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.