Change gonna come?

FIVE. March 30th

I once came across an amusing spoof answerphone message for a therapy centre, which went along the following lines: “If you are narcissistic, press 1, if you are co-dependent, press 2, if you have obsessive compulsive disorder, press 3 repeatedly …. and so on. It concluded “If you are manic-depressive, it doesn’t matter which button you press, nobody will come”. 

Manic-depression is called bi-polar disorder these days, but I quite liked the old label as I think it was more evocative of the emotional experience. Certainly the sense of despair and isolation implied by the answerphone guide for ’manic depressives’  speaks fairly accurately to my experience at times in trying to ‘get something back’ from activism. It can feel desolate.  Most times, it seems you have to plant an awful lot of seeds before anything grows. Then when something does it’s as like as not to get gobbled up by a rabbit or a slug. The knowledge that there are other people out there doing the same thing is supportive, and a side-benefit is getting to know loads of new people, but that doesn’t necessarily prevent regular spells of despondency  and occasionally, the onset of a heavy sense of futility which can be hard to shift.

Something which does usually help to shift it is receiving a long-awaited email reply with useful information, or hearing a report of or being involved in a creative and well-attended ‘action’ or being invited to some new group or enthusiastic initiative. It lifts the mood, even though of course it may amount really to nothing more than the brief appearance of  a green shoot which will die in the frost next week; or the sound of footsteps which seem to be coming to answer the door you are knocking on, but ultimately march right past. The sense of being part of a growing movement and of impending change around the corner (or the next one, or the one after) is meaningful and I retain faith in it for the most part, but it is nevertheless difficult, a lot of the time, to feel that one is actually achieving anything. When my dad was still alive he would sometimes ask me in a jolly way , “Well mate, are you winning?” If he were around to ask that now I would have to answer No.

It occurs to me that this is a relatively unusual phenomenon. Generally, when one devotes oneself to endeavour in a particular area, results, at least of a sort, come in due course. You pass a course and get a qualification, or you get a job and later a promotion, or the business you started gets customers and grows, or you establish a family, learn a skill, build a house, grow (and eat) some vegetables, or something like that. I can’t think of many endeavours besides political activism in which the actual chances of measurable success are so doubtful. I wonder what it must be like to work one’s whole life for a political cause which is never actually realised? To beTony Benn, say, who I’m sure had many satisfactions in life but ended up, on his death bed, further away from the main things that the had striven for than he had been at the start of his political career. Worse still, what if you were in the Socialist Workers Party and spent your whole life going to demonstrations at which even the other demonstrators didn’t want you there? Of course, you never know what is around the corner and I might have been saying something like this about bloody Nigel Farage a few years ago, and look at him now (although I trust he will get his come-uppance eventually).

In fact, even when you do get something back, what seems to count as a result may be no more than an echo, which, while gratifying is of course empty of real substance. Seeing oneself described in a local newspaper as part of a group of ‘angry campaigners’ shouting “shame” from the balcony  of a council chamber, or spotting oneself in a YouTube video of a road-blocking demonstration is quite fun momentariIy but I’m not certain it really counts as ‘making a difference’ . I have made a couple of forays into radio phone-ins recently, reasoning that some of them have surprisingly large audiences and finding that, if you keep your nerve and don’t get intimidated by the rather curt ‘researchers’ who answer the phone, getting through is easier than you might imagine. The first time I achieved this I was quite uplifted by the experience of being afforded air-team to explain at some length my view that Teresa May is completely bonkers and then having my neighbour text me two minutes later to congratulate me. But does even something like this actually make a difference? I did think that what I said was lucid and persuasive enough and I even had the odd experience of being able to confirm  this impression by hearing myself ‘rounding up’ reasonably eloquently  a couple of minutes later when I turned the radio back on . This was due to the ‘delay’ they put on to stop crazy people from saying offensive things (unfortunately not a technology utilised in the the Houses of Parliament). But despite my moment of fame I feel quite doubtful that it had any actual impact. I have to bear in mind, after all, that the reason I haven’t  engaged with talk radio in the past is that I generally think that  the people who phone  in are idiots.

The second time I called in (to say something very obvious but nonetheless very clever about the link between teenage knife-crime and the  fact that government has systematically been stripping away all resources from youth work for decades) I had the very tantalising and frustrating experience of being told several times that I was the next caller to be put through only to be summarily cut off without explanation when the presenter abruptly switched to a different topic. In contrast tot the previous experience. this was very disappointing and left me feeling depressed for a couple of hours. Ridiculous, I know. especially when you consider that the likelihood of what i might have said making any positive difference to anything is minuscule.

Or maybe it isn’t. That’s the trouble, I suppose, you just don’t know. If you are one of a million people on a march, surely it won’t matter if you don’t go because there will still be 999,999 others. What on earth could be the point of sending an email to your MP, or even of voting in an election (or a referendum), when the numbers are so big and the actual impact of what one individual does so inevitably small? Of course, we all know that this an error of thinking, because the only way you get a million people behind something is through a million individual decisions to do the same thing. But this challenges the mindsets of our lazy brains, which collude with our psychological defences against taking responsibility to encourage us towards passivity. In fact, contrary to what my feelings sometimes tell me, reason and evidence suggests that some of this activism, by me and the other 999,999 people, or however many there are of us, is actually making some sort of difference. If I look back over the past six months to see how much news coverage the climate crisis now gets, for instance, I would have to say that it is more. Did I do that? Did we do that? Maybe, At least, maybe.

All that leaves us with, it seems to me, is the requirement to be active in whatever way one can, notwithstanding that we may find ourselves sounding like an idiot on the radio or ’wasting’ the time in which we might be doing something enjoyable on signing petitions, emailing MPs, attending dull meetings and, occasionally, hitting the streets in some more lively activity. Which brings me to anther conundrum: does the fact that actual activity – in the sense of being on a big march, or walking around campaigning, or blocking the traffic in the local High St, (as happened recently in a rather elegantly-designed gesture of ‘alarm’ and defiance) – leaves one feeling better actually mean anything? Certainly I feel  expressed, empowered, enlivened, through the visceral experience of doing something with my body , with other people, but so what? I read a rather intellectual article about this recently which suggested that this is really important, but I’m not sure where the evidence is. Who knows what brings the change. It’s all rather puzzling. My mood shifts from elation to despair often without reference to real external changes.

If I was still a therapist I suppose I might be concluding that the internal changes are really the issue; or, at least, that it’s not isolated concrete achievements in the external world – Brexit or no Brexit, a crap voting system or a decent one, the council agreeing or refusing to declare a climate emergency (or to allow some oil cowboys to dig a fucking great oil well in the middle of an ancient forest) – which will count in the  end, but rather the more general changes we might make in coming alive collectively and starting to do things differently, with care and commitment and honesty and responsibility. In this respect I have been greatly cheered by the rapid growth and flowering of a new local environmental campaigning group which I initiated simply by setting up a meeting, and into which a diverse array of lovely, good-willed hopeful people have poured energy and creativlty. Although we’ve already done loads in terms of preparation, discussion and networking, we haven’t actually ‘done’ anything in terms of any ‘action’ yet, and even when we do it must be considered doubtful that our ambitious aims will be realised. Nevertheless I am made very hopeful and even joyful to be a part of such a thriving and boisterous organism and it feels, right now, like the most important work I have ever done. 

If ‘change gonna come’, real change, I think it might be this way, through the regenerative power created by people collaborating  in a common cause, believing a bit in themselves and each other, and taking pleasure in the endeavour of doing good things together.