This post was inspired by this development.
A lot of activism is repeating the same message over and over and over again. You have to sign petitions and write letters to the editor and attend rallies and contact your elected representatives and repeat the same thing over and over and over.
That's inefficient. We need a system where you express your opinion once to the pertinent people, and that's sufficient. And expressing your opinion more than once gains no further reward, and perhaps even annoys people and/or is detrimental to the credibility of your cause.
Case in point: I wrote a cogent and persuasive email to the appropriate elected representatives about the importance of Transit City to me personally and to our city as a whole. But now there are people convinced that I don't really care about Transit City because I didn't attend this one rally that I didn't know was a rally, or because I sent an email instead of making phone calls, or because I didn't skip work and attend some city meeting. And meanwhile I've been spending the past month thinking constantly about what I can do to convince the powers that be that Transit City is important.
Wouldn't the world be a better place if that one email was literally all I could do, and the powers that be would give it precisely my share of all due consideration no matter how much noise the other people make? Then my attendance at the rally would be redundant (maybe we wouldn't need to go to all the trouble to have rallies at all!) and I could have spent the past month putting my thoughts and energy into a wide range of other things, all of which could also be knocked off with a single well-composed email. Politicos' offices would run more smoothly, people would feel more engaged in the political process, people could inform themselves about and commit effort to a wider range of issues, and the world would be a better, more informed, less stressful place.
3 comments:
You're so right that so much of activism is repeating the same message over and over. Part of the purpose of that is to continually try to reach, teach and persuade increasing numbers of people, and to do that more often and more effectively than your opposition.
If we were only trying to reach elected officials, the once-and-done method would be brilliant. But for reaching out to others, that wouldn't work.
Do people ever listen to you? They never listen to me. I've given up on people.
"Do people ever listen to you? They never listen to me. I've given up on people."
Oh yes, people definitely listen. But only people with open minds. I've given up on talking to anyone whose mind is closed. Gave up loooong ago.
But it's also persuasion in the general sense. Making sure the ideas are out there. For example, making sure there is pro-choice information readily available because there is so much anti-choice information out there, and you never know who is seeking.
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