When the striped bass are running, my local jetty is lined with anglers. We are respectful of one another and try to give each other room so our lines don’t cross, yet it is still obvious when someone has caught a fish, and just as obvious — to me, at least — when I have not. In this situation, it’s hard for me not to feel jealous, competitive, and then a bit resentful of these weekenders catching all these fish at my local spot. Who are they, my mind complains to me, to be catching all my fish and leaving me with none? All of this is ridiculous. While in the grand scheme, there is a finite number of fish in the sea and the fishing stocks are being depleted, the culprits are climate change and capitalism in the form of huge fishing industry trawlers scooping up fish in international water, not a few weekend anglers. On the jetty, some people catch more and some less, but this is just a matter of having the right lure, a certain amount of skill, and luck. As people start reeling in stripers, and I’m still waiting for a hit, I just remind myself that fishing is not a competition. When the schoolies are running there’s enough fish for everyone and all of us end up catching something.
As an activist, it’s hard not to get jealous of others’ successes. I know I’m not supposed to — Solidarity Forever! — but still, it happens: while my downtown community activist group is struggling to rack up a single win, a group in the Bronx makes the papers by saving their community garden; when my non-profit is rejected for its umpteenth grant, we hear of the Ford Foundation making a three-year commitment to supporting a friend’s organization. Why are they succeeding and we are not? And then I step back and take a long view. Over the long arc of my activist life, I have had successes as well as failures — as have my friend’s organization, and likely that group in the Bronx as well. But more importantly, if I step back even further I can start to see their successes as mine too. Our tactics might differ: I work with creative forms of activism, others use legal or electoral means, and our objectives may vary: lately, I’ve been working on anti-corruption campaigns while admiring (okay, a bit jealous) of my friend’s work on the environment, but in the big picture we are all working toward the same goals: a more just and sustainable world. “Diversity of Tactics” has become the norm at most large-scale, multi-group protests these days. At its worst, this means marching peacefully with thousands while watching a small group of black-clad protestors smash a Starbucks window and set fire to an upside-down American flag knowing which image will make the nightly news, but at its best diversity of tactics is s a recognition that there are many approaches to activism and that no one way is the best. In fact, it’s the diversity of many approaches that is the best approach,