NINE 1st December 2019

Oh what a lovely rebellion

It was always going to be a difficult trick to pull off twice – turning up in the capital city, having given fairly detailed notice of your plans, with a load of vehicles full of artistic installations, staging blocks, solar power rigs, marquees and the like and expecting the authorities to let you put it all up in the middle of important and politically sensitive locations and block all the passing traffic for a fortnight. Still, it was a bold plan, and even though I think we are all ready to  acknowledge that it didn’t achieve the spectacular impact of the first ‘April Rebellion, I take comfort from the fact that we nevertheless drew serious attention to the climate crisis at a time of high political drama and excitement about other  topics and that the movement took another leap forward in terms of its own development;  not least by demonstrating to ourselves and others what can be done in the face of some seriously adverse conditions including determined resistance  from the authorities and really shitty weather.

Exactly how one should go about measuring success is anyway a moot point. Had I been writing this as intended shortly after the October shenanigans were over I would have set the needle considerably lower than I would now, some weeks on, as I finally start to emerge from the post-rebellion trough. Then it seemed like our impact had been disappointing. Now it seems that the profile of the climate and ecological emergency is way higher than it was at the start of October. I suppose it’s like planting stuff in the garden. One doesn’t always feel great after digging for a few hours and burying some  tiny bits of seed under the ground. Staring at the brown earth and nursing a sore back immediately afterwards it can be hard to believe that green shoots will come up. But they usually do.

It was a hard slog though. Whereas the abiding visual impressions from April had been of sunshine, colourful flags and smiling faces, the  imagery which immediately  springs to mind from October is of soggy tents, lost (confiscated) belongings, bitter exhaustion and a cold, hard road.

It’s a strange thing really how easily we deceive ourselves. Of course as mostly sensible and thoughtful adults we knew perfectly well that it was unlikely to be sunny in October, that the police would be ready for us this time and that anyway, one dazzling performance  in any context is rarely immediately followed by another. But this is somehow hard to programme into the human mind, so that we nevertheless bowled along in our gladrags with all our fancy gear not adequately prepared for the stiff opposition and difficult conditions we were about to face.

I remember being taught as a child in school about the Crimean War, and how the British literally turned up to the battle as if for an extended picnic, with deckchairs, sunshades, and sometimes family members along for the ride, expecting easy and glorious victory. I also remember being simply staggered by their stupidity. I suppose the failure to think properly, which is what it amounts to, is anyway what is behind the whole problem of the climate emergency: we find it very difficult to adhere to a sense of purpose or to adapt out plans  in the face of changing circumstances. The graphs of the people who measure these things show that when the news media was full of stories of serious and prolonged flooding in and around Gloucestershire and Somerset about ten years ago, the level of public concern about global warming and weather patterns changing shot up massively. A short while later it plummeted again. It shot up again in April this year. I think it’s probably a good sign that after a slight drop it’s now climbing again on a more steady but sustainable curve.

I tried – apparently unsuccessfully, because she found me guilty anyway, but who knows whether, as per the dynamics referred to above, she will come around to my way of thinking soon – to explain this to the judge when conducting my defence of ‘Necessity’ against the charge of committing a public order offence back in April. (Conveniently, the trial took place during the second week of the October rebellion, so that I was able to join in with the demonstrations which were coincidentally taking place all around the area of the magistrates court during the lunch breaks). What I tried to convey to the judge was that if I waited until the obvious and unquestionable evidence of destructive climate change was apparent in front of my eyes (a tidal wave rolling along the Thames, for instance, or a temperature of 50 degrees along the Embankment) it would be way too late for any meaningful action: my unwanted task is to draw attention to the fact that these things, sooner or later, are coming, and that the time to act in order to do something about them is right now. (In fact it’s sooner than that).

Putting worrying things out of one’s mind (or indeed, just allowing them to drift out of consciousness) is unfortunately something that human beings are very good at. Activists are quite bad at it, which is one of the reasons we are stressed a lot of the time. (Although if some more people got out of their armchairs we could of course share the stress around a bit and feel a bit more relaxed). 

I can’t, however,  blame acute consciousness about climate change (I believe that ‘woke’ has become the fashionably derogatory term for this, although I find it hard to understand why determined ignorance should be seen as a virtue) for all the stress I experienced, in relation to the October rebellion. Indeed, a fair amount of it was doubtless engendered by a subconscious awareness on my part that trying to occupy an area of Whitehall right outside Downing St, the most well-known resident of which is a notoriously touchy, self-important and volatile man, and the guards for which actually have automatic guns in their hands all the time, was not going to be a walk in the park.

Neither was it, but it was nevertheless exhilarating and, in retrospect, satisfying,althought rather gruelling. The build up to it was actually a much more stressful experience, characterised  as it was with attempts to master the intricate bureaucratic and technological systems which had been invented to facilitate organisation by some very clever but in my view, over-optimistic young people, and by the pressing sense that we might have bitten off more than we could chew. A part of the problem undoubtedly was the level of expectation created by the dazzling success of April. This was, as an astute colleague pointed out to me in the aftermath, the “difficult second album”. 

As he went on to say, it’s important to shrug off and move beyond the disappointment that this experience engenders and to build upon experience and learning so as become more deeply creative in the future. Notwithstanding some annoying and occasionally bewildering features of our organisation, I actually think that the values and principles at its core will help us to do that; but in the short-term  it can feel a struggle to get motivated. It’s easy to feel wounded, worn out and battle-weary. One can picture, imagine and even foresee  victories ahead but in the meantime there is a very strong urge to simply hibernate and try to forget about it all for a while. 

Doing this (taking ‘Leave’, as it were) would feel a bit easier to do were it not for the overwhelming evidence that, just at the time in the world at large that we need some seriously able and thoughtful people to take charge of things, we are choosing precisely the worst kind of nasty, ignorant and frankly evil individuals to lead us onwards. These things are of course connected, but right now I’m a bit too tired and depressed about it to articulate how. In the awareness of being led off towards one’s doom by the Pied Piper who is likely to win the UK election whilst those standing by, who could do something about it, are either, like the parents in the story, pretending not to notice, or are so incomprehensibly wrapped up in their own egoic delusions as to be unable to act rationally and do what they could to prevent it, it feels like all you can do is hold your breath and pray for a miracle. I’ve a strong sense that needing to get our of that state of mind, which I had begun to find intolerable, is what got me into the activism in the first place, but right now I really feel a bit too weary of the trench warfare to do much except close my eyes and hope the shells don’t land too close.