Fish stories are an integral part of fishing. Anglers love to tell one another about the fish we caught and the ones that got away, usually exaggerating the size and the weight and the duration of the fight in the telling. It’s a way of bonding…and bragging. It’s also sometimes pretty annoying, especially when you’ve been fishing for hours and aren’t catching anything and someone comes up and tells you that you should have been there last night, or earlier that morning, or last Thursday when the fish were biting like mad. But what’s more interesting than the stories that anglers tell are the ones they don’t: tales of the hours put in at river’s edge catching nothing. The time spent scanning the water for rises that might, just might, mean that a hungry fish is down there under the surface. The repetitive, meditative state of casting and retrieving over and over again. Fish stories are all about the glorious event: catching the fish; they are rarely about the necessary process: fishing.
The tip of Cape Cod is famous as a respite for radicals. The journalist Jack Reed owned the house down the road from mine and then sold it to Margaret Sanger, the reproductive rights activist, when he left for Russia to join the revolution. Noam Chomsky spends his summers in the next town over, and much of the conversation at many of the dinner parties I attend revolves around reminiscing about the Madison, Wisconsin chapter of the SDS. We have a running contest in my family whenever I give a talk about contemporary activism at the local library: how many minutes will pass in the Q&A session before someone prefaces their question with, “In the 60s, we….” (15 minutes was the longest.) Activists are forever telling activists what it was like at the Selma March on 65, or the student uprisings in 68, or battling the WTO in Seattle in 99, or Occupy Wall Street in 2011, or the beginnings of Black Lives Matter in Ferguson in 2014 or…. Invariably it was more exciting, more effective, and all-around better than it is now. What gets lost in these stories of spectacular actions is all the hard, boring, unexciting work that went into making the event. What’s also overlooked is how each of these movements built for the next. Civil rights and anti-colonial struggles in the 1950s and early 60s made way for the student protests of the late 60s, many of the core group of activists who began Occupy Wall Street first met during the alternative globalization movement a dozen years prior, and BLM is built upon the Black Power movement which from the Civil Rights Movement, which arose out of … and so on back through history. There are peaks in activism: the marches and protest that make it into the history books and are retold while slurping local oysters at dinners on decks on the outer Cape, but you need to be active all the time, even when it seems as if nothing is happening, if these notable actions are to happen in the first place.