We are talking about what to do when you care about a political issue and see things happening that you think are wrong.
Felipe’s example is the tragic death of Natalie Morton. He is enraged by some of the reporting, by right-wing newspapers who continue to claim that her death was linked to her cervical cancer vaccination, in order to further a political agenda. (Disclaimer: I love, trust and respect Felipe but I have not seen this coverage first-hand. I am taking his word for it.) He makes the point that this is deeply irresponsible and also socially damaging; that people will die because of it. And it is not okay for us, knowing that this is happening, to sit and watch it and to do nothing. There is an obligation on us to take action, and we are currently not living up to this obligation. The party political infrastructure does not help him; he does not trust it (somewhat understandably) and there’s not sufficient of a march with his beliefs.
He is also, I think, making a deeper point – that we are not well organised to take action. I might write to the Press Complaints Commission on this one (if it is not too late for me to establish what happened), because it pushes a lot of my buttons. I really do believe that reporters have an obligation to tell the truth, and in particular to report scientific research accurately, and that this obligation is often ignored, and that this is wrong and causes damage. I think it’s wrong to use a personal tragedy to make a political point.
But, in general, I’m not doing a lot, and a big part of that is because of Felipe’s point – that it’s not clear how to go about it. I sign petitions, but I don’t go out looking for them – I sign the ones that are tweeted or posted on my friends’ lists. I write Amnesty letters, because Amnesty makes it very easy for me to do it, but nowhere near as many as I ought to. And I also have work and family and friends and I never have a clue when to stop with anything, so quite often I don’t start.
Dr Bear argues a different case – that we don’t need to be organised, that we should start not from the top down but from the bottom up. For example, she puts the question: are we constraining ourselves by thinking that we have to be organised along party lines, or can we just we coalesce around different interests? She uses the example of the people who march in favour of abortion rights; they are ’strange bedfellows’, but this peculiar coalition has engendered social change.
She makes a powerful case for writing letters: “You have to say that you haven’t forgotten; you have to say that ‘we still notice, we still care’.” Not only is this a moral obligation for its own sake, but it is politically valuable because it is additive. Each letter is another voice, and when we get enough voices then something will happen.
So how do we engage with the current political process? Do we need to wait for an infrastructure, or to create one, or join a party and change it from the inside, or should we just go ahead and do what we care about most, regardless of what others are doing?
I don’t know the answer. I know the questions I want to ask next. They are as follows:
(1) What do we see working? What is changing the political landscape right now, and how? Who are the people that are changing the world in a good way, and how are they doing it?
(sub-question 1a: where do we have to filter for ethics? Changing the political landscape sometimes comes with too high a price.)
I don’t know the answer to this. I’m writing this post at least in part to hear from others. Both Felipe and Dr Bear are very clever and politically aware; they will have thoughts. I’d like to see that conversation move forward, on that level: system rather than individual, pattern rather than generalisation, and descriptive rather than normative at this point. I’d like to try looking at our political system from various different angles and see what we observe, before we start to figure out how to change it. And I’d like us to do it from a positive viewpoint, asking questions that will energise us rather than becoming so absorbed in what’s not working that it’s hard to find the will to do anything at all.
(2) What are our individual strengths? What do we have to bring to the party? What kind of activity makes us come alive?
Felipe is powerful when he’s driven by his anger; mine eats me up and leaves me a husk.
I am not a fighter. This is not the wiring I have. Most of the time (although not always) I think that the world needs fighters, that they are the people who drive a lot of this change. But this is not who I am. Putting me on the front line will not get a blind bit of value out of me, and it will distract the heck out of the people who are meant to be there.
I can be useful in other ways, though. I can help people to think through problems, or to connect to the best in themselves and find the willingness to act differently. I can help disparate, conflict-ridden groups of people to work together to figure out a way forward and get there. I can ask questions that open up new lines of enquiry and get people to see things differently. I can support people in pain and help them carry on.
I’m a lot more valuable if you use me like this than if you chain me to the railings. And I can do it for a lot longer before I fall over, because this is playing to my strengths, because it is working with the grain rather than against it. Ditto with everyone else, and their unique strengths. But for this to work, someone has to be asking the question.
Does that someone need to be an external leadership presence, organising Felipe and me and others to work in our different ways, pointing us at the problems that need us most? Or can we do it for ourselves, without thinking about what is happening around us, and trust that this is sufficient to do useful work? I don’t know the answer. I think it’s a good question.
I’ll finish with a quote from Rabbi Tarfon that I’ve used here before, because Dr Bear likes it and I think it’s apposite: It is not your responsibility to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it. Maybe the first responsibility is to get clear about how best to approach the task. Maybe it’s just to do what feels like the next right thing. I really don’t know.