It’s always best to fish with bait that resembles what the fish like to eat, not what you think they should like to eat. In order to do this, you need to be a careful observer of the fish’s food environment. What baitfish are swimming in the shallows? What flies are hatching? At what stage of growth are the frogs? Tadpoles? Pollywogs? Full-grown froglets? Matching your bait to their food usually means catching more fish. The easiest way to make this match is to use whatever the fish are eating as live bait. However, this can be impractical at times (ever try to hook a dragonfly?) and since fishing with live bait usually entails a lot of just waiting while your bait twitches in the water, it’s pretty boring. It’s more fun to fish with artificial lures, and they make ones now that are “holographically printed” to look like exact copies of the bait they are supposed to replicate. I own a few myself, and they work well, but I’m pretty convinced that all that realism is more for my benefit than it is for the fish’s. The truth of the matter is that your lure does not need to look exactly like what it emulates. Flies are made of bird feathers and animal fur, Senko worms can have sparkles, poppers look like cigars. What matters most is that your lure captures the essence of the bait the fish are eating.
As an activist, it is important to understand what people like to do. As part of our activist trainings we take all the participants on a “culture outing.” Being earnest activists, they assume we are going to a poetry reading on the malaise of capitalist alienation or something similar. Instead, we take them to whatever non-activists are doing in their town on a Saturday night. We’ve gone to baseball games, dance clubs, tourist walks, gambling casinos, and blockbuster action movies. We have fun, and we watch other people having fun. Then, the next morning, we discuss why people love this pop-culture and how we might integrate some of what they love into our activism. Just because people love watching Fast and Furious movies, however, doesn’t mean we should all race muscle cars to our next protest. Yes, Fast and Furious is about fast cars, but it’s also about a multi-racial, non-biological, rebel “family” who fights the good fight against the powers-that-be. When you think about it, that’s not a bad public identity for an activist group to cultivate. By looking past the surface and deep into the DNA of popular culture we can find ways to make our activism something people like as well.