who gets to be an activist?
on the unheroic (plus: books + links!)
Hello! Things are continuing to shift around these Substack parts. Read on for a quick “table of contents” or scroll down to the photo of a bench if you just want to read the dang essay!
As I’ve contemplated how I’d most like to share the work I do every day, I’ve decided to treat us all to a big bad mega-post once a month with an essay and lots and lots of links! If you’re keeping score, that means we’re still doing three essays and one podcast episode per month, but also on occasion with the links I’m excited about and the books I’m reading thrown in there.
So in this big bad mega-post we have:
- an essay from me, per uszh
- where I’ve been around the Internet lately
- other links to things that have sparked conversations/imagination/delight
- just a few of the books I’m currently into
Onward!
Last week my husband Nate and I drove into an alley on a street we’d never been to, picked up a smallish wooden bench and cable lock, and drove away with it. Over the next couple of days I painted the bench with some leftover house paint I found in our shed. Today we’re taking it to a bus stop on a busy highway that’s currently unmarked and seat-less.
We live on this bus line and, despite owning the two cars that every middle-class Southern household should, we ride this bus sometimes. We ride to burn less gas and take up less parking/traffic space, to see our neighbors’ faces, to increase the ridership that would increase the funding for the buses. But ultimately, we ride because we think it’s delightful. No parking. No driving. Read a book or chat with the driver, your choice. It adds a few extra minutes of walking into our days. It feels like being a part of our city in an irreplaceable way.
We love this insignificant little bus line, even though we know how many of our fellow car-owners in this city view all pedestrians, cyclists, and buses as mere obstacles to them, the rightful owners of the road.
So when we got the chance to help make a bus stop safer and more accessible, we just did it. Someone else paid for the lumber. Another person built the bench. And another person put out the call to the Chattanooga Urbanist Society for painting volunteers on social media. (And all those people, by remaining anonymous, are really much more in the spirit of the thing than I am, blathering on here about my involvement.)
Maybe all of us sticking our whimsical little benches around are mere hobbyists. Maybe we don’t get to call it “work” because we’re enjoying ourselves a little too much. Maybe strowing benches around to make the city more comfortable and cute isn’t a coordinated or strategic enough PR campaign to spark imaginations of a city that’s livable for human bodies.
But I can’t help thinking how much more good each of those people with their tiny tasks has done for their city and their neighbors than a hundred others put together, who have spent a lot of time formulating the “correct” opinions about public transportation—perhaps even said their correct opinions to their likeminded social media friends!—and never done a thing to actually change how they, or anyone else, get around.
“I’m not political,” I used to say. I wanted to love people, not breathlessly follow the machinations of faraway power. The government had never mattered all that much to my life.
Then I met poor people, whose lives had been impacted by governments at every turn—by child welfare services, by public schools and standardized tests, by Medicare and the disability system, by police who were all too willing to harass the vulnerable and all too scarce when they needed “protection and service.” Food stamps. Pedestrian and bike safety. Minimum wages. Housing vouchers.
Loving people, it suddenly seemed, meant knowing and caring how faraway powers made decisions about their lives—and because they were my neighbors, mine. Every law, every tax was a choice about how we would live together. About who we were. About who counted as “we.”
Maybe I didn’t become “political” overnight—but in time I became watchful—aware—uneasy—alive to how power operates and mutates and dictates.
“Awake, O sleeper,” says the letter to the Ephesians.
Since then I’ve worked in a food pantry and soup kitchen,
practiced asset-based community development,
marched in Pride parades,
marched with the Poor People’s Campaign,
sang and strategized in church basements with the Poor People’s Campaign,
gone to boring Zoom meetings and tediously written emails for the Poor People’s Campaign,
coordinated donations for and documented Black Lives Matter protests,
attended city council meetings,
spoken at county council meetings,
hosted a Warren staffer in my home,
worked in early voting and counted ballots in the 2020 election,
hosted gatherings and meetings for advocacy organizations,
helped start the Affirming Alum Collective,
supported activists near and far with time, money, and care,
tried to share a little of what I’ve witnessed and learned in all these places.
And still when someone calls me an “activist,” I sometimes hesitate. Activists wear T-shirts with slogans on them every day. Activists know politicians. Activists have arrest records. Activists know lots of history and political theory and stuff about privilege and oppression. Activists have strategies and demands.
Don’t they?
In those moments, I begin cataloguing all the “real” activists I know personally and all the moments I’m sure I “did activism” in my life. And I realize that “real activists” as I imagine them don’t exist.
Our campaigns and movements are scrappy and strong, but they’re also rather held together with Scotch tape most of the time. Our victories can feel hard-won, too-late, and fleeting, and our defeats nearly inevitable. We all feel a little inadequate to the work that’s really needed, and deeply lucky to share what work we can.
None of us is the activist of myth. None is the hero Gotham needs or deserves. We are whoever has bothered to show up.
When I was in college studying theology, friends and family assumed I was planning to become a pastor. A lady pastor; they were so excited! Over and over I tried to explain: so far as I felt called of God to anything, I felt a real vocation to just be a layperson. Maybe we have enough professional Christians, I said. Maybe it can be a sacred thing to minister from where we already are. Maybe each pastor is only as effective as their congregation is willing to be.
We don’t always have a word for this vocation. “Christian,” I suppose. And I wish we had a word for lay-activist. “Citizen,” we would hope. One who participates in the always-messy work of choosing together what kind of world we are making here.
In all honesty, despite the long list, “being political” still doesn’t come naturally to me. But we are living in a time when we all have to choose.
Staying out of it; giving up; even tracking people and issues like we’re watching a sport or enjoying an academic exercise without ever putting our own time, energy, money, or reputations on the line—these are all votes for a status quo that was never just and is quickly drifting toward authoritarianism and cruelty.
(And so, incidentally, are some of the habits the left has developed lately:
demanding perfection of one another;
forever losing the plot of analysis or strategy to indulge in self-satisfied litanies of blame;
overlooking local needs while chasing the shiny object of national spotlights.)
We have done our fellow citizens a grave disservice by implying that “politics” is a separate arena of life. And we activists have damn well shot ourselves in the foot by imagining that politics is not every single choice anyone makes about how they want their community to be, how they view or address their fellow citizens, how they look toward or away from the truth of where power lies.
In reality, big sweeping political victories won’t stick—they won’t be enforced—they won’t affect all the other arenas of life—if we aren’t also practicing the world we want to live in on a smaller scale. If we have no art or songs that help us imagine that world into being. If we don’t value the invisible invisibilized tasks and caring labor that lie behind every politician’s (or activist’s) boasts that they “get things done.”
And many of those victories can’t happen if there is no bench or no bus or no neighbor who’s reliable with the rides to help citizens get to the action safely, with or without the privilege of a car.
In reality, all of these are vital ways of participating. In reality, we need many more citizens willing to do what they can, not more activists berating/begging/shaming people for not doing what they can’t. In reality, there is no “movement” and no change unless everyone feels invited and allowed.
Maybe I don’t fit the description other people have in their heads for a proper “activist” any more than my own, and as time goes on, that becomes the reason I don’t shy away from the word.
As a disabled citizen, I refuse to let activism be defined by frantic overcommitment.
As a local citizen, I refuse to let activism be defined by the distractions of national politics.
As a student of systems, I refuse to let activism be defined by narrow measures of results, when we don’t always know all the effects of our actions.
As a feminist citizen, I refuse to let activism be defined as somehow the opposite of simple acts of care, daily relationships of patience, attentive habits of maintenance.
As a writer and artist, I refuse to strip away from activism the deeply human and necessary tasks of witnessing, noticing, and making beautiful.
As a Christian citizen, I refuse to idolize politics as if y’all we did not most deeply need the wide and long and high and deep love of Jesus.
And as a rider of the bus, I refuse to wait for someone else to act.
In case you missed it: me on the internet
Check out this conversation between Alexis Busetti and me about disability theology and healing on the That Makes Total Sense podcast
Read Shannan Martin’s story about her family’s life and interview with me at her highly-highly-recommended Substack,
links links links
This Culture Study post by
about why we all fantasize about living near our friends, but don't actually do it, has been on my mind all week. I (finally) paid for a subscription just to join the comment threads. I loved Petersen's final question: is it really, really, really because we "can't," or because we just haven't quite gotten around to making the hard/creative/unconventional choices it would require? A perennial query of mine about so many things.I have watched this Reel over and over. I saw it just before we left for Palm Sunday service and could not stop giggling through church.
On Being is back and I didn’t expect to be quite so excited!
This episode with Nick Offerman of Parks and Rec fame has me thinking about art, fame, and the good life.
And I loved so much about this interview with Isabel Wilkerson, I don’t even know where to start. It felt incredibly clarifying after the last few years’ torrents of events, information, and ideas. Quite sure there is a newsletter essay about Caste in all of our future.
Halfway through the Confronting Whiteness curriculum and have really found it to be so wise, challenging, and (perhaps this one is because of my group) hopeful. Heads up, I’d say it’s about like signing up for an undergraduate course in terms of homework, especially if you intend to really thoroughly explore the journaling and reflection.
books
I’ve been in a very serious fun-fiction rut [and don’t intend to exhaustively catalog my reading here anyway], but have been totally captivated by two books I read back-to-back entirely by accident:
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The first poor people I met and who befriended me, in the essay above, lived here in East Tennessee. Demon Copperhead is born into poverty in rural southeast Virginia, meaning this book was very familiar and at times extremely hard for me to get through. I was also skeptical of the project of imitating a Dickens novel—worried that fictionalizing the lived experiences of poor people would just yield another entry into the tiresome ranks of poverty porn. While I’ve steered clear of others’ takes on the book until I finished it, my own first impression is that Kingsolver is “one of us”—a Southern Appalachian person totally uninterested in flattening or exploiting our people. As a Tennesseean, a Wendell Berry fan, a “poverty abolitionist,” a White Scots-Irish American, and hopelessly in love with these mountains and their people, this book is stuck in my head, maybe forever.
I absolutely dare you to read it together with
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
I’m only halfway through this book by the author of Evicted, so I haven’t gotten to his action/policy proposals yet. But Desmond’s thesis—that ultimately, the richest country in the world contains so much poverty because it benefits the rest of us—immediately rang true for me and has something of the Hebrew prophet about it. Of course, as an academic, that thesis is meticulously supported. Desmond also coins the compelling term “poverty abolitionist” (and makes a clear case that this aim is inextricable from prison abolition). I bought the hardback, and I abhor hardbacks, and I don’t regret it.
As always, if you’ve read to the end of this thing, I know you’ll love My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World That is Sick.
A few of these are affiliate links! Thanks for your support!
May this Holy Week help you metabolize all that is dying and all that is rising in your life and in this gorgeous needy world.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey
Edited: after sending, I changed the title of this post from "when they call you an activist" to its current title. It sounded like an allusion to Assata Shakur's memoir WHEN THEY CALL YOU A TERRORIST, which I haven't gotten to read yet but wouldn't want to compare my experience to.