Sometimes you need to fish where you are, so make the best of it. After a long, dry summer, the stripers are biting like crazy off the ocean beaches and the bluefish are schooling in the bay and fattening up for winter. And I am back in NYC, hearing all this from my weekly fishing report from Cape Cod. School is back in session, my calendar is filled up with classes and meetings and papers to be graded and I simply can’t justify making the five plus hour drive to Cape Cod. So I get up early on Saturday morning, take the subway uptown and fish for carp and catfish with frozen corn and balls of bread in the man-made lake at the center of Central Park. It’s not very beautiful (plastic bags and other garbage wash around in the murky water at my feet) and I can’t eat the fish (not only illegal, but fish fed on plastic bags cannot be tasty) but it’s where I can fish right now.
Activism begins at home. The temptation is to go to the flashpoints: the mass demonstrations at global economic summits and the sites of unrest around the country. This is where the action is, and you and your issue are guaranteed media coverage. But this can also lead to a sort of activist tourism: dropping in for a few days, seeing the sites, meeting up with fellow activists, tussling with the authorities, and then moving on. This is not how social change often happens. Social change happens, and more important is sustained, because of long-term efforts and deep relationships. These things make up the firm foundations necessary to challenge old institutions and build new ones. It’s easiest, and most effective, to do this steady work where you already live and have friends. While the big, flashy activist actions get a lot of attention and press, small actions, close to home, matter, especially when done by a lot of people as part of a social movement, because every place is home to someone.