Almost all of the fish I catch I release back into the water. There are all sorts of reasons I do this. Freshwater bass stink up the kitchen when you cook them and taste like mud, the saltwater striped bass I catch never seem to fit into the 28-35 inch “keeper” window allowed in Massachusetts, and by law, all fish caught in New York City parks have to be released and, to be honest, I would not relish eating a fish whose main diet consists of white bread and plastic garbage. To make the fish easier to release I replace treble hooks with single ones and then clip the barbs on all my hooks so I can slide the fish off the hook and into the water quickly. I remove the middle hook on large, three hook lures. (Since predator fish strike at the head or the tail of a baitfish, the only function of the middle hook on a lure is to rip open the fish’s cheek or stab your thumb as you try and remove it.) And I use a silicon mesh net so the freshwater fish with delicate skin are better protected. Reducing the number of hooks and clipping the barbs means sometimes losing a fish I would have otherwise caught, but that’s part of the game for me. Every once in a while I keep and eat a fish, mainly the tasty lake trout I catch in early spring before the water heats up and drives them into the shallows and the bluefish whose oily meat is just perfect for smoking. But pan-fried trout and home-smoked bluefish are special treats, and most of the fish I eat comes from the store. The commercial fisherman of Cape Cod who supply my store-bought fish, the older Chinese men on the pier next to me who fish the Hudson River for dinner, the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama, and Warm Springs peoples who have to fight to keep their tribal fishing rights on the Columbia River where my parents retired. They all keep what they catch.
In our workshop, we have an opening exercise where we ask people to introduce themselves by telling the group how they got involved in activism. The point of the exercise is for people to get to know each other, but also to reveal — through example– that traditional activist outreach efforts: flyers, door knocking, petitions, and public meetings are not how they themselves got involved. Their stories, as different as they are, share several traits: they are experiential, they are emotional, and they are personal. In brief: they are affective experiences, and the very sorts of experiences we hope to generate through creative activism. By way of example, I usually begin with myself: I grew up in an activist family with a social justice minister for a father. But I was also an angry kid, upset by the inequities and vacuity of the world around me, and my father’s Christian brand of peace and love activism didn’t speak to me. Then, sometime around 1979, I heard my first punk rock song, God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols, and while I couldn’t understand the words they were singing I knew that they, too, were pissed off at the world and that I wasn’t alone, and through punk rock I found activism. Once we were doing this exercise with a group of sex worker activists in South Africa. When it came time for one of them to tell her story of activist awakening, she stood up and said: “I am poor, black, queer, a woman, and a sex worker. There has never been a moment when I was not an activist.” I realized then, and have realized many times since then, that activism for me is a choice, and for her, and many of the activists I work with, it was not. Activism is survival. I can always walk away from activism, with a bad conscience, perhaps, but no deleterious impact on my life (in fact, my career prospects would likely improve). She can not. This is why it is all the more important that I don’t.