Every movement needs great orators. Talk is important. But talk without action takes us nowhere. For every Frederick Douglass – both orator and activist – we need thousands of Harriet Tubmans.
In three previous diaries, - Tell us what you're doing, Tell us what you're doing now and Kosactivists! Tell us what you're doing (3) - I've sought to discover what it is specifically that people are doing in the realm of political activism, whether they are focused on elections and party politics, devoting every spare moment to single-issue reform, spotlighting an injustice or just improving their immediate neighborhood.
I've worked with political activists in one way or another for more than four decades, so it was no surprise to me how many people here are not just talking about making the world a better place. We do it every day in ten thousand ways.
That is sometimes easy to forget when slogging through the acid bath of a tendentious meta diary's comment thread. But, ultimately, except for the disruptors, disinformers and the terminally self-indulgent, improving life for our fellow human beings is what we're all about here. And whether your gig is delivering homemade peanut-butter sandwiches to the homeless every day, being a community organizer 40 hours a week for Organizing for America, helping gay men escape the violence they face in the Middle East by resettling them in Europe and America, teaching life skills to women who have just emerged from incarceration or putting in time at a phone bank and walking precincts to get better Democrats elected, other Kosactivists want the skinny on what you're doing.
In this fourth installment, I hope we hear from people who haven't spoken up before, but also get more details from those who already have. Given how close we are to election day, it would be enlightening for those who are walking precincts and phone-banking to give us the low-down on what they're hearing from rank-and-file Americans they're contacting. We can then all compare notes.
But election work, to reiterate, isn't the only thing going on even this close to the mid-terms. Political activism is obviously about far more than putting good candidates into office and ejecting the jerks and crooks.
Something that hasn't come out too much in the three previous comment threads on this subject is how people have beaten the obstacles they encountered, or how they dealt with failure, fixed mistakes, and used what they learned from one project to achieve better results in the next one. We want details, anecdotes and advice.
Don't be shy because what you're doing doesn't seem like a big deal compared with what somebody else is doing. We all participate based on our skills, our time, our passions. Whether it's an hour a month handling the ladle at a soup kitchen or 80 hours a week fighting to get a progressive initiative passed or end the war in Afghanistan. It's all worth telling.
So tell us!