Working it Backstage
On finding less obvious ways to take action in 2024
The main MLK event in town today was so well attended they were turning people away at the door. A good thing, I suppose. Though when I finally made it inside after some seats opened up partway through, I was a little disappointed to find the whole scene felt a lot like one of the “multicultural” assemblies my school district was fond of putting on in grade school — meaning half the time was devoted to applauding and thanking whoever had just been on stage, whether it was a middling junior high dance troupe or some public figure seriously or enthusiastically delivering a rather bland speech sprinkled with mentions of diversity and justice.
Between acts I squeezed out of the cramped row and made my way to the back. The event was being recorded; I could watch the keynote later. I figured that my attendance could be useful less as another member of the audience (clearly attendees were not in short supply), but more in talking with those putting on the event itself. So I went to talk to the volunteers hanging out near the entrance.
This is how, in the span of maybe 15 minutes, I managed to have multiple conversations about what, if any, reparations work is happening in the region, and was able to assess the interest level from some key community members. I also got set on a path to connect with other local folks partnering with the Oregon Remembrance Project (https://oregonremembrance.org/), an effort focused on truth and reconciliation projects throughout the state, and the local launch of the Sunrise Project (https://oregonremembrance.org/sunrise-project/), which is helping communities throughout Oregon more honestly face their legacy as sundown towns.
15 minutes, and I was way more set to participate in local efforts for truth and healing than when I'd started out.
As I left the MLK celebration, I didn't feel bad about cutting out early. We're two weeks into 2024. This is not a year for sitting through platitudes; it's a year for figuring out how to take action, again and again. We all know there's a lot of at stake; as I'm typing this, the Iowa caucus is taking place. (Scratch that; it looks like they've already called the caucus early, in favor of our own homegrown celebrity authoritarian.)
There are many of us who are dispirited about the U.S. presidential election, and the obvious and terrible ways it's already playing out. There's the fear of anti-democratic forces within the U.S., the sway they already hold in official halls of power, the chance that they may hold yet more. And there's the uninspiring alternative, the party of liberal boomers that continuously fails to transition power (Feinstein was the clear lesson on this, before Biden's second-term obsession) or take a more serious stand for most of its ostensible values. With the election also occurring within the context of so many other anxiety-inducing, large-scale crises (let's just name the changing climate and multiple ongoing wars as a start), it can be difficult to believe it's possible to have any meaningful influence upon the course of events. Even if one is hopeful in these matters, where to start?
Here's my take: I think the best, most useful courses of action this year are going to look a little like my time at the MLK event this afternoon. Which is to say, the best thing to be doing is probably not the obvious choice on the menu. It's definitely not to merely sit in the official seat that's been put out and marked 'participation.' (i.e., it's probably not just casting a vote in November, though I believe in doing that, too.) We're more likely to find interesting ways to actually make change when we glance around the room and see where people are in motion, not where they're sitting and taking in the provided programming.
Here's my take: I think the best, most useful courses of action this year are going to look a little like my time at the MLK event this afternoon. Which is to say, the best thing to be doing is probably not the obvious choice on the menu. It's definitely not to merely sit in the official seat that's been put out and marked 'participation.' (i.e., it's probably not just casting a vote in November, though I believe in doing that, too.) We're more likely to find interesting ways to actually make change when we glance around the room and see where people are in motion, not where they're sitting and taking in the provided programming.
What's another example of putting this principle into action? Myself, I've put a lot of thought into how I want to use my time in 2024. I know that sitting on the sidelines, waiting with dread to know the outcome in November, is not an option for me. But I've no interest in stumping for any of the main presidential candidates. In 2020, I solved this by campaigning in the primaries for a candidate I genuinely supported. I'd stumbled upon the data showing that primary turnout is actually one of the more important factors in determining who wins the general; voters who show up for a primary election are much more likely to vote again later in the year. So I did my work to prevent re-electing Trump in the spring, not the fall. (Let's note this is yet another reason for the Dems to hold a competitive primary, should they really want to be strategic...)
This year, that's not a possibility. So instead, I took a look around at upcoming local campaigns to see if there was anything that I felt was meaningful, in line with my own beliefs, and potentially useful for indirectly shaping the broader electoral mess we're facing. It didn't take me long to zero in on the upcoming ballot initiative for ranked choice voting (RCV) here in Oregon (https://www.oregonrcv.org). Details are still being finalized, but if everything comes through, it appears one of my main work projects this year will be organizing in support of RCV, supporting volunteers around the state. Which means I'll still be doing plenty of get-out-the-vote work, but this time doing so while having conversations about the ways in which we can actually creatively shape and improve the mechanisms of the democratic process so that we don't forever find ourselves with the limited choices offered by this year's presidential lineup. (Really, what better year to advocate for RCV?)
Moving away from all this electoral politics talk, I had another experience last week that likewise seems to fit into this theme of taking action by looking for the less-than-obvious route. It wasn't planned; it happened one afternoon during a mindless moment of social media scrolling. I snapped out of my scrolling trance when a “thin blue line” flag appeared in my feed. The algorithm-induced bubble of Facebook means I don't usually get exposed to symbols known to be associated with white supremacy, so its appearance made me do a double-take.
The flag, imposed on the shape of the state of Oregon, was part of a post from a local emergency services agency in which they were thanking many of their partner organizations, including both fire and police departments. There was no other inflammatory rhetoric. Still, I sat there wondering about what to do. Obviously people need to feel safe enough to call an ambulance or fire truck when it's needed, and this was not going to encourage that. It also legitimized a symbol that's been wielded by those carrying out real violence. Plenty of other agencies around the country have prohibited their staff from displaying it, even if there has been rancor around such decisions.
What I concluded, pretty quickly, is that despite encountering this on social media, I needed to respond in a different way. I could comment directly on the post, but I risked 1) being ignored or just not seen by the responsible party, whose main job clearly wasn't to stay on Facebook all day; and 2) having detractors jump in, increasing the engagements, and thereby ensuring that the post was seen more — not what I wanted.
So here's what I did: I dug around online until I found the non-emergency, administrative phone number for the agency, and I called them. As I dialed, I also decided that I needed to not presume anything about the motives or knowledge level of the person posting, and to engage with them in good faith. This to me feels like it's worth saying, because there's a lot of emphasis in various quarters these days on the righteousness of being outraged, and the performance of that outrage or anger as essential to activism or to political action. On the contrary, I think that such anger often comes out of other emotions — anxiety, fear, hurt — that if not held well by ourselves can hinder our own ability to be effective, and can cause unexpected harm. Anger can be useful — sometimes. But as someone who occasionally works customer service or retail, I know that it's also true that the moment you get a member of the public who's angry with you from the get-go, the less desire you have to help them out.
So I called up and I used my best shopkeeper voice, aka my “trying to be helpful” tone. I said I didn't know who to talk to, but that one of their social media posts had used a controversial image and I wanted to make sure they were aware of that, given that plenty of police departments around the country had banned its use. The woman who answered was a little surprised, I could tell, and had me repeat the concern.
I repeated myself. But I didn't demand to know who was responsible, and I didn't accuse them of being racists; I just made sure they knew one community member found it controversial and cared enough to call.
I had some contingency plans, if rebuffed, which included calling the partner organizations they tagged. After that I'd try the local press, because an agency's refusal to delete the flag image would have been newsworthy. Yet I didn't need to rely on any of that, as when I checked back a little later, the flag was gone. I did, however, keep a screenshot of the image, and will be checking back occasionally, to make sure this wasn't some one-off kind of event.
This experience is interesting to me in so many ways. First, it was a reminder of the baseline nature of our online bubbles, which was such a contributing factor to political outcomes in 2016; it prompted me to consider how I'm going to keep stepping outside my own bubble and challenging myself to keep more truly aware as the year goes on. At the same time, it also felt like such a validation of the potential for making things happen by getting out of the entire bubble that is the internet, of getting offline and making real contact with another human. By no means would every such interaction go as this one did, but we should remember that the potential for easy, one-to-one change remains possible.
This, in a different way from the MLK event, was also a “backstage” action. Like the MLK event, the obvious and public route didn't have much to suggest that it would result in any active change. And in this instance, it came at the risk of not only being ineffective, but of even working at cross-purposes to the goal at hand. Thankfully, the obvious, publicly-touted routes for making social change are rarely the only ones at hand. Yet the effect was public, and would be even if I never bothered to tell anyone about it.
I don't know what you're feeling in this moment, at the outset of 2024. If you're experiencing dread and avoiding the news. If you're devastatingly anxious, or devastatingly angry. If you're overwhelmed or just so busy with whatever you've got going on personally that you're just shrugging your shoulders, figuring whatever happens will happen. There are plenty of ways to feel.
But likewise, there are plenty of ways to engage, with just the tiniest bit of attention and creativity. I hope that in the coming weeks and months, we all find ways to escape the barrage of headlines, to pause, and to see what we're capable of making happen by going off script and stepping backstage.
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg