Honestly, I'm a Low Energy Activist
You won't find me at every protest. But I'm grateful for dedicated activists. I know they make a difference.
Dear Human of Planet Earth,
How are you? I haven’t written to you for a while.
Recently, I’ve been nursing a bad back. At its worst, I couldn’t drive, I could barely walk, I couldn’t sit on a low chair, and getting in and out of bed was excruciating.
But my bad back doesn’t fully explain the lull in my newsletters because after a week and a half I was back to my usual routines, with routines of gentle stretches and exercises added in.
The truth is my mind’s been buzzing with inputs from podcasts and current affairs - leaving my brain too cluttered to be coherent.
Autists - (and I’d bet money I’m an undiagnosed one) - talk about ‘spoons’. Sometimes you run out of spoons and you just don’t have the energy to fight, write, get out of bed or progress that project.
I’ve never suffered severe depression or autistic burnout, so I won’t say I’ve ever run out of spoons entirely - but when my mind is cluttered and I have too much going on, my coping mechanism is to switch some things off. For instance, regular housework has been permanently switched off in my life. In its place I have someone come in every fortnight to help out and I do sporadic, intense cleaning and sorting from time to time.
So since I’m writing to you, something’s cut through the clutter.
And that something might seem off-topic, but bear with me.
The thing that swept away the clutter was a headline on yahoo, about an attack at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs: five dead and 18 injured.
I thought immediately about an LGBTQ activist friend who would be onto this, sharing the news, writing about it.
Me? I didn’t even want to read the article. I didn’t want to know more. And that’s typically my first response to anything that looks like a terrorist attack.
Last week I looked up the meaning of ‘stochastic terrorism.’ It probably crossed my radar because of the attempted bombing targeting asylum seekers in Dover. Or maybe it was something James Finn wrote in the Prism & Pen. ‘Stochastic terrorism’ in the result of a group being demonised in the public discourse - and this triggers violence against them which appears random in nature. So a lone-wolf actor gets a gun or a bomb and takes practical action to reduce the ‘perceived threat’. Was this mass shooting at the gay bar in Colorado Springs stochastic terrorism?
The yahoo headline made me think of a young person I was chatting with last week. He was distressed. He’d been reading about the hysterical anti-LGBTQ legislation and legislators in Texas, the ones who describe all LGBTQ folks as ‘groomers’ and believe that everyone is born heterosexual. Something in the news caught this young person’s attention last week and he spent hours poring over it.
As a reader of James Finn’s Prism and Pen newsletter, I know it’s not just last week and it’s not just Texas or Colorado Springs. The blatant homophobia targeting schools, young people, libraries and transpeople in particular, has been relentless over the last few years.1
I mentioned James Finn twice now. Who is James Finn?
James Finn is a lifelong activist. Everyday he engages with the marginalisation and abuse the LGBTQ community face. Every day he stands up for justice, kindness and respect. Every day, through his publication, he gives folks on the LGBTQ spectrum and their allies, a voice to tell their stories.
If James Finn ever wants to quit we don’t know about it.
For decades, the evangelical Christian right in the USA waged a sustained war on legal abortion options, and still savouring legislative victory there, they’ve turned the full force of their faith and passion onto the LGBTQ community.
Thanks to activists like James Finn, those of us who aren’t directly victims of religious extremist aggression, know the other side of the story.
I dare to describe myself as an activist, but if so I’m a low-energy activist. I’ve attended about three or four protests in my entire life and only one of them was about climate. In fact, perhaps I should describe myself as an ‘advocate’ because I don’t know if I do enough agitating to be an activist at all.
My approach is gentle and considered.2 I do a lot of listening and wonder how to nudge people to the other side. And if I have an Achilles heel, it’s a kind of Imposter Syndrome. There’s a part of me that believes if you’re not an expert on a subject, the gaps in your knowledge are like traps-in-waiting; if you don't know all the technical ins-and-outs you should perhaps not say anything.
If I didn't feel limited by the need to research things, I'd write to you more often, pour out my views and concerns in paragraph after paragraph.
But if activists fell into that kind of thinking they’d stay at home.
They don’t wait to know everything because you can never know everything.
But you don’t have to know everything to have a position. You just need to know enough.
I joined XR Croydon to see how I could play a role in raising awareness about the climate emergency. Awareness is a key pre-requisite to action if that action includes big changes.
Population awareness signals to policy-makers that ‘the people’ are ready to be on-side. As George explains here, by mobilising 25% of people, attitudes can be flipped:
But where does the tipping point lie? Researchers whose work was published in Science in 2018 discovered that a critical threshold was passed when the size of a committed minority reached roughly 25% of the population. At this point, social conventions suddenly flip. Between 72% and 100% of the people in the experiments swung round, destroying apparently stable social norms. As the paper notes, a large body of work suggests that “the power of small groups comes not from their authority or wealth, but from their commitment to the cause”.
Don’t dismiss awareness as being inferior to action.
Don’t dismiss activists.
Somebody has to sound the alarm.
I recently wrote to you about switching to a greener bank. It’s the activists of XRCroydon who’ve got me on that path. And this without even speaking to me directly!
I didn’t feel pressured, I didn’t feel shamed. I felt motivated to take action. Maybe that’s the most effective endgame of any activism?
Not to shame but to activate change?
At first, I said I’d look into changing my bank in the New Year, but I’ve decided to get cracking earlier, over the next few weeks in fact.3
We might debate which approaches to activism are most effective, but without doubt, activists make a difference.
There are high-energy activists, who make it to several protests a month, while also organising and promoting these events. I’m in awe of their commitment.
And there are low-energy folks like me, who share photos and attend events they can fit into their schedule, events that don’t include a chance of getting arrested.
There are folks like Peter Thatchell who get beaten up from time to time for their cause. And folks who’ll spend time in prison but emerge with no regrets, willing to do it again, even as rightwing politicians and fellow citizens call for longer sentences for ‘illegal’ protest action.
Here are activists in Croydon, my community, protesting against Barclay’s investment in the fossil fuel industry.
And here are activists all over the UK, protesting the same.
In case you missed it, here’s my last newsletter, written to nudge you to reconsider who you bank with.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be writing to you again as soon as I have the head-space - and a schedule that’s not too cluttered.
Now to cook dinner.
With Love,
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical,
Croydon,
London,
That patch of earth known today as the United Kingdom
Lat +51.51 Long, -0.118
Prism & Pen is a Medium publication which besides giving a platform to queer folks to speak up, also documents hateful attacks and the role of legislators and institutions, in the US especially, in supporting hate, discrimination and oppression. If you aren’t a Medium member, you can access all of James Finn’s Prism & Pen work on Medium via Twitter.
to be honest, sometimes I pontificate with fury and rage in a thunderous loud voice - but that’s usually when I’m reacting to the madness of climate deniers and other dangerous voices in public policy making - and then I’m usually on the phone with a relative, or subjecting my poor sons or husband to my stream of angry consciousness
The motivation to speed things up is personal convenience, not altruism - but that’s human nature. I’m taking some action over the next month and it will be more efficient to have the new account details in place in time for those actions.