Enough of this shit

ONE    December 22nd 2018

A few days before Christmas on a bleak, damp, London afternoon and I find myself sat on wooden box with a hole in the front of it beating out a harsh incessant rhythm with my bare hands and shouting hoarsely every now and again and in unison with a dozen other drummers and dancers, the words “Rise Up!”. Our invocations are responded to cheerfully by those of our companions – literally partners in crime – who have positioned themselves so as to block the points of entry to and exit from the BBC head office. Although some of them are merely standing placidly holding up cloth banners. the BBC security staff, on grounds of health and safety, have forbidden people wishing to get in or out to attempt to negotiate these flimsy obstacles. A number of other people have used superglue and an ingenious arrangement of drainpipe sections to secure themselves to the metal barriers (which the BBC security staff had erected to prevent us gaining access to the building itself) and to each other. On either side of the barriers crowds of Broadcasting House staff members contemplate with glum bewilderment their inability to get in for a meeting or production deadline, or out for lunch.

Along a wall adjacent to the barrier a queue of a hundred or so punters wait to see if they will be allowed in, presumably as studio audience members. Some of them chuckle at everyone’s dilemma and many respond approvingly at being told by our ‘de-escalators’ going along the queue with leaflets that we are here to save civilisation from imminent collapse on account of the climate crisis that the BBC has been under-reporting. Some others stamp their feet (not in time with the drums), look at their watches and glare at us with open hostility. My immediate comrades, none of whom I met before today, include a man about my own age who has sensibly brought sticks with which to beat his loud snare drum, a slight shy girl aged about 17 who has travelled up, like me, from the home counties and found herself playing a pair of tom-toms which someone else had left on the ground (she is anxious about finding the owner to return them later), a stout bespectacled man who arrived late but was welcomed with enthusiasm because he brought the biggest fuck-off bass drum you have ever seen, and a very enthusiastic young guy with a tall well-made bongo who, on account of his obvious drumming talent, has become our leader for the afternoon.   I am floating between being too cold and too hot and also floating in an out of a sort of trance in which I keep recalling strange dreams which I am not certain I ever had. I am definitely too hungry and thirsty having forgotten to eat the sandwich I brought or to drink any water. The pads on my fingers are swollen and red and there is a kind of white residue building up on the inside of the joints. I am exhausted but I grin happily at our young leader when he pauses for a moment to show me his own bruised hands. I’m having the best time in ages.

So how did I get here? There I was just around 2 years ago preparing to retire quietly from my professional life and to spend my days engaged in a list of things I enjoyed but never had enough time for: gardening, playing tennis, learning Spanish, finishing a book started five years before which remains without a clear structure or a working title, visiting other countries, playing the guitar, doing bugger-all when I felt like it. Although always politically-minded (as the book, if it ever gets finished and read, will attest) I did not put political activism on the list.  I’ve dipped in to various things over the years – a fair bit of political literature, some petition-signing and donating, the occasional local meeting or interesting-looking conference – but had until late 2016 remained more or less, and like most of my ilk (grumpy old git Guardian-readers who know quite a lot and are happy to share it with you but don’t actually do much about it) an essentially  passive consumer. And even though I was genuinely interested in what I read and heard, and sometimes even inspired, nothing shook me from my inertia.

So what changed? What took me from  ‘A’  – consisting essentially of a regular cup of coffee with  the Guardian ‘comment and analysis’ section and the odd cynical email exchange with a like-minded friend – to   “B’ – sitting in the middle of the road annoying a load of people and shouting my head off?

I suppose it was three things, none of them very mysterious: Brexit, Trump and the ‘luxury’ of time. Together they seem to have taken me over the tipping point; between feeling frustrated and that I possibly ought to be doing something more substantial about the public issues which concern, upset or irritate me, and actually doing something. Having gone over that tipping point it feels like momentum is gathering on the other side. I’m not sure I can stop. Sometimes I tell myself that the explanation for my activism is that, being an affluent retiree with no job to hang onto or reputation to  maintain,  I have nothing left to lose. I doubt this is strictly true. More likely, my experiences of activism – although not all of them are positive or exciting by any means – have combined and collided together to create, through a sort of alchemical process, an actual new sense of purpose. Whatever it is that makes you feel that you just have to do something  – whether it’s the washing up, asking someone to marry you, jumping off a high-diving board, or shouting “tell the truth BBC” in the direction of a bemused sports commentator as he tries to get to his lunchtime meeting – I now have that motivation. And it seems that the more this muscle is exercised the stronger it grows, A phrase I have picked up along the way is written on a scrap of paper on the notice board in my study. It says: “If not you, who? If not now, when?”. I have no answers.  I could be in this for the long run.

I’m speaking about this as if it’s an internal process, but of course nearly all of it has been outside my control. It has felt like something happening to me more than something I was doing. My activism may ultimately be re-activism. In that sense there is clearly at least something in the ‘nothing left to lose’ bit. There is a balance, or not, between the things one doesn’t like, on one hand (what Hamlet called the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune) and our attachment to a comfortable life on the the other. The Brexit referendum and the whole process leading up to and following it enraged and appalled me but it still wasn’t enough to get me out of my armchair. Trump’s election distressed me so much that I simply couldn’t settle. After I saw the Brexit result on a morning TV news channel I had actually turned the TV off and then back on again in case I had made some sort of error of consciousness. With the Trump result I did that again and I checked on alternative channels too. I seriously considered going back to bed and getting up again later to see if it had been a dream. For weeks afterwards I often caught myself forgetting it had happened or half-believing that it was a dream. A nightmare of course. I felt like the hyperactive Hamlet, pacing back and forward, caught between an urgent compulsion to act and a desperate search for some evidence that what I knew to be true had never happened. 

Later on the morning of November 9th 2016, I wept. I can’t remember doing anything like that before. Not after Thatcher’s hypocritical election victory speech (“where there is discord, may we bring harmony” – that one) in 1979. Not after they started bombing Baghdad 12 years later (when I felt an urge to be on the streets but knew nowhere to go) or when the lying bastards did it again 12 years after that (when an important Saturday work commitment ‘prevented’ me marching with the million others). After Trump’s victory, I could not be at peace.  It occurs to me now that the mixture of horror and outrage I experienced and was incapable of integrating psychologically or even physically offers a fair explanation for what  Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder sometimes is. I simply felt that this could not stand. I could not be at peace with it and it would be immoral, unthinkable, fatal even, to try.

The advantage I and most adults have over kids with ADHD is that we have enough ego function to transform a sense of emergency into a plan of response; maybe even to turn a crisis into an opportunity. I was in Parliament Square as soon as I saw a chance of gathering with some like-minded people. That was in the early spring of 2017. There were a few thousand of us that evening, and a smattering of speakers. It gave me a sense of relief. I’m not sure I could not have done it; as if for years I had been the proverbial frog heating up slowly in a pan of water and not noticing how high the temperature had got, now I was the frog put into a  pan of already boiling water who leaps straight out again. I had to do it.

I still didn’t do much: waved a placard, chanted politely according to guidance, clapped, booed and cheered. But it was a watershed. It wasn’t obvious at first but I think my course changed then. A short while afterwards I was surprised to find myself re-organising domestic commitments so that I could spend a Saturday morning canvassing shoppers in Richmond to reject their arrogant sitting MP Zak Goldsmith at a bye-election he had pointlessly triggered (which, rather wonderfully, they did). When the first big anti-Brexit march was called for summer 2018, I was there despite having other places I would really much rather be , and when Trump soiled our country with his presence a month later I was there again. I had even designed and made my own banner, an act which felt at once secretly shameful and preciously self-affirming. And in October 2018 I was  there again for the Brexit ‘People’s Vote’ march, this time quite joyfully astonished to be taking part in something so unexpectedly huge and potentially transformative. In between times, my dilettante toying with petitions and public meetings and whatnot was changing into a time-consuming habit, something which felt like a job of work.

More significant than any of the big rally day-trips to the city was finding myself, shortly after Theresa May’s ridiculous announcement of a snap general election, sitting in the back room of a pub listening to plans for a very unlikely cross-party campaign to oust the incumbent MP from one of the safest Conservative seats in the country and then, just a month or so into my retirement when I was supposed to be sitting in the sunshine and admiring the azaleas, trailing for hours around the local streets delivering leaflets and knocking on doors to explain to local voters why they should support a ‘Progressive Alliance’, ignore party loyalties and vote for someone who still had more or less no chance of winning. (Quite a few of them did, and she came a creditable second). 

It was a  laborious experience which ended in very predictable defeat; but underneath the sense of drudgery I felt a growing sense of connection – to other people alongside whom I campaigned, certainly, but more importantly to something in myself which I think I had forgotten about. It felt regenerative and wholesome and of value. Despite chronically stiff limbs, missed tennis matches, boredom, a neglected vegetable patch and a conviction of eventual defeat, and the humiliation of being told frankly more than once to fuck off and stop wasting people’s time, I was feeling a bit more real. To be honest I’m still not sure if this ‘sense of self’ is any more than a bloody-mindedness, a mild defiance disorder carried over from my adolescence or some sort of attachment to fighting lost causes. I’m trying to keep a watching brief and see what develops. But so far it feels pretty good and this is more or less regardless of the relative success or abject failure of any of the various enterprises with which I have become involved.

A central issue which I think I need to monitor in relation to this is whether this good feeling which seems to derive simply from doing something is actually a good thing. It certainly does make me feel better for a while, but then again so does spending an hour in the garden on a sun lounger, drinking a couple of pints in the local on a Friday night, playing tennis, or watching Narcos, and I don’t count any of them as essentially useful activities, except that they give me pleasure. I don’t discount the value of pleasure but I l know that when I am on  a sun lounger or in the pub or on the tennis court that I am usually not doing anything more than gaining pleasure. And if I did these things too much, and instead of rather than as well as useful things beneficial to other people and the world in general, then, I recognise, they would constitute avoidant or even addictive behaviour – an escape from reality into a mood-changing experience. The point is, could it be that this is what is happening when I march through London with several hundred thousand other people, or when I sit in someone’s living room estimating the probability of our candidate winning this or that local council ward, or when I send off a sternly-worded letter to my MP?

More particularly is this what was really going on when, a couple of months ago, I participated in blocking half a dozen road bridges in central London for most of the day as part of an ongoing ‘climate change rebellion’. There is no doubt that, despite the cold and discomfort and apprehension about arrest, it felt good. But was the feeling of powerfulness that came with the experience of truly affecting things merely a compensation, a denial of the reality of true powerlessness? When we stood at the end of the day on Lambeth Bridge, after the police had literally given up and gone home,  chanting “Whose bridge? Our bridge?” it felt genuinely joyful. But was it just a mood-altering delusion? So far as I know the world is still warming up ready to destroy civilisation and nobody with real authority is doing much to change it. Who am I kidding?

I’m really not sure about this. I think there is a danger that the emotional charge of activism could morph into what some psychotherapists call ‘spiritual flight’ – an escape from the problem through an absurdly idealistic belief that we are solving it. On the other hand we clearly need to maintain morale and self-belief to achieve anything. My hunch is that the key is determination and purpose; not letting yourself get carried away with apparent successes, and indulging neither triumph nor despair. Just keep on one step at a time and you may get somewhere good. I don’t know if this is right but I guess at least I might find out this way. 

The thing I have found most appealing (alongside the screamingly obvious point that the issue here is basically the end of the world) about the climate protest group that is my latest and currently most consuming area of activism, is this attitude of determination. A phrase I see often in social media comments or text messages  is “We won’t stop”. I find that peculiarly compelling. It seems to be a potential trump card to the usual expectations of the mainstream drift consensus which has helped get us into his awful mess – don’t worry, eventually they will get tired / dispirited / fobbed off / arrested and just go away. No we won’t. It’s like, I think, the ‘Yippees’ in the USA circa 1969 who said “We want everything, now”, which was ridiculous at the same time as being completely valid 

Another idea sometimes quoted in these circles is that the world will probably only be changed by a small group of people acting with determination. Again, at one level this is so absurd as to be insane, But have a look at history. Check out, for instance, how many guerillas were in the boat with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara before they landed back on their home island of Cuba and began the armed revolution which overthrew the Batista government and set up a communist administration able to defy the might of the USA for over fifty years and achieve astonishing transformations in infrastructure, health and education services. Check out how many conquistadors were with Charles Pizarro in 1531 when he sailed around the coast of South America to subdue and eventually destroy an empire (the Incas ) which had dominated a continent for several centuries. The numbers are tiny. Indeed, they are scarcely believable.

This matter of setting out to achieve the apparently impossible  is really important. If we allow the odds to discourage us we’re lost before we even start. Fortunately, a silver lining to the cloud of a couple of the disasters which have recently befallen us – the vote to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump – is that they provide indisputable evidence that the unfeasible is perfectly possible.  The problem of climate change might be placed in the same category; if we weren’t at this point would we really consider it credible – indeed, did we, say 35 years ago when the threat was already apparent – that our incredibly clever and sophisticated species might bring itself to the brink of extinction through greed and inertia?

So activism should not be dismissed on the grounds that success is unlikely. One of the early criticisms. even in the progressive media, of our climate rebellion group was that that its aims were ‘unrealistic’. Sometimes (when I am managing my anger ok) this actually makes me laugh. It is supposed, by our critics and opponents, to be unreasonable to ask for carbon emissions to be brought to zero by 2025 or for a citizen’s assembly to be created to address the problem of climate change which politicians evidently find so intractable; it is apparently reasonable, on the other hand, to allow civilisation to come to an end whilst we talk interminably about more ‘realistic’ solutions which we never implement. 

In 1961, John F Kennedy, not really a radical but at least a symbol, for a while, of progressive liberalism, said that “In ten years time we will put a man on the moon”. At the time this was an idea improbable to say the least, and yet science, technology, thought, and practical  endeavour swung behind him to create an unstoppable collective purpose which made it a reality. Kennedy, however it happened, was a catalyst. The things which bring ideas into reality are belief and activism but we generally need a spark to get us started. 

Leaders of much quality seem hard to come by at the moment. There are doubtless a lot of complex reasons for this. In the meantime we will need to make do with what ever wakes us up and presents us with a sense of the right direction. For me it was the offence against civil morality and decency that is Trump. No doubt I was ready to be woken even though it was an unpleasant start. And now it turns out that there are any number of things to which I should be turning my attention, not all of them very directly related to him. How I’m going to negotiate the conflicts which this brings up, including between the compulsion to do something and the continuing desire for a quiet and pleasurable life, I’m not at all sure. But I’ve made a start and, for the moment at least, it feels good.