There’s always time for one last cast. One last cast for the day as the sun dips down. One last cast before you need to go home and assume your responsibilities. One last cast for the season before you pack up your gear. My last casts usually come in the form of deals I make with myself: five more casts in a fan pattern in this particular spot and then, convinced there are no fish out there just waiting for me to drag my lure through their quadrant, I will go home. I often cheat. I swear I’m going to make one last cast and then I make another, then another, and only when I am disgusted by my weakness, or seriously worried about time, do I make my final cast and go home. Sometimes, however, these last casts are the ones that bring in the fish. It makes little logical sense, I know, but I am convinced that the fraction of casts that qualify as last casts, relative to all my other casts of the day, disproportionately yield more fish. Who knows, maybe I take more chances on those last casts: casting into areas I usually overlook or trying out a lure that I haven’t used before. But no matter how many last casts you take, there is always one, definitive, last cast and then you need to go home.
Part of being an effective activist is knowing when to quit, and when not to quit. Back when I was a community organizer in the Lower East Side of Manhattan we worked on a campaign to save local community gardens. These were gardens that residents had reclaimed from rubble-strewn lots back in the days when NYC’s infrastructure was crumbling, realtors were disinvesting from the neighborhood, and the property was worth nothing. Now that gentrification had made the Lower East Side a desirable place to live for the more well-to-do, these abandoned lots turned community gardens were being sold off by the city to developers. Working with the people who had built the gardens we set out to save them. We held protests outside the gardens, we had sleep-ins inside the gardens, we even unleashed 10,000 crickets at a city land auction to halt the sales. And garden after garden was sold off and the gardeners were thrown out. People were getting dispirited and we seriously contemplated ending the campaign, but we staged one last action: we took over a major avenue in the middle of the day, blocked traffic, brought out planter boxes, planted flowers, fired up a sound system, and held a raucous garden party that made all the local news channels. This action, planned in conjunction with other city-wide protests, was enough to convince a celebrity to donate a small fortune to buy the gardens for public use and push the city into selling them to her. After this victory, the campaign became a matter of permits and legal wrangling, better left to lawyers and non-profits, and we knew it was time for us to pack up and go home.