Why activism is good for you

You might be wondering what an article about activism is doing on a site promoting positive mental health and wellbeing. Social campaigner Sarah Clancy explains…

There’s a funny and almost unspoken notion that making better societies should be left to some experts or some paragons of virtue who have never messed up any single thing. This twinned with an unhealthy cynicism that sees people who care or are passionate about issues as naive, is a toxic sort of mixture that inhibits many people from making the changes they need to in their own lives or in their towns or their whole societies. I have learned loads as someone who is a fairly frequent f**ker up of things but one of the most important lessons I have managed to take on board is that if we are waiting for any problem to be solved by perfect people then it is a dead cert that it will not ever be solved.

It has to be said that as well as all of the biological causes of poor mental health sometimes too the nature of how our society functions is actually part of our issue. Pressures to fit in or to succeed according to someone else’s definition of what success is, can be overwhelming.   If you don’t buy into the status quo it can seem that there’s nowhere for you or no road that will bring you wellbeing and satisfaction. This is not the case, there’s a great old slogan that says no one can change everything but everyone can change something and by accepting that we are powerful agents of change rather than passive recipients of culture we can do huge things. Usually though we do huge things in spite of ourselves one tiny step at a time, and most likely after every small effort to do something we care about, we feel better about ourselves. Well maybe I should speak for myself after every small effort to do something I care about I feel better about myself!

We are all aware of the problems that require our urgent love and attention, both the local and the global; poverty, injustice, the environment, health, wars, resource distribution, politics and yes the global economic model to name but a few. But what I want to deal with here is the issue of power, more specifically of us all taking ownership of our own power.

We do not live ‘atomic’ separate existences. Even the most reclusive of people live within networks of culture, of law, of infrastructure, of ideas, of education, of politics, and of the systems that deliver and disperse resources. These systems are all created by the actions of humans. This might seem a very obvious thing to say so maybe by now you are asking what on earth I am on about? I’m talking about how individuals and groups can affect these man-made systems and structures. In short I’m talking about Activism.

The word activism is often taken as a synonym for ‘protest’ but if we use that shorthand explanation it can fool us into thinking that ‘Activism’ is not something we need to concern ourselves with. Not True!! We are all ‘active’ in some way or another to create or sustain the types of systems we live in:

• Sometimes this is by actively supporting those systems because we agree with them.
• Sometimes by actively opposing them or parts of them because we think they are wrong.
• Sometimes by actively building and organising for alternative versions that we think are better.
• Lastly and most importantly lots of people, perhaps a silent majority are active to ensure our society functions as it does by entirely ignoring it, which means, abdicating your power to others.

When we ignore or abdicate from something as crucial as our place in the world or our community and how we engage with them, we give others permission to engineer our society for us. By allowing others to ‘create society for me’ we are not engaging in harmless ‘inactivity’. It actually manifests itself as a support for things as they are. To take the fitness analogy, not taking control of one’s one diet and exercise will have a direct effect on one’s body. Not taking action on the issues that concern you will also have an effect on your society.

Think for a minute of the many things that we take for granted today in Ireland as rights or entitlements, for example weekends or days off from work, voting rights for women, the right not to be a slave, the right to have sex only by choice, the right not to be sentenced to death, or the right to choose our own interests and political affiliations to name just a few. None of these ‘rights’ are things that were donated unasked for by some generous and wise benefactors. These are all things that people sometime somewhere saw as necessary. They imagined how they would look and function, and then came together to achieve them. I am certain that these people argued, disagreed, conceded and perhaps eventually settled for less than their ideals. We know though that they continued to struggle and work to get these rights for the very reason that we now have the luxury here of taking some of them for granted (though we shouldn’t!).

This work of achieving such freedoms took place over generations, and continued in the face of hardship and resistance. But those involved, to use a euphemism ‘carried the flame’ until these ideas became so firmly entrenched in our culture, that in some shape or form (and imperfect though their realisation might still be) these rights all became socially legally and culturally deemed as the ‘norm’.

This does not mean that no-one here is oppressed or that we have perfect gender equality, but it does mean that our culture and institutions recognise these as things to which people are entitled; ‘standards’ is a useful word to describe them and that it is recognised as either deviance or criminality when these rights are not respected.

To summarise what I am saying here I will use a quote from Anthropologist Margaret Mead; ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; it’s the only thing that ever has.’’

SO WHAT CAN WE DO?

We can take ownership of our power

First of all accept that you are powerful and take ownership. The ways we are powerful are nearly too numerous to mention but some of these include our political power, the power of our voice (we live in a country where we do not generally face imprisonment or even death for speaking our minds). We have consumer power; the power to purchase or not purchase or to support social justice in the ways we use our personal resources. We have the power to create, the power to protest, to organise for change, to strike, to work, to volunteer, to innovate, to influence, to give example, to learn, to access and share information, to communicate, to publicise, to experiment, and we have the power often forgotten, to make mistakes and to learn from them.

Most importantly and perhaps most often ignored is that we all have the capacity to imagine things differently than they are at present. This is the most culturally derided power that people have in current globalised capitalist societies; practically all of our education systems, political systems, media and communication channels are actually geared towards demonstrating that what we have at present is the ‘final solution’ or the ‘best for the most’ to use some of the common terms.

It requires use of your own critical, creative and questioning powers to refuse to share such low ambitions as to accept that this world where millions live in abject poverty or are disenfranchised is the best that all the intelligence and compassion of the human race can achieve. Once you’ve taken that first step of rejecting such low standards then a world of education, opinion, creation and community awaits. All that’s left is to get stuck in to learning about how you will go about making your own power count.

Humanity is like a kaleidoscope in its diversity and societies can only reflect or cater for diversity when all strands take their place in creating the spaces both physical, mental and economic in which the endeavours of life and love take place. Agitate and shake all the ingredients together and we can create diverse and spectacular possibilities. It’s possible, it’s necessary, it’s empowering, it’s addictive; it’s living.