One of the things that makes fishing so enjoyable for me is that it is not activism. It is also not my work as a teacher or my career as an academic, and it is not being a good husband and father.  When I am on the water, looking for a fish rising or a good obstruction under which some fish might be hiding, pole in my hands waiting for the quick pull that signals a fish, my mind both focusses and drifts. Like participating in a Japanese tea ceremony, I am simultaneously completely in the moment and a million miles away. It would be easy to say that fishing is an escape from the responsibilities of my life, but that’s not entirely accurate. Fishing is not so much an escape as it is an addition to my life; it doesn’t take away from my other roles in life (though my family, editor, and comrades might disagree) but supplements them. The most obvious example of this being the words I am writing right now, but their are other compliments as well. After a few hours of fishing, I am less short with my kids, more generous with my wife, more serene at faculty meetings (dreaming of fish, rather than getting enraged at petty academic squabbles), and recharged enough to dive back into the anguish of the world and the activism that might change this world for the better. 

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”   — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels  

The best — and happiest — activists I know are not only good activists, but also good lovers, bothers, sisters, workers, dancers, musicians, gardeners, bakers, readers, runners, and, yes, hunters, anglers, shepherds, and critics.

 

This morning I went fishing in one of the nearby kettle ponds that were stocked with trout a few months ago by the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game. The temperature had dropped during the night and as I got up the ground was crinkly white with frost. I put on a lot of layers, topped with an old Irish fisherman’s sweater that is usually too warm to wear, wound a scarf around my neck and pulled on a wool cap, and went out to the shed to grab my gear and make my way to the pond. I parked my jeep by the roadside pull-out as the sun was just coming up, walked the quarter-mile through the woods to the water’s edge, kicked off my boots and pulled on my waders and walked out into the pond. And froze. And caught no fish. And froze some more. And still no fish. If this were an isolated incident I might be tempted to go out again tomorrow, but over these past few weeks the days have been getting shorter, the weather getting colder, and I’ve been steadily catching less fish. Instead, I think I’ll spend tomorrow packing up my gear for the season. I’ll rinse off my lures and rub a little oil on the hooks so they don’t rust, wipe down my poles with mild soapy water, grease my reels and let out the drag so the springs can become unsprung, and organize my tackle boxes. I’ve already started making a list of lures and flies I want to buy over the next few months,  I’ve begun searching Ebay for an off-shore rod for my NYC pier fishing, and I plan on watching a lot of fishing videos on YouTube this Winter to finally learn how to really fly fish. I’m already looking forward to Spring.

 

My father was 84 years old when he died and for most of those years he was an activist. He began his life as an activist in 1948 after he got out of the Army, went to college on the GI Bill, and got involved in protesting the then newly formed Apartheid regime in South Africa. In the 1950s he registered voters in the Southern United States, in the 60s, as a young minister, he helped organize the second Selma march, in the 70s he was a local secretary of the ACLU (whose work with the Black Panthers got our home phones tapped), in the 80s he blockaded munitions trains carrying weapons headed to Central America, in the 90 and into the new century he led interfaith peace protests in a small town in the Pacific Northwest where he retired. At his funeral, person after person stood up and testified to the inspiring example of a life of tireless activism, but I knew the secret of my father’s lifetime of commitment: he took breaks. Regularly. Growing up, I remember whole stretches of time when my father devoted himself to raising a family or working on his career or simply relaxing. As I grew into becoming an activist myself, I carried his lesson: breaks are as important as activity if you plan on being active for a long time.

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. 

As much time as I spend thinking about what a fish might think, I have to acknowledge that 1) I will never know what a fish thinks, and 2) fish probably don’t think much at all. Fish react. In all my time fishing, I have never witnessed a fish pondering. Yes, sometimes they are slow to bite — there’s nothing slower than a carp opening its mouth to slowly suck in the bread ball floating on the surface of the water, and yes, fish like to nibble and taste when fishing with live bait, but my hunch is that what looks like thinking to me is merely reacting to various stimuli like smell, taste, and movement. Often they don’t take the time at all. If fish are feeding and you see a rise and can plop your lure down in the middle of the commotion fast enough, then chances are good that you’ll get an immediate hit. All of this makes sense if you think about it. FIsh live in a fast, competitive world. They need to eat things that are trying to elude them and, in turn, elude those bigger fish (or fisherman) who are trying to eat them. Hesitate a minute, and your meal goes by, is snatched by another, or you turn into a meal yourself. To survive, fish learn to react: a silver flash means a minnow, a fuzzy something is a nymph, a white underbelly with protruding floating on the surface is a tasty frog. Immediate reactions, not contemplation, means survival. Besides, fish brains are just not that big.

A lot of activism is based upon the belief that humans are rational beings who think and then act.  Traditional democratic theory is based on this belief, and it is understandable that those of us who would like our society to become more democratic also operate under this assumption. The problem is this: we don’t think the way we think we think. In fact, most of the time we are not thinking at all, we are just reacting to stimuli based upon patterns we’ve established and beliefs we already hold. This is why no amount of reasonable facts articulated in clever op-eds or laid out on well-designed flyers is going to change people’s minds. If they don’t fit with what we already believe we ignore them, dismiss them, or twist them to make them fit. This is what cognitive scientists call confirmation bias.  So what can activists do? The first thing is to figure out the patterns that guide people’s reactions then fit the facts we want people to understand into the stories they already tell themselves. We can also become really good storytellers ourselves, creating new patterns into which new facts can fit.  Finally, we can disrupt old patterns though actions that defy easy classification and immediate reaction. Take a protest, for instance. When you see a protest you know what it is. If you like protests and support the cause then you’re all for it. If you don’t, then you immediately reject it. In either case, there’s not much thinking going on since you know the story already. But when a protest looks like a street party as Reclaim the Streets protests in London did, or resembles a children’s dance recital (with gas masks) like a protest staged by environmentalists in Chongqing, then it slows down reaction time and thinking has a chance. People can learn to think before reacting. We have big brains.

It’s Thanksgiving and I’ve returned to fish for bass in the pond where I fished all summer. When the days and water were warm I was killing it with a purplish Senko worm with a  bright yellow tail. Cast it out, let it fall slowly, and boom: bass on the hook. Today, I get nothing. For an hour and a half, I work the shoreline, fishing in all my favorite spots, casting out my bait in all the same places, and…nothing. Looking at my watch, I realize I have only 30 minutes until I’m due back at home to make lunch for the boys so I tie on a froggy-looking crankbait lure that I’ve never caught anything with. Three casts in and I have a 16-inch largemouth bass on my hook. One thing that keeps fishing interesting is that it’s always changing. As the weather varies, the tides shift, and the seasons change, where you’ve been fishing and what you’ve been using to catch the fish no longer work. The fish are somewhere else, or they are attracted to something else. You can keep on doing what you’ve been doing before, but you probably won’t catch much. Or you can break tradition, adapt to the changed conditions, and try something new. You’ll likely have to try many new somethings before finding a new tradition, but it’s worth the disruption, uncertainty, and experimentation once you start catching fish again.

One of my favorite activist photographs is of a young woman wearing a hijab and a T-shirt that says: “This is what a Feminist looks like.” The image reminds me that we shouldn’t get hung up on the way things once were, but instead look to how things are now. Activists need to be willing to break traditions, not just with old tactics as I’ve written about before, but with their very sense of identity. The history of feminism(s) in the US is a good example of this. In the “first wave” of feminism, at the turn of the last century, activists drew upon patriarchal notions of “true womanhood” in a strategic move to make their case for voting rights. Dressing all in white, carrying American flags, and sometimes pushing baby carriages, Suffragettes staged massive marches, rallies, and other spectacles to show their strength and refute the anti-feminist imagery of feminists as “mannish.” Fast forward a half-century, and “second wave” feminists are protesting against this culture of womanhood by throwing mops, lipstick and high heels into a “Freedom Trash Can” at a Miss America pageant. (Bra-burning, it turns out, is largely a myth.) A few years later, lesbian and feminists-of-color challenge “universalist” notions of women’s liberation as cultural, racially, and sexually specific, and make the case for what we now call intersectional politics. And, in more recent times, “third wave” feminists reject what they perceive as the overly censorious culture of feminism and re-appropriate lipstick and girly dresses, and yes, wear hijabs. Through all these permutations, the call for respect, dignity, and power remains the same, but what these demands sound like, and what the people making these demands look like, have changed. It’s the willingness to break tradition that’s one of the reasons why feminist activism is still so active at a time when labor activism — still waking up from its self-image of a White, male factory worker with burly forearms — struggles to redefine itself. 

Fishing, particularly freshwater fishing, means snagging.  You cast too close to the log sticking out into the water under which you just know fish are lurking and your line gets wrapped around the log. Or you cast into overhead branches, or get hooked on an underwater obstruction.  You pull, try a couple of different angles, and pull again, but sometimes (oftentimes) the snag just won’t get unsnagged and you need to cut your line. Look carefully and you’ll see you aren’t the only one. Hanging from trees, or tracing lines below water, you’ll spot cut lines from other anglers and at the end of the fishing season at my favorite pond the shoreline is just littered with the stuff.  Left behind lines and lures are not only ugly but dangerous. Old ladies swim the circumference of my pond for their morning exercise and kids who splash in the shallows, and my pond is home to birds, turtles and, of course, fish — all of whom can get tangled in the line and cut by the hooks. So every once in a while, wearing swim trunks in the Summer and waterproof bib waders in Spring and Fall, I wade out to the weed beds and jutting logs and clean up the mess. Sometimes I find still serviceable lures that I clean up and add to my collection (a Booyah pad crasher frog bait I found has become one of my favorites), but most of the time it’s just yards of line and rusted hooks. Although like to think of my favorite fishing spots as mine, I also recognize that they’re not really “mine,” they’re something we all share.

Whose streets? Our streets!  It’s a classic activist refrain, one that I’ve chanted thousands of times myself. It’s a statement of power and agency: taking over a street, or a square, or a public space with our bodies and our voices from the authorities who are trying to stop us. Yet, it’s not only “our” streets, nor are they “their” streets — they are shared streets. I remember once doing a training action with a group of West African activists in a working-class, market neighborhood in Accra, the capital of Ghana. The first thing the young activists did when we arrived was to visit all the shopkeepers in the surrounding area to let them know what we were doing: a street theatre protest), why we were doing it: to protest governmental corruption, and how long we would be doing it: 2hrs.  They did not ask for their permission but, as they explained it to me: we are coming into their space, where they live and work, and since we are going to cause a disruption it was a simple matter of respect to let them know what was going on.  (This consideration was not extended to the police or authorities, who would have shut down the action immediately.) Not everyone they talked to was happy, nor did everyone approve of the political message we were trying to convey, but they did appreciate the gesture and as the activists performed their action, I noticed several locals coming out from behind their market stalls to watch, smile, and nod their heads in agreement.  

The anglers I fish alongside on the Christopher Street pier approach fishing differently than I do. They arrive with multiple poles, all of them heavy power, which they line up across the side railing with little bells on top that tingle when a fish gets hooked. Their reels are loaded with high pound test monofilament, and often even higher test braided line, so they can safely haul the fish up to the pier from the water 15 feet below. For bait, they favor small, live crab: the favorite food of the Tautogs we are all hoping to catch. I, on the other hand, fish with light tackle and line, usually only one rod, and bait my hooks with frozen shrimp left over from a dinner I never got around to making. We take different approaches because we are after different things. The other anglers do what they do because they are after food for themselves and their families, or maybe to even sell to a local fish market. Success means catching and landing a lot of fish. I, on the other hand, am fishing for the excitement of sensing the hit when a fish takes the bait, having my rod double, and then struggling to bring the fish in. (I don’t eat the fish I catch but give them to my fellow anglers who, in turn, supply me with crabs for bait. We seem to have come to a tacit agreement that I now work for them.) For all our differences, there is also a lot we share: grumbling when the tide is running too fast under the dock and our rigs get swept out, posing for phone photos with a big catch, and, of course, the tedious wait for a bite. But because what we are after is different, what we consider a good day of fishing differs too.

It used to be that just acting up as an activist was enough for me now that I work with activists to make them better activists I’ve been thinking a lot about what separates good activism from not-so-good activism. When I first began assessing activism I was pretty dogmatic: activism which achieved concrete, capital P political objectives was good, anything that didn’t was bad. It didn’t hurt that with such clear demonstrable goals, success or failure was relatively easy to measure. But through a series of eye-opening experiences, and difficult conversations with other activists who don’t always think like me, I’ve started to see other, often more internal and invisible, markers of activist success. Things like instilling confidence in individuals, building community within a group, or enabling envisioning in the activists themselves are objectives I now take seriously in my evaluation. But the most important thing I’ve learned is that any assessment of “good activism” must be done relative to the intent of the activist. Once everyone is clear on this, it’s really a matter of addressing a few simple questions: What do we want to have happen? What actually happened? And, because activism is not just an event but a process: Knowing what we know now, what would we do differently?

When the fish are biting I stop noticing everything else around me. My eyes are focussed on my line and my hands are sensitive to the least little pull on the pole. I’m in the moment completely. When the fish are not biting, when they are ignoring my fancy lures and could care less about my elegant casts, the world comes back in. At first, all I wanted to do was to get back to that peak state of fish-catching, but lately I have been enjoying being just as present in the scenery that surrounds me.  Watching the sunrise over an oceanside beach or set over the bay. Noticing the osprey as she flaps her giant wings and glides in big loops overhead or the resident snapping turtle making his early morning rounds of the circumference of the pond (uncomfortably near my bare legs). Letting myself be amazed by hundreds of pogies swirling in an underwater moshpit just yards offshore. Being in the moment, whatever that moment has to offer, has extended the pleasure I get in fishing from a few highs to the entire experience.

Like catching fish, victories in activism are few and far between. This is why it is important to not just learn to live with the process of activism — the meetings, the strategy sessions, the actions, the postmortems — but to learn to love it. This can be hard sometimes, as anyone who has sat through a multi-hour planning meeting can attest. It’s easy to focus on the droning self-important pontification and the excruciating procedures of democracy and wish it was all over and done with so we could just move on and get out on the street.  But being stuck in a meeting wishing and hoping you could be somewhere else means missing what is there at the moment. There is real beauty in a group of people coming together and sharing their ideas in order to change the world and it’s important to notice and appreciate this as well. In the words of LSD-laced professor turned yogi Ram Dass: “Be Here Now.” Being present, however, does not mean being passive. We can, and should, change norms and enact rules to amplify the beauty of creative companionship and minimize the drag of endless meetings and make the whole process of activism more lovable.

It’s getting colder and the Largemouth Bass and monster Carp I usually fish for in Central Park have gone to the bottom of the lake so I head out around the shoreline to look for the smaller brown bullhead catfish and bluegills that I know are still biting. I find them under the spreading branches of a willow tree hanging over the water just east of the big fountain on the lower end of the lake. I first try some small feathery jigs that panfish often go for, but after a dozen casts and a lot of snags on underwater willow branches, I abandon all pretense and tie a #8 octopus hook on my line a foot or so below a bobber, mash some white bread into a ball around the hook (it seems as if everything in this urban lake: the carp, the catfish, the turtles, the ducks, the mallards, everything but the bass, eats white bread), and toss it out to semi-submerged brush pile. Within a few minutes my bobber gets pulled underwater, I set the hook, and pull in a little bluegill. A few minutes later I catch another, and then another. Catching the bluegills isn’t as much fun as hooking a nice bass and watching it take a flip out of the water, or feeling the power of a big carp as it makes a run to the middle of the lake, but catching the wee ones keeps me fishing.

Often it seems like protests are organized without much thought to who they are for, or against.  The default audience usually seems to be the activists themselves, or maybe expands to include passersby, “the media,”  and usually the police. This, albeit often unconscious, choice of audience colors the content and form of the action. Chanting self-righteous slogans feels pretty good to yourself, it’s pretty easy to piss off cops and attract the attention of passersby with a raucous street protest, and doing something controversial is sure to attract the media, and but are these the individuals and institutions who have the power to make the changes we want to see? Experienced activists do something called “power mapping.”  A power map charts out who has the power to make changes, and who has the power to change them. If, for example, you want to change policing then who can change training, policy, and recruitment? If it’s an appointed official, who are they accountable to? If it’s an elected official, who constitutes the base of their constituency?  These are the folks we need to be targeting. Power mapping reminds us that it’s the big fish that we are after, but it also tells us that sometimes the way to get to them is through little fish.

I remember my first few weeks fishing a small kettle pond I had discovered not far from my house on Cape Cod. Using a pumpkin-green Senko worm with a chartreuse tail rigged weightless Texas-style I was catching 3-5 nice size bass on average, every day. Cast it out, let it slowly sink, get a hit, and reel ‘em in. Easy. Then I started hooking the monsters: 8-10 pound bass from the middle of the pond, and I just as quickly lost them as they thrashed, lept, ran for the deep, and snapped my line. One day, as I was fighting what I could only assume was the biggest bass in the entire lake, a fellow angler yelled out across the pond: “loosen your drag!” At that moment I realized that all this time I had the drag on my reel tightened down so hard that there was no give whatsoever. When a 10-pound bass took a run, it was a simple matter of physics that my 6-pound test line would snap. I quickly reached down to let off the drag and my line started screaming out, pulling yard after yard off my reel. When the fish stopped running I quickly reeled the line back in. This went on for the next ten minutes: run and reel, over and over, tightening the drag here, loosening it there, until the fish (and I) were tired and I could safely land my monster bass. Later, I came to realize that there are a lot of factors involved in setting the proper drag: the strength of your line and whether the fish has a soft or hard mouth, but that day I learned a very important lesson about resistance: you set your drag too high and you’ll snap your line, but if you set it too low the fish will take it all and you’ll be left with an empty reel. You need to always be adjusting your drag

Activists, young activists in particular, can be uncompromising. The only victory is total victory, and unless your adversary capitulates to every one of your demands, then the campaign is a loss. Consequently, uncompromising activists chalk up a lot of losses. Mainstream political operatives, particularly moderate ones, do the opposite: they give away everything at the first sign of resistance and are left with nothing at the end. The trick to being an effective activist is to gauge how much resistance you need to apply to get the result you need.  Give your adversary too much line and you’ll give away all your power. Don’t give an inch and they’ll dig in their heels.  This calculation depends upon your strength, and it depends on your adversary. Potential allies need a little room to play, unyielding enemies need to be met with maximum resistance. As I write these words the current President, who lost both the electoral and popular vote, is making baseless claims about stolen elections and demanding that the vote go his way. His opponents, who in elections past have been prone to capitulate at the first sign, have decided not to give an inch. It’s the right amount of resistance. The outgoing president has a hard mouth.