Yesterday I had a singularly unproductive day fishing. I tried moving around the lake, fishing with different lures and bait, and targeting the different species of fish I knew were there. Not a bite. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. It was frustrating, I only had one day off to fish the entire week and here I was repeatedly casting out and reeling in, or patiently waiting to feel a tug on my line, catching nothing. But I’ve had many such unproductive days before and will have many after, and I reminded myself of the hackneyed, but nonetheless true, adage: “It’s called fishing, not catching.” Even on a good day of catching, the majority of your time is spent just fishing. And on a bad day, like yesterday, it is all fishing not catching. To stay fishing, day after day, through good days and bad ones, you have to learn to love the process: looking over the water, strategizing the shoreline, psychologizing the fish, casting and retrieving, the waiting. With luck and skill, the process might yield a product and you’ll catch a fish, but if you don’t enjoy the process of fishing itself you might as well quit because the ratio between fishing and catching is mighty slim.

As an activist, you rarely win. You can work for months, even years, on a campaign and not see any result. Even when you win and a new policy is enacted, or a fair contract signed, or there’s a palpable shift in public opinion, it can all be undone in a moment and you have to start again. To remain an activist over the long haul, you have to learn to love the work itself. This means making the work lovable: activism should be about pleasure, play, and celebration more than the sacrifice, seriousness, and righteousness that too often characterizes the practice of doing activism. Embracing the process also means acknowledging the long game. Yes, we must keep our eyes on the prize, and have faith that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but we also need to recognize that the path is really long.  Most of all, learning to love the process of activism entails a certain separation from its product. This is what my friend, the master activist L.A. Kauffman, once called “existential activism.” You don’t act to shape and change the world for the surety of any end result, but because to not act would mean ceasing to have a meaningful existence. It’s called activism, not winning.

Fishing is largely a solitary activity. That’s why I gravitated towards it as an introverted pre-teen and then again during a time of social distancing during a pandemic. Yet some of the best times I’ve had fishing are with other people: dropping lines on a party-boat with my family, taking my younger son and his friend who had never been fishing before out on a rainy, windy early morning to try our luck surf fishing and then going to a warm diner afterword, or an evening excursion with an old activist friend who was in town, talking and casting, casting and talking, as we walked along the jetty. I never seem to catch much when I fish with other people, but that’s not really the point, the point is that we have fun. We laugh at our bad luck, we talk about politics and past campaigns, or we just stand silently together, drinking beer, as the sun sets and the sky turns red over the tip of the Cape.

Activism is inherently collective, but not always social. We work together, but sometimes forget to enjoy one another’s company. This separation between our activist lives and our social lives often results in individual burnout as we start to feel as if we “have no life.” It also causes problems for recruitment since others, who would like to have a social life, want nothing to do with us. Losing people and not gaining others, the movement or campaign withers and dies. It doesn’t have to be this way.  A community activist group I was once part of on the Lower East Side of New York City had multiple working groups: one worked on gentrification and rent control, another on protecting community gardens, a third on policing and the then mayor’s “quality of life” campaign, and so on. And then there was The Ministry of Love. The sole purpose of this group was to make sure we had fun: it insisted we hold our meet in back rooms of bars and cafes and move to the front and hang out after the meetings were over,  it organized trips to baseball games and threw dance parties, and The Ministry of Love made sure that no one ever came to a meeting without being greeted or left without feeling, well, loved. As we grew as an organization, gained more members, racked up more victories (and sustained more losses), we came to realize that it was this playgroup that made all the other working groups possible.

I started fishing again to be alone. The immediate impetus was the COVID crisis when social distancing became the norm and being alone at water’s edge was one of the few places I didn’t need to worry about wearing a mask. But I came to really enjoy the solitude for other reasons. As an activist, a teacher, and a parent, there are always e-mails to respond to, meetings to attend, classes to teach, and sibling fights to referee. It’s an ongoing, and continuous, conversation. I enjoy the silence of fishing.  Fish don’t talk, and they don’t want to be spoken to. (Although I do usually say a few words to them before I release them or, if I plan on eating them, before I stun and bleed them out). In this silence, I listen to the other sounds around me: the lap of the water, the scurrying of an unseen animal in the brush, the laugh of seagulls or honking of ducks, the truck upshifting as it makes the climb on the highway nearby. Against this natural white noise, and with my physical movements engaged in the regular rhythms of casting and retrieving, my mind wanders: going to spaces and stopping at places it’s usually too busy to go, or going nowhere, simply resting, before I go back into to the world.

Activism and organizing, almost by definition, are collective activities. Social change does not happen because of a Great Leader doing a Great Act, it happens because lots of people, working together, do lots of things over and over, collecting more and more people with them as they go. This is exciting, but it can also be exhausting, especially for someone who is a bit of an introvert like myself. When planning for an action or working in a social movement, it’s really easy to get sucked in as every spare minute is spent meeting or talking or strategizing with someone. And then there are those times in history where the world explodes, and you are out on the street marching and protesting with masses of people every day. All this is good, but in my four decades of activism I have seen many, many activists get so caught up in the movement (and urged by their comrades to do so)  that they forget to take care of themselves, they forget to make time to be by themselves. They burn out, and eventually, inevitably, they quit. A good activist needs time to be inactive. A good community organizer needs space to be away from the community. Making time and space to be alone is essential for coming back and working together.

Surf fishing and pond fishing are not the same. If the fish are running off the beach you are likely to catch them. It takes patience, sometimes months until the fish show up, but once they do you just cast out something shiny and silver and they will bite hard. (In answer to my question, “what’s the best lure to catch bluefish?” the guy behind the counter in my local tackle shop, in taciturn New Englandese, replied, “a tin can.”)  Pond fishing takes more finesse, and a different type of patience. The fish are always there but they may not be interested in what you have to offer. And even if they are, and they bite, they may just nibble, or take a few passes, or even swallow and spit out your bait before you get time to set your hook. As an inexperienced fisherman, I picked up saltwater fishing pretty easily once I knew when and where the fish were, but I’m still learning how to slowly entice the fish in my local pond and when to set the hook at the exact right moment so they won’t get away. I like fishing in both fresh and saltwater equally, and I appreciate that they are different.

There’s a difference between activism and organizing.  Activism is all about attention grabbing tactics: the protest march, the die-in, or the media prank. If the historical moment is right, these tactics can generate a lot of attention and your issue can move quickly from the margins to the center of public political concern.  Organizing, on the other hand, is slow and sly. It entails going to community meetings week after week to get to know local residents and gain their trust, patiently building networks of support and solidarity. While an activist is often front and center, getting their picture in the paper, a good organizer works behind the scenes, barely noticeable. Both are necessary for social change. An activist draws attention to issues that might otherwise be overlooked or ignored. The organizer sets the stage for the activist by creating an environment receptive to their actions and then follows up by turning attention into concrete political gains. It’s not an either/or sort of thing, you need both activism and organizing, but you also need to approach each differently.

I am proud to say that I own some of the best fishing gear made…in 1973. Like many anglers, I love trolling yard sales and browsing E-Bay for deals on rods and reels, and this means that most of my gear is, to use a genteel word, “vintage.” For freshwater, my go-to spinning reel is a Mitchell 300 (from when they were still made in France) and my rod is a 7 ft. medium action Fenwick Feralite. Bayside, I fish with a Mitchell 302 Salt Water and an 8 ft. Garcia Conolon, and for surfcasting I have a 12 ft. custom rod on which I’ve mounted an old Penn Spinfisher 704. I also possess equally venerable baitcasting and fly fishing tackle. Using old gear has its downsides: bail springs frequently break and rod windings unwind, but I know that any gear that’s already lasted 50 odd years will usually last the abuse I’ll give it over a fishing season.  There’s one thing, however, that I use new, and change regularly: my line. I’m not one of those line fetishists who replaces their line every few weeks as soon as it gets curly, but I’ve had enough fish break my line to know that having the newest line possible means that I will be able to cast more easily, snarl less readily, and land more fish.

There are tried and true tactics in activism: the mass protest, the strike, the sit-in, the boycott, the petition, the door-to-door canvas, etc.  These tactics work, and every activist should be practiced in using them. But it’s important to remember a few things. These old tactics were once new. The petition was perfected in the Chartist struggles for universal suffrage in England in the mid 19th Century, and the sit-in was pioneered as a sit-down by auto workers in Detroit in the 1930s and then honed by the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. These old-new tactics were created because the preceding ones were becoming less effective. The petition was, in part a response, to mass protests and uprisings being brutally suppressed, and the sit-in was in response to union strikers, and black diners, being locked out of buildings. It is important to innovate, to change as conditions change, and to create new tactics. But innovation doesn’t always mean creating new tactics, sometimes it means putting a new spin on old ones. In our age of entertainment, how might we reimagine a picket line as a performance? With more of our public spaces online, how might we stage a virtual sit-in? At a time of social distancing, how could we rethink a street protest?  Old tactics are fine, just make sure your thinking is new.

Last Saturday I was fishing in my favorite place at Central Park Lake, on the downside of a big rocky outcropping that juts into the water. After weeks of trial and error, I had perfected the perfect bait for the carp used to eating leftover bread tossed out by tourists for the cute ducks and little turtles paddling on the surface. I threaded a long-shank hook through a hard crust of day-old baguette for buoyancy and packed a ball of Wonderbread around the bend to hide the hook, lend some weight, and dissolve slowly underwater. Watching for the swirl in the water that signified a carp I cast out and almost immediately got a hit. It was a monster. My rod doubled and my drag squealed. Reeling in slowly and playing the fish carefully to keep it on the hook (since it’s all catch-and-release I had pinched the barb) I got the yard-long primeval looking beast to shore. Wanting to prove to my disbelieving friends that there are, indeed, fish in Central Park and I was, in fact, catching them, I searched around in my jeans pocket for my smartphone to take a picture… and in doing this released just enough pressure on the line for the fish to do one final flip, slip my hook, and head back into the lake.

My friend and fellow activist David Solnit once said to me, “You have to think of your protest as a picture, because that’s how most people will see it.” David knows what he is talking about, as one of the leaders of Art and Revolution he was largely responsible for the look and feel of “The Battle for Seattle” the Anti-World Trade Organization protests in 1999. While the feel of the protest is important to those directly taking part, and even those directly targeted, most people in our mass-mediated age will experience the protest through pictures. This was something recognized early, and brilliantly, by the US Civil Rights movement who choreographed such events as Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat and the racist violence inflicted upon peaceful protesters at lunch counters and on city streets with more thought and precision than a theatre director. When working with activists brainstorming new tactics we will ask them to act it out their intervention and then freeze in a tableau so we can all get a sense of the picture the protest will convey. This is good activist practice..and it’s also important not to get so concerned about looking good and capturing the picture that the reasons for doing the protest are overlooked. If the importance of the picture replaces the importance of the action then you are in trouble. Challenging and changing power is what is important, and a good picture is good only as a means to do this.

I spend a lot of time trying to think like a fish to figure out what a fish might think is a tasty treat. I try and figure out what a fish might react to in order to provide exactly the right stimuli to create the reaction I’m looking for: a bite. I sometimes even go as far as trying to imagine what a fish might be feeling to get a feel for what might satisfy their hunger. But all this is speculation, I can never really know what a fish thinks or feels or will trigger a reaction. I can, however, know one thing for certain: whether a fish bites or not. And, when it comes down to it, this is really all that matters. A fish may be thinking that my lure looks like a fish or grub they are hunting, and feel that it would be good to eat (or may not be thinking or feeling at all) but none of this counts unless they commit to the action of chomping on my bait. It’s really that simple: if the fish bites then I have a good chance of catching it, if it doesn’t, I don’t. And no one wants to hear a fish story that details the psychology of a fish but ends with an empty creel.

Activists give a lot of thought to changing people’s hearts and minds about issues. They try to “raise awareness” through pamphlets, soapbox speeches, press releases, social media posts, and other educational tactics, and they try to rouse people’s emotions through street protests, vigils, media stunts, creative interventions, and other affective tactics. Underlying this emphasis on hearts and minds is a faith that thoughts and feelings will somehow automatically lead to action. I’ve come to believe that this is a misplaced faith, particularly within our spectator society where we are used to consuming all sorts of transformative ideas and ideals without ever acting upon them. This is not to say that thinking and feeling are not necessary. People need to think that something is wrong and feel that they can change it (or feel that something is the matter and think of a plan to address it) before change can happen. But the goal is always the change, that is: action.  Without people acting nothing will change. This is why it is so important for activists to do more than merely raising awareness and stirring up passions, and concentrate on charting pathways and creating opportunities so that people can act on these thoughts and feelings.

In order to catch fish, you need to learn to think like a fish. When I’m out fishing I think to myself, if I was a fish, what would I want to eat?  What time of day would I be hungry? Where might I lurk in search of prey? Where would I feel safe from predators?  Where would I go in the heat of the day, or to warm up in the morning? And then I fish with that bait, at those times, in those spots. A rudimentary knowledge of fish psychology, coupled with a careful study of the shoreline, is sure to result in more bites.  But of course we can’t think like a fish. We can only think like a human who thinks what a fish might think. We can, however, observe fish behavior. So I look to when the fish are breaking the surface and figure probably means they are feeling hungry. Or where the baitfish are swirling, figuring that it’s likely that the fish I am after are nearby. From these observations, I can build up a simple profile of how a fish might think. Fish are not dumb, we just don’t understand their thoughts.

In order to convince people of our political point of view, we also need to know how they think. Some of this can be figured out by observing their behavior. What news programs and podcasts do they listen to? What politicians do they vote for? Do they go to church? But knowing how humans think is easier than it is with fish for one simple reason: we can ask people. This sort of research can be done informally: striking up casual conversations with folks in a bar or a nail salon, or it can be done more systematically. When we are planning one of the first things we do — after mapping the terrain and identifying our audience —  is a detailed cost/benefit analysis of people’s reasons for doing, or not doing, what it is we’d like them to do. Knowing how people think, their motivations and resistances, means that we have a much better chance of reaching, and convincing, them. There’s another benefit to figuring out how people think too. Often activists approach their audiences with contempt: they are simply too stupid, or brainwashed, to see the obvious truth in front of them. The result: we yell louder. This convinces no one. Understanding the reasons people have for doing what they do and believing what they believe, helps us recognize all people as thinking people, and approach them with the thought and respect they deserve.