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It's obvious you've been little involved in "activism", and thus know little about it. Many things bely this, including usage of the word activism - most serious "activists" I know call themselves organizers, not activists. Activist is a word used by detractors and the media - it gives an image of a solitary person, maybe on some ego trip, while organizer implies a group effort. An example being Obama who, rightly or wrongly, caleld himself a community organizer, not a community activist. The most common view I come across in people working in organizing is that abandoning your job and going to work in organizing full time is almost always a bad idea. It's considered a bad idea on so many different levels, I wouldn't know where to start. It's not egalitarian - you create a division between "activists" and regular working people who are not, in the OP's opinion, the real deal since they don't work on activism 100% of the time. It's more constricted - when your paycheck depends on some government agency, or some NGO, or some union or the like, you're more constrained. You have to obey the hierarchy and your behavior affects your paycheck. This changes your behavior to where you're thinking less of the work and more on your paycheck and the desires of the hierarchy giving you your paycheck. If the EPA gets massive budget cuts someone working there is out of luck - but not someone with a solid job who does environmental work in their spare time. It's more sustainable - during upsurges of social change, positions open up to work for causes. As the zeitgeist changes, most of these positions dry up. Someone with a decent job can be in things for the long haul. It's a way of turning off activism - it's the armchair people who aren't even armchair activists who say you have to be 100% devoted 24/7 or it doesn't count. It's a way to discourage organizing efforts, and a way to allay the fact that they themselves are part of the problem. It's the oldest circular reasoning of the lazy person - they want to do absolutely nothing, so they invent the bogus idea that they have to do it 24/7 or it doesn't count, and since this is unreasonable they do nothing. This isn't reality, it's a lazy person's circular reasoning, and this is fairly obvious to all. You're talking about something you seem to know little about. Is Noam Chomsky not a real activist since he studies computer and human language at MIT? Was Edward Said not an activist since he was a professor of English literature at Columbia? Virtually everything you said is obviously bogus to anyone who has actually been involved in activism. |