“Give a person a fish and they eat for the day. Teach a person to fish and they eat for life.” After a 40 year hiatus, I had to (re)learn how to fish. I had a lot of teachers: there were the anglers on the Outer Cape beaches who would tell me what popper to be casting out into the surf, the old men on Manhattan piers who taught me the best technique to hook a crab for Tautog bait, and then there were my senseis on YouTube: an entire amateur academy online who schooled me in everything from the right technique to work a rubber worm in the lily pads to how to boil up my own catfish bait. But mainly I taught myself how to fish through a lot of observation and reflection, and a lot of trial and error (emphasis on the latter). I discovered that the catfish in Central Park Lake really only eat bread balls because that’s what the tourists feed the ducks and turtles. I found out that hooking a rubber worm in the middle, “wacky style,” may catch more bass, but it also means a lot more swallowed hooks and injured fish. And I also found out that when the fish are biting you can cast out almost anything into the surf and you’ll get a hit. Every once in a while I’ll see a novice angler casting out near to me. Usually, I’ll go over teach them as others have taught me: give them a few pointers and offer some encouragement. But I also know that if they are going to fish for life, they are going to have to teach themselves.
For the past decade, I’ve trained people on how to be more creative activists. The easiest way for me to do this is to do what I’ve seen other teachers do (or what I’ve done when I am feeling lazy or rushed): teach people to use a particular tactic or strategy, advising them to do this and do that, essentially: teaching them to do what I would do. This might make for a good action, for one time, but it won’t make for a good activist. To teach people how to become good activists necessitates stepping back from techniques and teaching the underlying principles and philosophies of activism, and demonstrating through case studies and historical examples what good activism looks like. This knowledge is not provided as a blueprint to recreate a style of activism already created but meant as tools and inspiration to build new creations. In the end, I try to teach activists to teach themselves. To use what they have learned from me, yes, but more importantly, to learn from their own past histories and current practices, their commitments and their creativities, the signs, symbols, and stories of the cultures in which they work, and put all of this into their activism to create something new. When this happens I know they will be an activist for life.