Author: activistangler

No matter how diligent you are about employing the best catch and release practices: using hooks with the barbs pinched off, never using a gaff, and relying upon silicone landing nets that won’t disturb the delicate slime that protects the fish’s skin, fish still get hurt. Instead of being hooked in the tough cartilage of their lip, they will swallow the hook and it will get lodged down their throat or in their stomach. Trying to get it out, or cutting the line and leaving the hook in, you risk mortally damaging the fish. Maybe they will heal, and maybe they will become part of the food cycle by providing a meal for the snapping turtles or crabs, but there is no denying the fact that you have left the fish in a worse state than when you caught it. And no matter how humanely you try and kill a fish you plan to eat, whether you stun it first or sever their spinal cord or bleed the fish out by cutting the gill rakers, you hurt the fish.  As I found out pretty quickly, fish bleed bright red blood.

People get hurt in activism, no matter how careful and concerned you are. I’ve planned demonstrations for weeks, set up non-violent civil disobedience trainings, assigned skilled negotiators to liaison with the police, and then one bottle gets thrown, the police charge in, and protestors end up bloody and in jail. Activism, if you are good, also hurts your adversary. I recall one campaign we waged against a particularly egregious developer who was buying up an old community center in the Lower East Side to turn into a high-rent apartment building. We protested, we sat in and occupied the building, we filed legal injunctions, and we stopped him.  We also bankrupted his business and his employees lost their jobs. “Good,” you might say, “the greedy bastard deserved it.”  And he did, but we also destroyed his dream and harmed those who depended upon him. If I were to do it again, I probably wouldn’t change a thing: I’d still stage that protest and still bankrupt the developer, but I’d need to do it recognizing that people will get hurt.

Like all anglers, I have my favorite spots to fish. There’s a semi-submerged log that juts out into my nearby kettle pond where I have stashed a long stick to help me keep my balance while I navigate my way out to the end. About twenty-five yards to the right of the path through the dunes that leads down to my local beach is my favorite spot to go surf fishing. These are places where I have spent a lot of time fishing and — if I’m lucky — catch a lot of fish. But, like most anglers, I always have an eye out for new spots: the cut I noticed in the sandbar about 500 yards up the beach, or the overhanging trees on the opposite side of the pond that seem like a shady, cool place for bass to hang out in the heat of the day. Every once in a while, I leave the safety and comfort of my usual haunts and try out one of these new spots. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for an afternoon. If nothing is biting, then I’ll go back to my old spot, nothing lost but an hour or an afternoon. If I do catch fish, however, then I’ve found what might become a new favorite spot.

There are activist tactics that have always worked. One of my first activist jobs was for an outfit called Mobilization for Survival, an offshoot of the Vietnam War-era MOBE. The organization was known and respected for their logistical abilities in pulling off mass marches in the US capital. Such demonstrations had been a mainstay of protest since the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements, and the annual March on Washington was a tried and true formula to draw attention to an issue and flex a little political muscle. But by the time I had joined “the movement” in the 1980s  they were also getting a bit tired and stale, marches were still working, but with diminishing returns. Looking around I saw (and participated in) other, newer, modes of activism:  ACT-UP’s media zaps and the street protest cum rave parties of Reclaim the Streets. I went on to train activists in other forms of “artistic” activism: comic street performances and eye-catching visual spectacles. These new types of activism seemed to work better, garner more media attention, and were certainly more fun than those tired and tiring marches. But there were plenty of new tactics I tried that didn’t work so well (I’ve come to despise flash mobs). What mattered was that I — and hundreds of thousands of other activists — were willing to try new tactics in new settings. Without this willingness to explore, the public square occupations that swept the globe in 2011, from Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, would never have happened. But looking ahead to what may be an unprecedented refusal of a US president to concede a lost election, and the protests that are sure to ensue, I’m reminded that old favorites like mass marches on the capital can still deliver the goods.

Sometimes when casting, particularly when a wind is up and you are using a light lure, your line snarls. This usually happens at the worst moment. Top three memorable line snarls: 1) standing on the beach with a massive knot in my line and looking out to the surf just as a school of bluefish goes by; 2) dropping a critical part of my reel overboard while attempting a field “fix” of a snarled spindle; 3) watching people to the left and right of me reel in fish after fish, as I stare down at a bird’s nest of monofilament (this has happened so many times it has congealed into one, nightmarish, memory). When you get a snarl you need to take the time to pull the knots apart, picking at the strands with your fingernails, and tracing back the loops to locate the ur-knot at the root of it all, before you can resume fishing. But sometimes this is impossible because it’s too dark to see, or the knot is too tight, or the fish are biting — right now! — and you simply can’t wait. When this happens you need to cut the snarl out, discard the line, retie your lure, and start again. 

There are always snarls in activism: conflicts internal to the organization or group that jam up the work. These snarls often have to do with decision making and group dynamics. They can be caused by leadership struggles as the authority of one faction is contested by another, or by conversations over ideology, strategy and the “correct line” to take in opinion and actions, and in everyday interactions as some people (usually white men) explain too much and others (often woman-of-color) don’t feel heard. Most of the time it’s worth working these things out. Groups will not grow unless all people are heard and respected and others step back and let others talk and lead, organizations will not be effective unless strategies and systems of power are worked out and agreed upon by all, and you can’t create a just world if your own practices are unjust. But sometimes working out these snarls takes over the entire activity of the group. This is exacerbated by the desire in many lefty groups to “reach consensus” through “participatory democracy” where everybody speaks and no one listens, and in the sardonic words of social movement scholar Francesca Polletta, “Freedom is an Endless Meeting.” When this happens, all activity turns inward and the original activist aims of the group get lost. An experienced activist learns when to fix snarls and when to cut them out and move on.

When I get a new lure, I like to test it out in shallow, clear water. I study how it moves: what happens when I reel in fast or reel in slow, the motions it makes when I jerk it and then let it rest. Sometimes I just like to see how it falls through the water on its way to the bottom. Certain rubber worms, Gary Yamamoto’s for instance, do a wiggle on the way down that the bass in my local kettle pond seem to find irresistible. But I don’t expect to catch fish when I’m testing out a lure, in fact, the expectation that I might catch fish gets in the way of the testing. In search of a bite, I’ll find myself casting out to a spot far out in the pond where I just saw a fish rise and where I have no hope of seeing how my lure is performing. The same holds for testing new (or in my case, usually very old) rods and reels. It takes time to understand the particularities of tackle and adapt your techniques in order to use the rod and reel to its best advantage. Rushing into the business of catching fish, in my experience, often results in bad casts, snarled lines, parts lost in the water, and missed fish. Most of all, it results in a lot of frustration. Once I’ve tested out my tackle, understand how it works, and know what it’s good for and what it’s not, only then I am ready to catch fish.

Too often, activists don’t test out their tactics. At best, we plan the logistics and map out the scenario for weeks or even months, hold endless meetings to decide what words go into the pamphlet and how confrontational to be with the police, and then we leave our meeting spaces for the streets and hold our protest. At worst we do almost no planning and go out to do it anyway. Either way, the action takes place at the end of the process and happens only once. It shouldn’t be this way. A year or so ago, I came across a photo series shot for Life magazine of student Civil Rights activists training for lunch counter sit-ins in the early 1960s. In one picture, a fellow student blows smoke straight into another’s face as she sits impassively at a mock lunch counter. In another, a would-be activist has hot coffee spilled on them. What these young activists were doing was as obvious as it was brilliant: they were practicing for what was going to happen when they sat down at a Whites-only lunch counter, and then testing their responses.  Training activists today, I encourage this sort of practicing and testing. We ask people to rehearse their actions in front of a public — even if that “public” is only family and friends — when nothing is at stake. Testing out the action in this way prepares the activists for how they might react, and also provides a sense of how an audience might respond, both of which help them refine their technique. Only having tested our activism in the shallows are we then ready to move into deeper waters.

“Give a person a fish and they eat for the day. Teach a person to fish and they eat for life.” After a 40 year hiatus, I had to (re)learn how to fish. I had a lot of teachers: there were the anglers on the Outer Cape beaches who would tell me what popper to be casting out into the surf, the old men on Manhattan piers who taught me the best technique to hook a crab for Tautog bait, and then there were my senseis on YouTube: an entire amateur academy online who schooled me in everything from the right technique to work a rubber worm in the lily pads to how to boil up my own catfish bait. But mainly I taught myself how to fish through a lot of observation and reflection, and a lot of trial and error (emphasis on the latter). I discovered that the catfish in Central Park Lake really only eat bread balls because that’s what the tourists feed the ducks and turtles. I found out that hooking a rubber worm in the middle, “wacky style,” may catch more bass, but it also means a lot more swallowed hooks and injured fish. And I also found out that when the fish are biting you can cast out almost anything into the surf and you’ll get a hit.  Every once in a while I’ll see a novice angler casting out near to me. Usually, I’ll go over teach them as others have taught me: give them a few pointers and offer some encouragement. But I also know that if they are going to fish for life, they are going to have to teach themselves.

For the past decade, I’ve trained people on how to be more creative activists. The easiest way for me to do this is to do what I’ve seen other teachers do (or what I’ve done when I am feeling lazy or rushed): teach people to use a particular tactic or strategy, advising them to do this and do that, essentially: teaching them to do what I would do. This might make for a good action, for one time, but it won’t make for a good activist. To teach people how to become good activists necessitates stepping back from techniques and teaching the underlying principles and philosophies of activism, and demonstrating through case studies and historical examples what good activism looks like. This knowledge is not provided as a blueprint to recreate a style of activism already created but meant as tools and inspiration to build new creations. In the end, I try to teach activists to teach themselves. To use what they have learned from me, yes, but more importantly, to learn from their own past histories and current practices, their commitments and their creativities, the signs, symbols, and stories of the cultures in which they work, and put all of this into their activism to create something new. When this happens I know they will be an activist for life.

I was out fishing early this morning on the Christopher Street Pier.  It was a misty, colder morning, the first real sign of the winter that was coming, and I was fishing for tautog (blackfish) with a simple sinker slider rig with a piece of shrimp for bait. After a few minutes one of the elderly Chinese men who frequently fish the pier showed up with his multiple rods. Recognizing that I was encroaching on his usual space, I nodded in his direction and moved over to give him room at the railing. Then we stood, 15 feet apart, watching our propped-up poles for the telltale dip that meant a fish was nibbling. Neither of us were having much luck, but I was having a little more luck than him and so he walked over and asked me what bait I was using. I told him it was shrimp and went into an overly detailed story about being out of other bait and then discovering the shrimp in a leftover bag in the bottom of my freezer and so on, but given his limited understanding of English, and my absolute ignorance of Chinese, I think I lost him. We stood apart again, both watching our poles. Then, a bit later,  after I was done baiting up my stripped hook, I walked over and gave him a few frozen shrimp. He nodded his thanks, and we both went back to our fishing. The mist had turned into a steady drizzle and we were both standing back from our rods taking advantage of the cover of the pavilion that stands at the end of the pier. Periodically I would run out to my rod and check the line to feel for nibbling. After the third or fourth time, he came over to me with a little device: a clip with two bells on springs that attached to the tip of my pole and tinkled if a fish was on the line. I nodded my thanks, and we both went back to fishing. By 8 am I was cold and it was time to go to work so I wound up my bait, broke apart my rod, packed up my gear, and headed over to the old man to hand him back his bell. He smiled and gestured that it was mine to keep. We both nodded at one another. This was a poignant, but not isolated case of human connection. Lately, in these days of divisiveness, most of my cross-class, many of my cross-ethnicity, and nearly all of my cross-political exchanges have taken place while fishing or discussing fishing.

The Acts in The Bible should be up there with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as required reading for every activist. As much as I despise the Apostle Paul for what he did to Jesus’s teachings in turning love and forgiveness into rules and intolerance, I have to admire his skill as an organizer, turning a ragtag bunch of rebels into the nascent Christian Church. Here he is dispensing invaluable activist advice in 1 Corinthians:

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews….To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.

Sure, Paul may be a shameless opportunist, but he also understands that in order to reach people, to connect with people, and to convert people you need to be able to meet them where they are. Too often activists don’t do this. We insist on meeting people where we are, or where we would already like them to be. This may work amongst the already converted, but to bring about broad social change we need to connect with those who don’t know, don’t care, or don’t agree with us (aka the infidels). To create these connections requires recognizing and nurturing commonalities. This doesn’t mean pretending to be who you are not, it means finding what we share with others: being a mother, a son, or a devoted partner;  an avid gardener, lover of romantic comedies, a pop music fan, or, yes, a fisherman, and starting there.

Fish are often active in the night time. The best surf fishing, for example, usually starts at dusk and stretches into the night. Fishing in the dark can yield a lot of fish; it is also really difficult. I never realized how much I rely upon my vision until I started fishing at night. When I cast out I like to see where the lure lands: did fall short of the mark? did it go wide? When I reel in I like to see the action of my lure in the water: is it bobbing or diving? And when I snarl my line I like to be able to see the knot so that I can pick it apart with my fingernails and get back to fishing. All of this sensory feedback is absent when fishing at night. Sure, your other senses fill in. You rely much more upon feel and even hearing when you can’t see a fish hit your plug, but there’s been a few times when I mistook the curiosity of a passing seal for the hit of a monster striped bass (luckily seals are smarter than fish and don’t seem to ever get hooked).  A master fisher would likely disagree with me, and in time my other senses will likely get sharper and with practice I’ll be able to better gauge how far I’ve cast and distinguish stripers from seals, but for now, for me, fishing in the dark means I am fishing blind.

Activism can sometimes seem like fishing in the dark. You go out and do your action and hope for the best. Your message might reach the right people, get some media coverage, have an impact — you might hook a big one —  but it’ll be more luck than anything else. Some of this uncertainty is endemic to the nature of public activism, but you can increase your luck by increasing the amount of sensory feedback you receive. When we stage practice actions in our trainings, we assign participants not directly engaged in the intervention to be observers and interviewers. As the action takes place, the observers stand back and watch the crowd: who stops and who doesn’t? At what point do they smile, frown, talk to their friends or take pictures?  When do they walk away? Meanwhile, interviewers approach people to ask a few questions: Why did they stop? Or, Why didn’t they stop? Do they understand what is going on? What do they think or feel about what is going on? Do they plan on doing anything as a result? We then stop the action halfway through. People usually want a break anyway, and as we have a snack and a drink, we hear the feedback from the observers and the interviewers. Based on this information we tweak the second half of the action. At the debrief after the action, we review this information again as we discuss what we learned that we might apply to future actions, and how we might use these insights to become better activists. This sort of feedback is essential, otherwise we are acting in the dark.

I remember the first time I started catching fish in large numbers. It was early June and schools had moved online because of the pandemic so we were out on Cape Cod a month earlier than usual. I was fishing my usual place on the jetty at the mouth of the harbor when I caught a striper. A small one, no more than 12 inches. It was my first fish of the season. Hell, it was my first fish since I had taken up fishing again. I tossed it back, and twenty minutes later I caught another, this one about 18 inches. Then another, and another, and another. Some small, some big (though none hitting the magic 28-35 inch window that would allow me to keep and eat it). This catching streak went on for a couple of weeks. The jetty filled up with people who were also catching fish, and I was catching so many that I started wearing a rubber glove on my left hand so I could grab the slippery, spiny stripers, unhook them and get them back into the bay as quick as I could before casting out again.  Then one day, fishing at the same place, at the same tide, I caught just a few, then the next day only a couple, then one, and then none. Every few days for the rest of the summer I would head down to the bay to fish. It was still a beautiful place to cast out and unwind, even more so since I was now often the only person fishing, and every once in a great while I’d catch some errant striper who had lost its way, but the fish had moved on.

Being an activist means accepting that there will be times of great activity and times when it seems like nothing is happening at all. One of the byproducts of having been an activist for most of my adult life is living through several of these cycles. I became an activist during an upsurge of organizing on college campuses aimed at divesting from firms that did business with the apartheid regime of South Africa. The activist enthusiasm soon spilled into other areas. As my fellow students and I looked closer to home, we began protesting the budget cuts that were just beginning to devastate the public university system. At the State University of New York, we occupied buildings in the state capital, then at the City University, we took to the streets. It was exciting and exhilarating, I felt like I was on the cusp of something. And then nothing: the protests fizzled and students graduated.  Next, there was the upsurge in angry, joyful, creative activism that surrounded ACT-UP as new (and old) activists flooded the streets, occupied pharmaceutical buildings, and staged brilliant media zaps to bring attention to the AIDS crises, the government’s inactivity and the profiteering health care system. It seemed like every day I was in a meeting or at a demonstration. And then the calm. After this there were upsurges of protests around the wars in Iraq and the power of non-representative global organizations like the WTO, there was Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, and then Black Lives Matter, twice over. Each time it felt to me as if everything was going to be different, the world was going to change, and every time the upsurge that flowed so powerfully eventually ebbed. But each tide left some change in its wake, and I know that it will always flow again.

My best days fishing are often those when the beginnings and endings are not in my control. I begin when the sun rises or the sun sets, and I fish until the fish stop biting and go to the deeper, cooler levels of the lake or it gets too dark to see where I am casting. These permeable boundaries are radically different than the rest of my hyper-scheduled, time-managed life: get up at 5:00, make coffee and respond to e-mail. At 6:00, wake up my wife and kids and bring them coffee and tea. 6:15, walk the dog. 6:30, pack school lunches. 7:30, be in my office at my desk. 8:00, prep for lectures. 9:30-10:45, teach, and so on, throughout the day, with time carefully allotted in  hour and minute blocks. (I even have an allotted time for napping: between 12:30-1:00 precisely, directly after my 30-minute lunch.) When I am out fishing, on those days when I don’t just have a “two hour allotted fishing time,” segmented time dissolves deliciously into flowing time, where beginning and endings become more flexible.

After suffering through too many endless meetings and dispiriting actions, I’ve come to realize that one of the worst things an activist can do is be too flexible about time. When meetings don’t end on time, or no time is set for their ending, people inevitably start slipping out the back to get on with their lives and in the end, the only people left and making decisions are people who have no other lives to get on to. Hardly the people you want leading the revolution. Actions also need clear beginnings and endings.  Again, in order for everyday people to take part in protests, they need to fit it into their everyday schedules, otherwise, it will only be the schedule-less (aka students, bohemians, and trust funders) who will take part. Action endings are also critical. I can not tell you home many protests I’ve witnessed — and how many I helped plan — whose ending was scripted not by the activists ourselves, but instead by the police breaking up the march or hauling away the protestors. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done about this, and sometimes, as with planned Civil Disobedience, this police “ending” is part of our narrative,  but usually it’s the result of us just deciding to go on as long as the authorities will let us, which means letting them write the conclusion of our story And, in this ending, they always win.

Yesterday I had a singularly unproductive day fishing. I tried moving around the lake, fishing with different lures and bait, and targeting the different species of fish I knew were there. Not a bite. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. It was frustrating, I only had one day off to fish the entire week and here I was repeatedly casting out and reeling in, or patiently waiting to feel a tug on my line, catching nothing. But I’ve had many such unproductive days before and will have many after, and I reminded myself of the hackneyed, but nonetheless true, adage: “It’s called fishing, not catching.” Even on a good day of catching, the majority of your time is spent just fishing. And on a bad day, like yesterday, it is all fishing not catching. To stay fishing, day after day, through good days and bad ones, you have to learn to love the process: looking over the water, strategizing the shoreline, psychologizing the fish, casting and retrieving, the waiting. With luck and skill, the process might yield a product and you’ll catch a fish, but if you don’t enjoy the process of fishing itself you might as well quit because the ratio between fishing and catching is mighty slim.

As an activist, you rarely win. You can work for months, even years, on a campaign and not see any result. Even when you win and a new policy is enacted, or a fair contract signed, or there’s a palpable shift in public opinion, it can all be undone in a moment and you have to start again. To remain an activist over the long haul, you have to learn to love the work itself. This means making the work lovable: activism should be about pleasure, play, and celebration more than the sacrifice, seriousness, and righteousness that too often characterizes the practice of doing activism. Embracing the process also means acknowledging the long game. Yes, we must keep our eyes on the prize, and have faith that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but we also need to recognize that the path is really long.  Most of all, learning to love the process of activism entails a certain separation from its product. This is what my friend, the master activist L.A. Kauffman, once called “existential activism.” You don’t act to shape and change the world for the surety of any end result, but because to not act would mean ceasing to have a meaningful existence. It’s called activism, not winning.