Unsustainable Activism
or
Activism Can Eat You
by dr. hyena

Of course activism can eat you; and yes, so can parenthood or a career or art, etc. But let's focus on activism, especially for those among us who live and breath their activism with fierce, selfless idealism and devotion.

In a renewed effort to open an overdue discussion, I ask that you please consider this barrage of invasive and offensive loaded questions.

Is this you?

Do you wake up in the morning feeling ashamed of your privileges, responsible for the misdeeds of your predecessors, guilty for each unit of your consumption and sorry for your incarnation in a toxic and disposable “First-World” society?

Do you pause at your refrigerator door to properly anguish over magnet-held images of starving babies, prostituted children, or bowel-churning satellite photos of grievous wounds torn in the Earth?

And when you open that fridge, do the foods that you somberly remove excite and thrill you? Or do they simply fill you without violating your political taboos? That is, are you eating what you’re eating because of what it Is? Or are you eating what you’re eating because of what it isn’t?

Do you curse the vehicle that transports you to where you’re going, promising yourself you will upgrade to the most eco-friendly alternative as soon as you can do a ton of research on it and get the necessary large sums of money and learn to be an able mechanic? In the meantime, do you make sure to agonize over the fossil fuels and pollutants burnt and spewed while you travel as best as you can today? Bickering with the Bad News on the radio, do you refuse to return a smile to an attractive passing driver, because you disapprove of their SUV?

Are you alienated from colleagues and co-workers because they assume you pass judgment on their lifestyles, whether you speak it or not? Do you occupy that lonesome, self-appointed position in the workplace that labels you as The Other, The Weird, The Dissatisfied, The Masochist, The Malcontent, The Disapprover? Do you struggle with your employers over how much you will compromise yourself to keep the job you hate, to earn the money you hate, to pay the bills you hate, to live in the sprawl or industry you hate, so you can fight the corporations and the laws you hate?

And then, weary from another day’s anger and tension, do you attend another activist meeting, because you can’t respect yourself if you go home to rest instead? Sitting in a circle of agreeing minds, do you squash down that little voice that cries up that you’re doing too much already? Do you volunteer again and again (despite the resulting chill in your gut, your body's familiar fear of being under-slept and over-stressed again already), because you feel that if you don’t, no one will? Or do you take on more than you should in order to rescue another work-horse from committing to more than they can handle?

Do you Use your fear of failure, your rage against injustice, and your always replaceable deadline-stress as if they were fuels, in order to continue in this manner?

Me too. How long do you reckon we can get away with it? Will we hold out long enough to realize our goals? Will we just keel over dead some busy afternoon, or will we fade slow, having to let healthy people spend valuable time feeding and washing us?

Make no mistake about it, activism can eat us alive; but only if we feed ourselves to it willingly... which is what we do, isn't it?

The Movement, you see, has a way of becoming an entity unto itself, in the same way a corporation does. It is more than the sum of the people involved; it is also Less than that. This entity lacks compassion, pity, or even concern for the limitations of its human components. It sits at the center of our circle, its many eyes searching each of us for promises and offerings of ourselves to be laid before it. We can compete to sacrifice more of ourselves, to neglect ourselves worse than each other for the greater good, and still hardly whet its appetite.

If you are interested in being a martyr for the cause, the movement accepts martyrs, fried in oil of self-depracation and often served with perhaps a tepid white guilt sauce, hmmm? Yes, the movement will accept all that you can wring out of yourself and ask for more. It will spend your paycheck, trash your car, move into your home, chase off your lover, eat all your food, throw out your hobbies, alienate your friends, scare your family, and consume your health.

If you allow it to; if you offer more than you can spare, on a silver platter, hoping that the ravening appetite seated at your table will politely leave enough for you to get by on.

Do not depend upon this hungry guest to mind its manners sufficiently to allow for your needs. Our campaign is not a genteel being; it is not even housebroken. We called this thing up from the ouija board of our combined frustrations, and now we must interact with it accordingly. Carefully. All fingers and toes kept well away from its rows of gnashing teeth.

Yes, the campaign is a monster. A big, beautiful, dangerous beast. We have us a tiger by the tail. That’s what we asked for: a great fiend to sic on our enemies, the better to torment and topple them by. Our Baby.

So what can we do to make the best of it?

Maybe we can acknowledge this situation and begin to work consciously with the entity we have invoked. Maybe we can start by working consciously with our own selves, cultivating fulfillment through pursuits that recharge us in our personal lives. In the hours between causes, can we focus on embracing what we love about ourselves and life on Earth? Then we might come to the meeting already aware of how much (more) of ourselves we can afford to contribute to tasks for the cause.

Perhaps we can acknowledge that the movement by its nature cannot become dependant upon the contributions of a single person. That indeed, to allow any group’s campaign to become so is akin to sabotage, however well-intentioned the work-horse may be. When the stoic old girl drops dead in front of the plow, leaving the rest of us without the skills to carry on, her indirect disservice to the cause (albeit selfless and noble) will show as clearly as her contributions.

I posit that we can grow up a bit by facing the fact that our first environmental responsibility is to the fine human animal that we get to ride around in. When we neglect that, our outside contributions devalue drastically. We can admit that it is reasonable and morally sound to attend to this most dependable and loyal being first.

No other has always been there for us and still remains so, as this one has and does. This being endures all it can in devotion to our wishes, despite incomparable feats of abuse and neglect, cruelties that we'd never inflict upon any other creature. And we are useless to any cause without it.

The campaign that will succeed is one in witch: the individuals comprising it are developing awareness of what genuinely replenishes and energizes them, discovering what sustainable resources can nourish and nurture their bodies and spirits. Then they can become conscious of the quantities they Can afford to share of themselves for the best reasons; meanwhile each prioritizes their own health and well-being through active, loving self-respect. This recipe may well cook up a campaign that Can’t be stopped.

Or, in these treacherous parts and times, we can step out of this conversation and slip again into all-encompassing guilt and shame for the shortsighted misdeeds of our ancestors, our families, society, race, gender, privileged groups, etc. We can choose to focus always on the big wrongs in order to ignore the costs of neglecting our own lives, our health and our relationships.

We can over-surrender ourselves now to an admirable cause, for however long we last. We can age prematurely and rapidly deteriorate, embittered by sacrificed lifetimes in the wake of unrealized goals. We can hang on by sheer spite in early old age, trying to fake the spark that once drove us forward. We can stay visible in the fight just waiting to “go down swingin’” with the good guys in the end, having finally given up hope of success and settling for underdogs’ bragging rights in the hereafter. We can finish ourselves off with abuse, neglect, and despair before all the pollution and war and corruption gets a chance to.

Or, we can work to win; get our lives and our planet restored, united and co-evolving. We can work with a conscious awareness of what we can spare and what we will select to spend that on. We can contribute the quality of energy that finds favor with justice and rises superior to struggle, generated by a holistic approach to personal responsibility that begins with an active reverence for the self.

It’s not too late. Want to?