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.