Fishing with live bait entails a lot of watching, sensing, and waiting for a nibble. How long to wait is always a question. I’ve stared out across the water at my bobber, watching it do nothing, only to come to the conclusion after a fruitless hour that there are absolutely no fish where I’ve cast and I’ve just been wasting my time. On the other hand, I’ve also had days where I get impatient: casting out bait only to let it sit for 5 minutes before hauling it in again, never giving a curious fish a chance to find it. Deciding whether to do nothing or do something, and when is the right time for each, extends throughout fishing. Once you see your bobber dunk under, or feel a pull on your line, you need to set the hook in order to catch the fish. This sounds more straightforward than it is. If you yank back on your pole too hard, too soon, you’ll end up with half-eaten bait and no fish on the line. But if you wait too long, there’s a good chance that the wily fish will carefully strip your hook and swim away. Perhaps Aristotle was thinking of fishing when he came up with his concept of the Golden Mean, finding a happy place between excess and deficiency.
Sometimes waiting is essential with activism. The arch pranksters, the Yes Men, play the long game. They create websites that look like their targets and then, when sloppy journalists ask for quotes or unsuspecting event planners ask them to come to speak at conferences, they are ready to launch their satirical performances that reveal and exaggerate the worst practices of their foes. Everyday activism entails biding time too: waiting for an event that thrusts your issue into the limelight, the moment when your opponent slips up, or when public opinion swings your way. But sometimes waiting around is the wrong move, and you need to force the action. When we first formed our community activist group in the Lower East Side I remember a more experienced member lobbying for an action. I argued that we were not ready and that no one in the community was even thinking about the issue at hand: government complicity in gentrification. “Yes,” she replied, “but if we don’t do an action now, people will continue to not think about the issue, and worse: we will be one of those groups who talk about doing actions but don’t do them.” We did the action: a banner drop in front of the local Housing and Urban Development office calling out the practice of warehousing empty apartments. It was terrible. We weren’t ready, no one from the community came, and the press didn’t show up. Yet, that action changed us from a kvetching group to an activist group and set the stage for much more successful, well attended, and well covered, events in future months. Maybe Aristotle was wrong: it’s not so much finding a place between doing nothing and doing too much, it’s knowing that each has its own value, at its own time.