Carrol Cox wrote, with typos corrected: > As Jim pointed out a couple weeks ago, mass movements in many ways _just > happen_; moreover, they are seldom if ever predictable.<
yes, but individuals can contribute to them "just happening." It's not like meteor showers hitting the earth or something. (I used to use "not like the weather," but we now know that people affect the weather.) It's important to avoid thinking of "events just happening" and "activists doing stuff" as completely distinct. >There's a book I have never read but the title is wonderful: They Should Have >Served that Cup of Coffee_. But even the students who sat at that counter >getting beat up and hassled day after day did not really have any idea >whatever of the great surge of humanity they were helping to trigger. Ditto >Rosa Parks and the Montgomery NAACP when they set off the bus-strike.< yes, things "just happened" in these situations, but those students were deliberately putting themselves "in the line of fire" (as it were), as was Rosa Parks. To me, what's important is actual action, linking up to actually-articulated grievances and nascent movements, rather than abstract sloganeering. Slogans are fine, by the way, if they help a real-world movement articulate its program and unify around it. -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
