WisCon Day 2: Con of the Living Dead

[bcholmes]

I had to be up in time for a 10am panel on Saturday. Since I went to bed at 3:30 or thereabouts, I spent much of the morning thinking "gaah. Gaaah. Brain no work. Go, brain. Brain. Braaaaiiiin."

I wandered over to Michaelangelo's for coffee. I got coffee. It wasn't enough. Then I was up to the green room for my 10am panel:

Activism: When to Speak Up, When To Let It Go

How do you balance political activism and relationship/work life? When do you let things pass? When do you make allowances for people, or stop making allowances? How can you speak up without turning something into a fight? How do you protect your personal and emotional safety when you do activism? What words and phrases do you find particularly helpful? Let's discuss and strategize around all kinds of activism.

M: nojojojo, Ian Hagemann, Carrie Tilton-Jones, bcholmes

I had high hopes for the panel, and I think it went well, but I think I was the least valuable participant. I was tired and wasn't able to make the points I hoped for as clearly as I wanted to be able to make them. (That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it).

I suspected -- and it turned out to be true -- that at least some of the other panelists were approaching this panel with RaceFail in mind. That the question was really inspired by those experiences of the many, many people who just burned out on RaceFail.

The place I was coming from was, I think, different. I had a coupl'a things in mind as I approached the panel. One was a section of Elizabeth May's book, How to Save the World in Your Spare Time. Toward the end of the book, she writes about work/life balance:

There is a lot of discussion these days about work-life balance. This may well be important if working in a corporate culture. However, I do not think it fits in thinking about our work in the environmental movement. Saving the world is not a nine-to-five commitment. Environmentally aware people do not stop recycling because they are on vacation. [...] This life is not work. This life is life.

I confess that I've often been inspired by that line, even if I can see that it's a bit idealistic. In particular I've certainly experienced limits to my activism. During February, when work was tremendously busy, I was doing a gazillion TV and radio interviews, and countless talks about Haiti, I came about as close to breaking as I have in my life.

But the other experience related to my delegation to Haiti in 2007. There was a point at which I suddenly realized that every community leader that we were speaking to had an escape plan in her or his back pocket. Many of them had fled the country after the 2004 coup. Almost all of them went into hiding a few times in their lives. Others were jailed. They knew that their lives were in danger, and they were doing the work anyway. And that's not hyperbole. Lovinsky is proof of that.

What I felt then, and still feel now, is that our expectation of comfort, here in Canada and the U.S., is very high. And I think that that high expectation of comfort really does influence the whole activist/balance equation.

I want to go further, but I confess that I don't know how. I think there's something about that whole, "is your life on the line" experience that's important and different from online activist burnout. I don't know how to fully articulate it, though. I don't want to sound as if I'm saying, "Oh, those participants in RaceFail were just whining about fictional characters in ray gun stories and there are Real Stories of Third World Suffering™ they should be concerned with." Certainly, some people during RaceFail were saying exactly that, and I disagree with it about as much as I possibly can. I'm also not saying that the cost of participating was trivial. nojojojo brought up the experience of being a writer, criticizing the actions of editors. Was that going to ruin her chances of getting some of her books published?

But, like I say, I'm not sure I know how to develop this thought any further. There's something there that nags at me.

Carrie talked about the balance question in terms of the "superwoman" phenomenon. She said that it's a real phenomenon that many women try to do too much, and that it's probably an important message to suggest to those women that they find their limits and stick to them.

Carrie also had an excellent list of criteria that affected her interest in intervening: did she think she could make a difference? Did she have back-up? Are there other observers to the conversation that might benefit from her comments?

We got hung up on the word, respect, for a bit: Carrie asserted that other people believe what they believe for reasons that, to them, seem just as valid as the things that we believe. Thus, she claimed that being respectful when engaging another person was crucial. For my part, I think it's interesting that "respect" is conflated, in our culture, with being "nice". In Haiti, people can give each other respect while screaming at each other.

nojojojo interjected that while respect is sometimes important, anger is also sometimes important. RaceFail was a case in point, here. She argued that many of the points made in the RaceFail debate had been made many times before -- the earlier arguments were easily forgotten because the listener didn't fully internalize what the stakes of those arguments were. This was a useful comment for me, because I've often had the experience of talking about "the tone argument" with other (usually white) folks. Invariably, the other person eventually settles on "well, I just think about what approach is more effective." nojojojo's comment got me to realize that letting the other person see that anger is often the effective strategy in the long run. That was a tremendously useful comment.

Ian contributed some useful "toolkit" comments: he talked about how valuable it is to rehearse the kinds of things that he'd say in a political discussion. He also talked about the simple value of working on his own issues. He said that if he's an activist for some cause, and he always comes off as angry or sullen because of personal issues, he's not a terribly good ambassador for that cause.

My last contribution to the panel was to talk about Paul Farmer. I got to see Farmer speak in Boston about a year and a half ago. Now, one can read about Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains and come to the conclusion that he's a incredible individual -- he probably is. But when he was asked, in Boston, how he keeps going on those days when he's in an emotional low, he talked about not thinking in terms of individuals, but rather thinking about teams. If he's part of a team, then when one person is having a low, the others can help pick up the slack.

As I said, I was still pretty sleepy during most of the panel, and I feel like I didn't make these points anywhere near coherently enough. Carrie's points were really nicely stated and well-thought-out. I'd like to see her on more panels in the future.

Afterward, I went to the con suite and grabbed a banana for lunch. I chatted with polyfrog a bit prior to my 1:00 panel.

Hmmm.... I'll probably hafta finish this later.

Comments

[redbird]

Thanks for the write-up. I had wanted to attend this panel (I think I was desperate for caffeine or something at the time), and this is a useful summary. [I am groping for thoughts on what comes between the 9-5 stuff and the all-the-time recycling approach you described, but they aren't coming together.]

[kalmn]

carrie is tesseract26, i do believe.

[kalmn]

on lj, i mean.