It feels weird to be me and to not know what to do in this moment. And I think that feeling points to a larger problem.
Let me explain.
I have been involved in social movements in one way or another for, oh, almost 30 years now. I’ve never been a high profile leader. I’ve never been the boldest or the most effective participant. I’m certainly not someone who has the innate capacities to be a great organizer. I’m just someone who has shown up and done stuff as best I could in the moment. Over that time, my energies have shifted from being primarily focused on activism and organizing to an emphasis on movement infrastructure, which given my skills and interests has mostly meant media-related movement infrastructure. But I have been, and in a different way still am, involved.
I’m also, of course, a writer, and lots of what I have done in terms of writing and media-making has also been connected to social movements and social justice. It’s not always obvious to me what value writing and media-making has to grassroots struggles – that’s actually a question I’m reflecting on quite actively now, and may write about in a substantive way in the future. But at least sometimes, I believe that it has value, and it certainly has given me lots of opportunity to learn about lots of different movements, past and present.
So when you look at it from a certain angle, I should be reasonably well equipped to look at the world around me in this difficult moment and identify useful grassroots ways to get involved. And I am actively attempting to do that right now.
The world has never stopped being awful in some pretty profound ways, as so tragically demonstrated by the active and enthusiastic support for genocide by Western elites, both reactionary and liberal, over the last year. But while it may make little practical difference to those already facing genocide in Palestine, there are lots of other oppressed people who will face an escalation of violence under the new regime in the US. It also seems nearly certain that the forces of reaction will seize control of the federal state in Canada after the next election as well.
In response to this, I’ve decided that I want to do a little bit more. In particular, I haven’t really been involved in any local grassroots efforts in about four years, so I want to do that. I’m not in a position where I can be the anchor person for a project or a group. I don’t have it in me to start something new from scratch. But I want to follow the very basic advice offered by lots of organizers in moments like this and find some already-existing initiative that is doing politically useful work and plug into it.
Except, despite that impulse, despite my experience participating in and making media about grassroots change-making, when I look around at my community I am kind of at a loss about what to do. And that makes me feel pretty foolish.
I can identify a few factors that are likely contributing to this inability to find a place to plug in. One cluster of reasons is very much about me. I’m intensely introverted, moderately socially anxious, and middle-aged, all of which mean that I’m just not as tightly connected as I used to be to local networks of people where friends of friends of friends might be doing cool grassroots stuff that I would then hear about, and I’m also not particularly well equipped to just go out and make those connections from scratch. COVID hasn’t helped, of course. The pandemic isolated all of us in lots of ways that haven’t necessarily been undone even as most of society pretends COVID is over. And personally, I’m still quite a bit more deliberate about COVID safety than most people, which makes things more challenging too.
Another set of factors is, I think, related to changes out in the world. This is harder to pin down, but I think it’s real. There are, I think, fewer sustained groups and organizations doing grassroots work than there used to be. This has been a pattern in lots of places around the world for the last couple of decades, as I understand it. And note that I’m not saying that fewer people are doing things in individual and collective ways to make the world better, because that isn’t true at all. But even as people mobilize, sometimes in their thousands or their millions, to fight for social change along some axis or other, it often doesn’t translate into organizations that stick around after the upsurge has passed. There are lots of theories about why that’s the case, and I’m still figuring out what I think, but I’m pretty sure, whatever the cause, that it’s a real phenomenon. And, again, I think the COVID pandemic exacerbated this existing trend.
So I look out at my community, and I don’t see many options for political involvement that aren’t electoral. Some of that is about my own disconnection from relevant networks. But some is because there just isn’t as much to see in terms of ongoing, public-facing groups and organizations as there might have been 20 or 30 or 50 years ago.
Of course, I know there’s not nothing. There are events and actions in the community, and I go to them when I can. I’m also aware of a few groups doing things in an ongoing way. But, for one reason or another, none of the groups that I know about feel like viable options for me at this time. And I’m not sure what to do.
Which, like I said, makes me feel foolish. I feel like I should know better, and I’m not sure what to do about it. And I recognize that if I can’t come up with a way to get involved, with my history of being involved in and paying lots of attention to social movements and other sorts of grassroots political work, where does that leave people who are coming to the question “What can I do?” without all of that?
I think that’s a question that the social movement left really needs to be grappling with – not only do we need more groups, projects, and organizations that have an enduring presence beyond a single upswing in momentum, but we need more clearly visible and accessible entry points for people who want to get involved.