The anglers I fish alongside on the Christopher Street pier approach fishing differently than I do. They arrive with multiple poles, all of them heavy power, which they line up across the side railing with little bells on top that tingle when a fish gets hooked. Their reels are loaded with high pound test monofilament, and often even higher test braided line, so they can safely haul the fish up to the pier from the water 15 feet below. For bait, they favor small, live crab: the favorite food of the Tautogs we are all hoping to catch. I, on the other hand, fish with light tackle and line, usually only one rod, and bait my hooks with frozen shrimp left over from a dinner I never got around to making. We take different approaches because we are after different things. The other anglers do what they do because they are after food for themselves and their families, or maybe to even sell to a local fish market. Success means catching and landing a lot of fish. I, on the other hand, am fishing for the excitement of sensing the hit when a fish takes the bait, having my rod double, and then struggling to bring the fish in. (I don’t eat the fish I catch but give them to my fellow anglers who, in turn, supply me with crabs for bait. We seem to have come to a tacit agreement that I now work for them.) For all our differences, there is also a lot we share: grumbling when the tide is running too fast under the dock and our rigs get swept out, posing for phone photos with a big catch, and, of course, the tedious wait for a bite. But because what we are after is different, what we consider a good day of fishing differs too.
It used to be that just acting up as an activist was enough for me now that I work with activists to make them better activists I’ve been thinking a lot about what separates good activism from not-so-good activism. When I first began assessing activism I was pretty dogmatic: activism which achieved concrete, capital P political objectives was good, anything that didn’t was bad. It didn’t hurt that with such clear demonstrable goals, success or failure was relatively easy to measure. But through a series of eye-opening experiences, and difficult conversations with other activists who don’t always think like me, I’ve started to see other, often more internal and invisible, markers of activist success. Things like instilling confidence in individuals, building community within a group, or enabling envisioning in the activists themselves are objectives I now take seriously in my evaluation. But the most important thing I’ve learned is that any assessment of “good activism” must be done relative to the intent of the activist. Once everyone is clear on this, it’s really a matter of addressing a few simple questions: What do we want to have happen? What actually happened? And, because activism is not just an event but a process: Knowing what we know now, what would we do differently?