Our Impact Can Be MUCH Greater than We Know at the Time
In response to my Facebook repost of AOC’s suggestion that instead of ICE thugs, we send 5000 caseworkers to the border to help people immigrate the right way, a friend asked, “Do you really feel “calling out” the GOP will make any difference?”
This is how I answered (embedded links were not part of my answer):
There is something to be said for the throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks school of activism. We never know what will be effectual. Did Randy Kehler know when he went to prison for draft resistance that he would directly inspire Daniel Ellsberg to copy and release the Pentagon Papers?
Did whoever said something that opened the mind of a Nazi skinhead know that this particular tormentor (Christian Picciolini) would do a 360 and become a voice of outreach between the Islamic community and the racist right? [NOTE: That incident is not in the BBC link above but was mentioned by Picciolini in a talk he gave to Critical Connections, a human rights group in my area.]
Did the speaker (whose name I don’t know) at my first peace demonstration, at NYU Uptown (now Bronx Community College) on October 15, 1969, have any clue that one sentence of his speech would reach 12-year-old me and turn me into an activist for the past 56 years?
Did I know when I marched at Seabrook in 1977 and spent an incarcerated week as a “guest” of the state of New Hampshire that we were creating a national and international safe energy movement that kept us out of the nuclear fission fiasco for the next 40 years? (We have to do it again, now—that technology is far more about creating new problems than solving the existing ones. I wrote my first book on why nuclear fission makes no sense and updated it after Fukushima. We don’t need it and it’s quite harmful.)
Did the midwives of Exodus, Shifra and Pu’ah, know they were inventing nonviolent civil disobedience and that we would be using it to outsmart dictators more than 3000 years later?
I am an activist because my soul would not let me rest if I weren’t. I’ve been lucky enough to do a few things that worked, including starting the movement that saved a local mountain. But even when it’s defeat after defeat, I keep at it, knowing that if I change one mind or move one person to take action that day, my work has been worthwhile—and if I didn’t, I still made the effort.
Here are a few more examples:
- Did the peace activists camped at the White House lawn in 1970 just days after the murder of four protestors by National Guard troops know that sleepless President Richard Nixon would come out to talk with them t 4:30 a.m.?
- Did Greta Thunberg know when she started researching climate issues at age 8 that at 15, she’d be leading an international student climate change movement and would go on to embrace other activist campaigns including challenging the Israeli ban on humanitarian aid to Gaza?
- When she raised concerns about pollution in her Niagara Falls neighborhood of Love Canal, did housewife Lois Gibbs have any idea that she would shepherd through multiple pieces of legislation around toxics?
- When he was sentenced to life in prison, could Nelson Mandela have had any idea that just 32 years later, he would be the first president of a free South Africa and would create a model for successfully recombining former bitter enemies into a united nation?
What small step can YOU take that might turn into something much bigger—and where will you get the support to carry it out?
