This is a guest post by Mark Lance, Professor at the Philosophy Department and Justice and Peace Studies Program at Georgetown University:
Early in my activist career, I had a mentor, Molly Rush. Molly has done an enormous amount in her life, but was most famous as a member of the first “Plowshares” action. She, Dan and Phil Berrigan, and others broke into a missile plant in Pennsylvania and poured their own blood on documents and damaged Mark 12a first-strike nuclear nose-cones. She was sentenced to five years in federal prison. I worked with Molly a couple years after her release and one day was saying how much I admired her courage. She insisted that this was not the right thing to admire. She felt called to perform this action, but insisted that sustained lifetime involvement was much more important and harder than bold, dramatic, performances.
She told me about, and later introduced me to, a woman in her early 60s. Mabel had decided in her 20s that she could devote one evening a week to social justice work. Sometimes she attended a protest; sometimes stuffed envelopes or worked a phone bank; sometimes she organized teach-ins. But she had not missed a week. In 40 years. (20 years later, when I was organizing one of the large mobilizations around the IMF/WB meetings, she emailed me with a long apology, because her doctor had forbidden her from coming to DC on her broken hip for the protests. In introduced her to a bunch of young activists over the phone.)
I’ve had a second career in activism for roughly 35 years. I have seen hundreds of passionate committed young people jump into the work, doing everything, 80 hour work-weeks, nights in jail, enduring verbal and physical abuse, inspiring the hell out of me and others. And then disappearing after a total burnout, never to be heard from again. I’ve also come to know a smaller number of folks who have made movement work an enduring part of their lives.
Virtually anyone with a full-time academic job is in a relatively privileged position in our society. They have a decent income, fair control over their time, are highly educated and skillful, and enjoy the social capital of a PhD and a university position. I believe that in a world of rising fascism, climate disaster, war, greed, and all the rest, any such person has a duty to contribute. But the work is long, and it behooves anyone serious about it to attend to what they can sustain. One can deceive oneself in either direction, either imagining she is a super hero who will never burn out and quit, or, as is far more common, deciding that a few FaceBook posts are just all she can manage. Both of these are intellectually lazy in their own way.
A few years ago, I ran a class for seniors in our Justice and Peace Studies program at Georgetown, called Sustaining Activism. For years I had watched amazing talented activist students either burn out or drift away from their commitments, not, as it seemed to me, because of thought-out decisions to go a different direction, but just as a passive result of the pressures and stresses of life. I wanted to give them a chance to reflect carefully on where they wanted to go with this dimension of life, and on the pressures that they would likely confront.
The class met twice a week. The first day, most weeks, we had a guest. My criterion was that they be someone who had been an active participant in work for social justice for at least 20 years. Beyond that, I aimed for variety. I had people who worked for think tanks or academia, folks living in Catholic Worker Houses, part-time contributors to community organizations, labor organizers, revolutionaries, heads of NGOs, ... The only rule was that they had managed to stick with it. I asked each guest to give the students something to read before class as well as a brief bio. Then they discussed for the entire class. The other day they had readings I deemed relevant to the issues that arose that week and some sort of assignment. (Maybe a paper on collective childcare if that had been a salient issue, research on funding NGOs without becoming dependent on funding sources, a bibliography of the history of the Catholic Worker Movement, or legal threats to labor organizing.) Their final assignment was to write up a detailed 10 year life plan, to explain what their life-career-family-politics balance would be, and how they would sustain that balance given the real-world obstacles they had learned about.
There were 12 people in the class, all seniors. As we neared the end of the term, students started coming up to me to express thanks. Every single student told me that this was the most valuable class they had taken in their entire college career. Every one of them. (I’ve never had more than 2 students say that for any other course in 35 years of teaching.)
Obviously there are no algorithms for successfully pulling off long-term commitment to the sort of political work one believes in. But a number of themes emerged from this class.
1) Community is essential.
Trying to maintain this work alone, while living one’s life with people who find it odd or unimportant, is next to impossible. People spoke of their housemates, their “chosen family,” their comrades. But all had a support system that they drew upon in hard times and celebrated with in good, that shared their lives as honorary aunts and uncles and fairy god-parents, that joined them for non-traditional holiday meals. Your political community will, ideally, both support you when you need it and call you out when you are actually being lazy. They will be people who need you, who count on you to show up, but who don’t ask more than anyone can give. They will share the victories and the tragedies.
When Rachel Corrie was murdered by a military bulldozer-driver while engaged in nonviolent defense of a Palestinian home in Gaza, our community mourned together in at least three cities. A couple days later, a dozen of us were arrested in a civil disobedience action at the headquarters of the Caterpiller Corporation - which supplied the bulldozer for this and other crimes. (The Boycott-Cat campaign became one of the first salvos in what became the BDS movement.) And when we were released from jail, we had one hell of a wake/party. Many of us live far from one another now, but these are my people for life. Obviously, a good deal of intentionality is required in choosing such a community. In my view, nothing is more important in sustaining one’s involvement.
2) Self-care and attention to when it is needed: every guest talked about how there are low point when one is tired, sad, feeling defeated. Some would take a retreat in nature, some spend a week going to shows, some just sleep and disconnect from all media. But these times happen. They don’t mean you are a bad lazy activist. They mean you are human.
3) Another dimension of self-care is maintaining your health, having something regular in your life that keeps you sane, calm, grounded, and physically well. For me, now, this is rowing. From 5:30-7:00 five days a week, I’m on the water (or the erg in Winter). I need that time, and my body needs the exercise. I think I have more energy to devote to other things because I take this time, but if I have to say no to a late-night meeting because I have to be asleep by 10, well, the young folks will have to deal.
4) Lives have longer-term rhythms as well. In my own case, I spent an average of well over 20 hours a week on political work when I was a grad student. At the time I was on a non-teaching fellowship for 2 of my 5 years, and had no family commitments. So I could basically divide my time between philosophy and politics. This continued through my postdoc and the first few years as a professor, but when my daughter was born while I was enduring a 2 hour commute to work (each way) this slid back to maybe 5 hours.
I became much more active in the early 2000s when our living situation changed, Emma got old enough to come along to meetings, and some exciting work was happening around global justice, but again ebbed in her difficult teenage years. Now that she is grown and on her own, my partner and I are both more deeply involved once again. The specific life-patterns will vary - but they need to be respected. The key, is not to lose your direction altogether, to find the sorts of contribution you can make, and to continue your connections to your people.
5) Recognize that there will be some sacrifices to choosing such a life. I’ve been a pretty successful philosopher. But there is no doubt that I’d have a few more books and dozens more articles if I had not had this side-gig for 35 years. I made that decision early, in grad school, and against the norms of my high-pressure, high-prestige department, many members of which felt that the only proper philosophical life was one that aimed for maximum productivity and a job at a top-five department. I will always cherish the memory of one beloved teacher who saw that I was sleeping out in the shanty-town we had erected on campus to protest Pitt’s investments in South African Apartheid and started chatting with me about various radical movements. At the end, he said “remember, your life is yours. Figure out what you want to accomplish with it and fuck respectability.” I won’t say that I don’t, now and then, feel a twinge of “I could have been invited to that conference!” but I never regret my decision.
This life of an activist/academic is who I am, and the people and experiences I’ve had are not ones I would trade. Again, everyone will have to decide for themselves what tradeoffs are worth it. I have friends who chose “voluntary poverty” to avoid paying taxes to the war machine, friends who gave up family to live in community, friends who spent years in Federal prison, indeed, friends who have lost jobs or their lives. There are risks to this work. But whether it is risking assault by cops defending those more vulnerable, risking your career or prestige by taking unpopular stands, or simply giving up time and money, that you would otherwise have, these things need to be part of one’s decision. Make it thoughtfully and embrace it fully.
6) Finally, nearly every visitor to my class emphasized that one has to let go worrying about exactly what to do. There are so many injustices in the world, and one cannot address it all. There is no more reason to focus on South African Apartheid than terrorism in East Timor. So you just make your choice, try to have connections and solidarity with people who make other choices, and get on with it. Similarly, some of us will engage in direct action in front of a Palestinian home, while others will work to elect progressive candidates. Some will organize teach-ins and solidarity vigils, while others will occupy buildings. As the Zapatistas say, we want “a world in which many worlds are possible,” and that will come to pass only with a movement in which many movements flourish and cooperate. Or as my mentor Molly said: “I’m not sure what is the best thing to do, but I know that if I do nothing, I won’t help change anything.”
So all in, I recommend a personalized version of this class for anyone concerned to make social justice a part of their life. Seek out folks who have been doing it for a long time. Buy them coffee or, better, organize an evening where they can talk with you and your students. Then write your own ten year plan. I’ve never known one that lasted 10 years without revision, but I’ve never known anyone regret having drawn it up.
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