelming, and weakness, self-fulfilling. You can overcalculate yourself into insensibility.

So be cautious, lest you become too cautious. I implore you: Think through your situation in all its particulars. Assess your actual strength unsentimentally. Consider the possibility that if you always compromise and your enemies don’t, the center will keep edging away from you, but don’t assume that a steadfast attachment to your uncompromising position will have the opposite effect. It’s possible, but far from inevitable. Bullheadedness doesn’t prevail automatically. You may massage your soul but accomplish nothing else. Say what you think, but be thoughtful enough to see the virtue in an outcome that’s not as good as you want but probably as good as it gets. Then get back to work—criticizing, mobilizing, organizing, listening, considering.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.