Well, most people would say that good parenting involves teaching children to be polite and respect others, especially those who might be involved in civic or governmental organisations that are meant to help people in a democratic society. However, there would be clear times that I know of in the past when the best way to help our neighbours, and others in society, would involve what would be clearly labelled as bad manners.
One event that comes to mind is a May Day rally in a small…
I think that the thing that jumps out from my memory of all of my activism was spending several hours on a sit-down blockade staring down the barrel of a water cannon. Potentially quite a disempowering situation, as the police have a lot of equipment which they are fairly free to use at their own discretion. When all you have is your strength of will, and your physical presence, to challenge that – you feel like the weaker party in that game.
But to come together…
I am very unhappy that you have asked me this question. I used to believe that if you weren’t miserable, you weren’t politically conscious. So I used to make myself even more unhappy than I was in order to make myself more politically right-on.
Thankfully I can now just allow myself to be depressed.
Man
I don’t know. Perhaps activism is a way of keeping your unhappiness at bay. You can cultivate an image of being a great activist while actually being extremely…
I do think swimming in the sea is remarkable. It’s the only time you’re inside an organism, but I don’t think that’s political. It may be spiritual.
Woman, St Leonards-on-Sea
Well, actually, when you say ‘activism and swimming’, the first thing that comes into my head is Jeju [island in South Korea, where villagers are resisting the building of a massive naval base] when I jumped into the water when I first arrived. When I saw the police were stopping the SOS kayaks, I…
I don't like it when things get ascetic. Enjoying ourselves has potential for liberating us. My general philosophy is: pleasure is a good thing. In our affinity group we have made a commitment to enjoying ourselves. We realised that a lot of our motivational energy comes from guilt. That got us thinking what other motivations we could discover. Enjoying ourselves is a vehicle that will be more exciting and appeal to other people.
There is a lot about pleasure that is to with class and…
For my parents, people who go to court are people who have done something wrong. Even when they know you, they are not going to change their mind. They may think “my daughter is not a bad person”, but they have stereotypes. And they will worry because I am in another country. Maybe they think I don’t know what I am doing, because my brother is police and they listen to him everyday.
But because I travel, then it changes my perspective. I realise that the law…
I do find that quite a lot of people think that to ‘get back to nature’ we should spend our time wallowing in mud. The practical problems of that [anti-roads] camp in Combe Haven [East Sussex]…. I’m quite glad I only turned up the day before the evictions happened, otherwise I would have had to spend days living in all that mud.
The thing I enjoyed most about being in a tree for three days [during the evictions] was being out of the mud for three days.…
I guess the thing that comes into my mind is, the first thing that comes into my mind, is activism plus going on road trips equals junk food. Activism and an adrenalin rush. The excitement of going on recces in the middle of the night, going past petrol stations and getting junk food to keep our sugar levels up.
It’s sort of like junk food is sometimes quite a helpful comfort food but it’s not part of a long-term sustainableness.
Woman activist
What do I think…
Reading the October issue of PN, the pieces about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the people working on Peace News getting an issue out the door but not knowing whether they would live to put another issue together again, reminds me of the 1980s and that same sense of desperation I had then, lots of us had, that the end of the world could be coming any day, that nuclear weapons were about to obliterate us.
It is a very different feeling today. With climate change, it is almost certainly…
Activism and partying? I haven't really experienced linking these together. If you're talking about a 'regular party', it doesn't really link to my peace activism.
It sounds interesting having those two things linked together. What comes into my head is people with different views who feel strongly about something coming together in a party and discussing things in a casual way.
You have to have music at a party, but I feel it should not be a mainstream band.
I haven't…
Well the first I'd say is that when I started going to protests as such, I wouldn't have considered myself to be 'an activist'.
The first protest I went on was on the night of the student fees vote in parliament. I'd never been on a protest before and I thought it'd be quite peaceful and quite orderly.
It didn't turnout that way – we got kettled by the police. It was not a pleasant experience, but I met great people and I wanted to get more involved.
There was a moment…
There had been an ‘issue’ in our group, so I had to talk face-to-face with someone. We figured out the best chance of us meeting was when he came to Aldermaston for an action camp (against nuclear weapons).
I showed up; he’d volunteered to be a decoy, so we walked around the base, talking about who said what and who did what and why he felt the way he did.
At the main entrance, he said he was going to walk straight in –as a decoy. I joined him – we were both expecting to be…
I know someone who became a committed, full-on activist because of his experience of consensus decision-making. A demo was happening and he tagged along, and it wound its way into a student union or something, and everyone sat down and they had a decision-making meeting and he was completely blown away and thought: ‘This is it! This is how things should be!’
What’s attractive is the sense that everyone is being listened to, everyone’s opinion counts. After my experiences of school and…
I used to belong to an affinity group whose motto was ‘fun and effective’. Every action was supposed to be both effective in advancing our cause, and fun for those of us carrying it out.
We did do some very amusing things. The most bizarre of which was when we were campaigning about East Timor, which few people had ever heard of, and British arms sales to Indonesia, which was then occupying the tiny country. (I still find it hard to believe international pressure forced Indonesia out…
If you ask who I feel has mentored me, the one obvious figure for me is the poet Waldo Williams, whose poetry is... how can I say it... Well, someone once asked me: ‘Which of his poems are the pacifist ones?’ And I answered: ‘They all are!’
They are all inspired by this notion that, as people, we can and must live in peace, and that is our natural state.
Some of the images he has are so…
