Fishing is largely a solitary activity. That’s why I gravitated towards it as an introverted pre-teen and then again during a time of social distancing during a pandemic. Yet some of the best times I’ve had fishing are with other people: dropping lines on a party-boat with my family, taking my younger son and his friend who had never been fishing before out on a rainy, windy early morning to try our luck surf fishing and then going to a warm diner afterword, or an evening excursion with an old activist friend who was in town, talking and casting, casting and talking, as we walked along the jetty. I never seem to catch much when I fish with other people, but that’s not really the point, the point is that we have fun. We laugh at our bad luck, we talk about politics and past campaigns, or we just stand silently together, drinking beer, as the sun sets and the sky turns red over the tip of the Cape.
Activism is inherently collective, but not always social. We work together, but sometimes forget to enjoy one another’s company. This separation between our activist lives and our social lives often results in individual burnout as we start to feel as if we “have no life.” It also causes problems for recruitment since others, who would like to have a social life, want nothing to do with us. Losing people and not gaining others, the movement or campaign withers and dies. It doesn’t have to be this way. A community activist group I was once part of on the Lower East Side of New York City had multiple working groups: one worked on gentrification and rent control, another on protecting community gardens, a third on policing and the then mayor’s “quality of life” campaign, and so on. And then there was The Ministry of Love. The sole purpose of this group was to make sure we had fun: it insisted we hold our meet in back rooms of bars and cafes and move to the front and hang out after the meetings were over, it organized trips to baseball games and threw dance parties, and The Ministry of Love made sure that no one ever came to a meeting without being greeted or left without feeling, well, loved. As we grew as an organization, gained more members, racked up more victories (and sustained more losses), we came to realize that it was this playgroup that made all the other working groups possible.