Author: activistangler

The first thing I do when I find a new place to fish is study the shoreline. When I first started fishing I’d just show up, cast out anywhere and catch nothing, then watch as other people reeled in fish after fish. Now I’ve learned to hold back and look. Where are the shady spots? The water lilies? What trees have fallen in at the pond’s edge that provide good cover for the fish?  If I am fishing surf side I look for sand bars and troughs and cuts where the big fish might be hunting baitfish. Studying the fish’s environment, and working with it instead of casting about blindly, means catching more fish.

The first rule of guerilla warfare is to know the terrain and use it to your advantage. For the Cuban revolutionaries, this meant knowing the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. For the Vietcong, it meant the jungles and deltas of Vietnam. Most activists won’t find themselves fighting in mountains or jungles, but the principle is sound. What is the environment you are operating within? In our activism training workshops, we spend an afternoon mapping out the terrain, filling up poster-size sheets of paper with details in the political, social, cultural, demographic, and even geographical topography. Even for those activists who have worked in the same area, on the same issue, for years, this mapping reveals features that they had overlooked. It’s only after we have cataloged and studied our terrain that we turn to strategy and tactics.

Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. 

– Jesus of Nazareth, recruiting anglers to be activists,  Matthew 4:19

For everything there is a season.  On Cape Cod, where I do much of my fishing, the legal season varies from fish to fish and whether you are fishing in freshwater or salt, but practically the fishing season lasts from early Spring to late Fall. My activism has seasons too, albeit on longer cycles. Every ten years or so I step back from day to day community building and troublemaking and take a breather. From my late teens to late twenties I was a campus activist, then ramped down to finish my dissertation and concentrate on my first teaching job. Over the next decade I worked as a community organizer in the Lower East Side, before putting activism on the back burner to raise a family and write a book about creative forms of activism. As our children got older, I took up activist politics again, this time as a trainer of artist-activists around the globe. After ten years as co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, I decided it was time for another break. The Center was in good hands, the world of activism was doing just fine without a middle-aged white man like myself front and center, and the COVID crises had forced me, my family, and the rest of the world into a state of quarantine. So I took up fishing.

When I was young I loved to go fishing. My mother would drop me off at a local reservoir or brackish estuary, and for hours I would cast my lures out into the water, waiting for a strike from a slippery eel or toothy snapper blue, but mostly relaxing into the rhythm of casting and retrieving. As a teenager, punk rock, skateboarding and sex seemed far more attractive than being covered with fish scales, so I stopped fishing. As I got older, other things took the place of skateboards and guitars and teenage dalliances, but I didn’t return to fishing for nearly four decades. The pandemic seemed like a perfect time to pick up rod and reel again. I needed a break from the stress of living during an unmanaged pandemic, I wanted time and space away from people where I didn’t have to worry about wearing a mask and getting too close, and I needed an escape from the burdens of being an activist at a time of political apocalypse. So I went fishing. Every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. Blissfully isolated on the tip of Cape Cod, I’d fish for smallmouth bass in the kettle ponds in the early mornings, then fish the ocean beaches for striped bass as the sun went down, and mid-day I’d cast off the harbor jetty as the “schoolies” made the run from the estuary to the bay as the tides turned.

After forty years, I had to re-teach myself how to fish, and so I approached the practice with what Zen masters call Beginner’s Mind. With no habits or tradition to fall back upon, every fish successfully caught or line hopelessly snarled, provided a clear lesson. With hours spent doing little more than casting and retrieving — actually catching fish being a fraction of the time spent fishing — I had a lot of time to think about these lessons I was learning. One of the things I thought a lot about was activism. Even on my political hiatus, I was still consulting on activist projects and as I gave advice on a global campaign for free vaccines, or an art project aimed at reintegrating formerly incarcerated people back into their communities, or using artistic activism as a way to fight corruption in the Western Balkans and West Africa, I found myself drawing from my fishing experiences.

Fishing, I discovered, has a lot to teach about the art of activism.