Discarded champagne bottles from all-night spontaneous street parties overflow garbage cans as I ride through the streets in the early morning hours to the Christopher Street pier to go fishing for Tautog. Parking my Citibike, I take my place at pier’s edge amongst the usual crew of Chinese anglers who greet me with head nods and even a few warm hellos.  The water is glassy calm with a strong outgoing tide which, as a passerby who stops to chat points out, is a pretty good metaphor for this momentous day. The fish, however, don’t seem to notice any difference. I bait my hook as I always do with shrimp, using a “fish-finder” jig with a 1 oz. weight to get me to the bottom (with the tide as strong as it was heavier would have been better but it’s all I have), and I catch — and don’t catch — about the same amount of Tautog as always. It’s a pretty typical day of fishing. Except that the tangles in my line are a little less frustrating, the boredom of watching and waiting for the tip of my rod to bend or bob that comes with bottom fishing is a little less boring, and the sun that rises slowly over the Hudson River seems just a little bit sunnier.

I had a long, difficult, and rewarding conversation with my friend and comrade Marlène yesterday. She was upset about a meeting we were both in the night before; upset that the mood was overly celebratory. I reminded her that it’s an old organizer’s trick to celebrate victories even when they are sometimes inconsequential and incomplete. The great trainer Saul Alinsky advised picking campaigns you knew you could win easily as a way to build up morale and convince people they had the power to change things. Once your group had a sense of agency, he argued, you could take on greater objectives. She reminded me that as an immigrant woman of color, people like her endured injustice and suffered trauma long before the current president took office and would likely continue to do so long after, regardless of the fact that the vice president was now a woman of color and daughter of immigrants. We listened to each other and learned from one another. In the end,  we both agreed that capturing the White House made the day-in, day-out work of organizing and activism that needed to continue just a little bit easier, and the days a little bit brighter.

It’s two days before the presidential election and I wake early to go fishing after a largely sleepless night. The radio news narrates a scene reminiscent of the darkest days of the Civil Rights Movement, as a gang of pickup-driving Trump supporters in Texas surround and threaten a Biden campaign bus. The next story is about a case before the court to invalidate 120,000 votes already cast in a predominantly Democratic district of Houston. What do I do? Do I stay at home to call voters in swing states? Do I stay glued to CNN, grinding my teeth as I have done for the past couple of weeks?  Or do I go fishing as I’ve planned? I decide to go fishing. Later, after I’ve would down watching the ducks on the water chase after the bread I’ve cast out to catch carp, smelled the unmistakable musty smell of fallen autumn leaves decaying and felt the first touch of winter frost on my fingers as I fumble to tie a knot, later, after I’ve caught a breath and my jaw begins to unclench, I can go home and catch up on news and make those calls.

Activists are a special type of people. We open ourselves to seeing and feeling problems in the world that others ignore and we commit ourselves to doing something about them. Consequently, one of the burdens of being an activist is the constant feeling that you could be doing more. If you just organized one more rally, made those few more phone calls, or rented a car and brought your friends down to the big march down in DC, then maybe something would change, history would be different. It’s the maybes that kill you: not knowing if you have done enough and whether you should have pushed yourself to do more. After four decades of being an activist, I wish I knew when enough was enough or not enough. I don’t, and I still feel the push to do more, just as I feel the pull to say I just can’t do anymore, not right now anyway.  From all my experience, I’ve come to the unsatisfactory conclusion that you can only do what you can do, no more, and no less.

A while ago I was out on my favorite jetty with a couple of weekend anglers. We were all casting out into the race as the tide brought the schoolies into the bay and then out again. Casting and retrieving, casting and retrieving, casting and retrieving. I do what I usually do and vary my retrieves. First, I cast out and reel in fast, pulling in my weighted Savage Sandeel so quickly that it rides the surface. Then I cast out and reel in slow, letting my lure hug the bottom. Next,  a medium retrieve, keeping the lure in the middle of the water column as best I can. Probably my most productive retrieve incorporates a little twitch or jerk as I pull my rod back quickly, then let my rod back down and give the line some slack while I reel in. This retrieve brings the lure up quickly then lets it drop back down, simulating a wounded baitfish and giving the bigger fish I’m after a chance to hit the bait on its slow fall. The guy next to me that day, however, had just one technique: he cast out his lure as far as he could and cranked it in as fast as possible. Over and over for more than an hour he did exactly the same thing with every cast and retrieve.  I caught a good number of schoolies that day. He caught nothing.

Activists can get stuck in tactical ruts. What do we do when we want to express our anger? We march! What do we do when we want to make our case to authority? We distribute a petition! (or march!) What do we do when we want media attention? We stage a die-in! (or march!). There’s nothing wrong with marches or petitions or die-ins…or strikes, protests, speeches, occupations, flash mobs, media pranks, or any other tactics that activists use, The problem becomes when they are used reactively and automatically. I remember once being in a workshop in Texas where a participant announced that they were holding their 21st Annual March Against the Death Penalty. A young activist beside me innocently remarked, “If you’ve had twenty marches already, and we still have the death penalty in Texas, don’t you think it’s time to try something else?” Marches have, and can be, markedly productive displays of people power and a means to challenge power, but they don’t always work. This holds true for all tactics. What worked one year might not work the next, and what works with this audience might not work with that one. And you won’t know what works best until you’ve tried a variety of approaches.

As with life, so it is with fishing: you have good days and bad days. On a good day, the sun is shining, the wind is calm, your lure or fly lands exactly where you were aiming, a hungry fish gobbles it up, and after a valiant fight (including a dramatic flip or two out of the water)  you land it successfully, easily unhook it, and let it swim away. And this happens again and again. That’s a good day. Then there are days where everything goes wrong.  The wind is up and it starts raining as you discover that your jacket leaks.  Your rod snaps or a part to your reel falls off and disappears in fifty feet of water. You slip off a  log and fall into the water with your phone in your pocket. And, needless to say, you don’t catch any fish. On average, I have more good fishing days than bad ones, and as I get to be a better angler the ratio increases in favor of the good. But I still have plenty of disappointing days catching no fish — in fact, I had one today — and every once in a while I have a spectacularly bad day. Yet I keep fishing, because sometimes the day turns around and, if it doesn’t, there’s always tomorrow.

When devising tactics with activists, we try and encourage them to generate as many ideas as possible, no matter how ridiculous or impossible. We do this to break the tendency that many activists have of settling on the first idea they come up with, putting all their efforts into it, and then getting disappointed if it doesn’t work out as planned. When brainstorming a multitude of ideas, invariably, many of them are pretty bad. That’s OK. My frequent collaborator Steve Lambert puts it this way: imagine a field of ideas, both good and bad. We’d like to imagine ourselves walking through that field only picking up the good news while discarding the bad ones. But that’s not how it works. It’s more like a conveyer belt where a good idea comes after a bad one after a couple of good ones and then a few bad ones, and you have to work on them all. Sometimes a bad idea, when worked upon for a while, becomes a good one. Once, when we were working with activist veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on a campaign to extend health benefits, someone suggested an armed takeover of the Veteran’s Administration. Thankfully, the violent insurrection was quickly rejected but it became the prompt for another idea: instead of an armed takeover, they came up with the idea of erecting a tent in the parking lot outside the VA building and creating a temporary clinic that would perform the services they wanted but weren’t getting. As a tactic that would demonstrate their demands within the demonstration itself it was a really good idea, but without the original bad idea, it never would have happened. What matters is having a lot of ideas and working through them all.

Most people dream about sleeping in on weekends or vacations, I think about getting up early and going fishing. I set my alarm to 4:30, drag myself out of bed, brew a cup of coffee, take the dog for a brief walk and then get into my old jeep or on the city subway and head out to my favorite fishing spot just as the sun rises. Other anglers I know are evening people, arriving on the beach or pond just as the sun sets and then staying there, in the pitch black, when other folks are home snuggling up to watch TV or out partying on the town. There’s good reason to get up early or go out late: mornings and evenings tend to be good fishing times, the water is cooler, bugs and baitfish are active, all which means the bigger fish are biting as well. But sometimes fishing at these opportune times is impossible. I need to get the kids up early and fed and off to school with packed lunches. Or my family intervenes in the evening, insisting that sit-down dinner gets priority. And so I go fishing at mid-day, during my lunchtime, sneaking in 45 minutes to an hour with my rod and reel. It’s not ideal, and my yield of fish suffers, but fishing when I do have time is better than not fishing at all.

Activists often feel pressure to be active all the time. There’s no doubt that if we were all active all the time more activism would happen and, presumably, more social change would be the result. But there’s a problem with this equation: it doesn’t factor in people’s lives. Being active all the time is a certain path to activist burnout. I can’t tell you how many gung-ho, married-to-the-revolution activists I know who found 24-7 activism unsustainable, quit and then retreated from politics (I’ve done it myself a few times now). This push for total commitment also limits the type of people who become activists, with the ideal profile being someone with no job, no family, and no social life outside of activism.  Recognizing these problems, my old Lower East Side Collective comrade L.A. Kauffman came up with an idea for something we called “scalable commitment.” Every flyer we produced and handed out had information on the issue on one side, and on the other had a list of things people could do — given their time and energy. These ranged from 15 minutes a week (usually call a local politician) to an hour a week (write letters and make posts) to a few hours a week (attend a protest) to a lot of time on their hands (come join us!). The brilliance of this idea is that it didn’t expect a full-time commitment to activism, yet gave everyone an opportunity to take meaningful action…when they could.

To catch a fish you have to reach the fish and this entails, among other things, knowing how deep they are swimming. Anglers call the span from surface to bottom the “water column,” and targeting exactly where the fish are is a matter of science: calculating water temperature and using fish-finding sonar, and experience and wisdom: when the surface water heats up the fish go deep unless, of course, you are fishing for fish who like warm water who then rise to the top.  As Buck Perry, the inventor of the spoonplug, is said to have said, “They’re either shallow, deep, or somewhere in between.” Once you have a hunch of where the fish are you need to select the right lure for the depth. If they are up top, I use a dry fly, a popper or maybe a jerk bait. Down low, I go with weight, often dragging along the bottom of the lake or beach with some sort of sinker. And in the middle, a diving lure is a good bet, or possibly a fast retrieve on a jig. None of which guarantees  I’ll actually catch a fish, but knowing whether to run deep or shallow makes my odds better.

Too often activists approach people as if they are all at the same level, making the same pitch to the person who has no knowledge of, or interest in our issues as we do with those who are already active and on our side. This one-size-fits-all usually results in confusing the uninformed or boring the committed. To combat this common tendency in our trainings, we borrow from a model used in public health campaigns. Getting someone to quit smoking, for instance, entails moving them through a series of steps,  from basic awareness of the issue, to acting on that issue, to having their action on that issue become part of their identity. There are 12 steps in all, and it gets quite complicated, but the point I want to make here is simple:  you need to know where the bulk of people are in these stages in order to design the most effective tactics to reach them. Tactics that get people’s attention and raise awareness (the fallback for many activists) may work well on people who are completely new to the issue, but trying to raise awareness of someone whose awareness is already raised is a waste of time. Most people today, for example, know that climate change is a real problem but the problem is that they don’t know what to do about it. Getting people to commit to action once their awareness is raised needs a particular approach, and so on up and down the ladder. Since people are not all at the same level, no one tactic will reach all of them, that’s why it’s good to use multiple tactics, aimed at multiple audiences, in every campaign.

Fish stories are an integral part of fishing. Anglers love to tell one another about the fish we caught and the ones that got away, usually exaggerating the size and the weight and the duration of the fight in the telling. It’s a way of bonding…and bragging. It’s also sometimes pretty annoying, especially when you’ve been fishing for hours and aren’t catching anything and someone comes up and tells you that you should have been there last night, or earlier that morning, or last Thursday when the fish were biting like mad. But what’s more interesting than the stories that anglers tell are the ones they don’t: tales of the hours put in at river’s edge catching nothing. The time spent scanning the water for rises that might, just might, mean that a hungry fish is down there under the surface. The repetitive, meditative state of casting and retrieving over and over again. Fish stories are all about the glorious event: catching the fish; they are rarely about the necessary process: fishing.

The tip of Cape Cod is famous as a respite for radicals. The journalist Jack Reed owned the house down the road from mine and then sold it to Margaret Sanger, the reproductive rights activist, when he left for Russia to join the revolution. Noam Chomsky spends his summers in the next town over, and much of the conversation at many of the dinner parties I attend revolves around reminiscing about the Madison, Wisconsin chapter of the SDS.  We have a running contest in my family whenever I give a talk about contemporary activism at the local library: how many minutes will pass in the Q&A session before someone prefaces their question with, “In the 60s, we….” (15 minutes was the longest.) Activists are forever telling activists what it was like at the Selma March on 65, or the student uprisings in  68, or battling the WTO in Seattle in 99, or Occupy Wall Street in 2011, or the beginnings of Black Lives Matter in Ferguson in 2014 or…. Invariably it was more exciting, more effective, and all-around better than it is now. What gets lost in these stories of spectacular actions is all the hard, boring, unexciting work that went into making the event. What’s also overlooked is how each of these movements built for the next. Civil rights and anti-colonial struggles in the 1950s and early 60s made way for the student protests of the late 60s, many of the core group of activists who began Occupy Wall Street first met during the alternative globalization movement a dozen years prior, and BLM is built upon the Black Power movement which from the Civil Rights Movement, which arose out of … and so on back through history. There are peaks in activism: the marches and protest that make it into the history books and are retold while slurping local oysters at dinners on decks on the outer Cape, but you need to be active all the time, even when it seems as if nothing is happening, if these notable actions are to happen in the first place.

It sounds obvious, but it’s something I had to learn. Fish where the fish are, not where they aren’t. When I took up fishing again, the running joke in my family was that I was the world’s worst fisherman. I enjoyed the time by myself, I appreciated the nature all around me, but I caught nothing, day after day. Then one day, as I was fishing my favorite jetty on the bay side of the Outer Cape, the schoolies — young striped bass — showed up. Overnight, I went from the worst fisherman to hauling in fish after fish. I was using the same gear (an old 8 ft Conolon rod and Mitchell 302 reel with new Stren 20 lb mono) and lures (a 5 inch Savage Gear sandeel), and casting and retrieving the same, but now I was catching fish. What changed? The fish. They were where I happened to be fishing.  But if I wanted to catch them in the future, I would need to go to where they were.

An activist needs to go where people are. One of my first jobs as an activist was helping to organize large rallies in Washington DC, usually on weekends, when it was easy for other activists to get here. We’d march for hours amongst the government buildings for the benefit of ourselves and the few (and over time, less and less) TV cameras that showed up, but the city was largely empty. It was like we were protesting in a ghost town. Where were the people? At shopping malls or sporting events, laundromats and farmers markets, bars or movie theatres, taking walks on commercial streets or through leafy parks, maybe even fishing. These are the places where activists need to go, and they need to go when the largest number of people they are trying to reach are there.  Of course, the tactics used need to match the setting. A mass protest is probably not appropriate in a tranquil park, but it’s a great place to set up an interactive exhibit on the effects of climate change. But neither is going to work if no one is around to experience it.

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.