Most people dream about sleeping in on weekends or vacations, I think about getting up early and going fishing. I set my alarm to 4:30, drag myself out of bed, brew a cup of coffee, take the dog for a brief walk and then get into my old jeep or on the city subway and head out to my favorite fishing spot just as the sun rises. Other anglers I know are evening people, arriving on the beach or pond just as the sun sets and then staying there, in the pitch black, when other folks are home snuggling up to watch TV or out partying on the town. There’s good reason to get up early or go out late: mornings and evenings tend to be good fishing times, the water is cooler, bugs and baitfish are active, all which means the bigger fish are biting as well. But sometimes fishing at these opportune times is impossible. I need to get the kids up early and fed and off to school with packed lunches. Or my family intervenes in the evening, insisting that sit-down dinner gets priority. And so I go fishing at mid-day, during my lunchtime, sneaking in 45 minutes to an hour with my rod and reel. It’s not ideal, and my yield of fish suffers, but fishing when I do have time is better than not fishing at all.
Activists often feel pressure to be active all the time. There’s no doubt that if we were all active all the time more activism would happen and, presumably, more social change would be the result. But there’s a problem with this equation: it doesn’t factor in people’s lives. Being active all the time is a certain path to activist burnout. I can’t tell you how many gung-ho, married-to-the-revolution activists I know who found 24-7 activism unsustainable, quit and then retreated from politics (I’ve done it myself a few times now). This push for total commitment also limits the type of people who become activists, with the ideal profile being someone with no job, no family, and no social life outside of activism. Recognizing these problems, my old Lower East Side Collective comrade L.A. Kauffman came up with an idea for something we called “scalable commitment.” Every flyer we produced and handed out had information on the issue on one side, and on the other had a list of things people could do — given their time and energy. These ranged from 15 minutes a week (usually call a local politician) to an hour a week (write letters and make posts) to a few hours a week (attend a protest) to a lot of time on their hands (come join us!). The brilliance of this idea is that it didn’t expect a full-time commitment to activism, yet gave everyone an opportunity to take meaningful action…when they could.