Risky Business - Part 4

This post ends the series, thanks for being patient, if you have been.

This week I've been wondering how my wife and I came to be poisoned, and what might be done about it. It would be reasonable to think, if the need to change our social decision making system is so clear, why haven't we done it?

Colossus the Cat Notices the Levitating Dog on the Deck

A few months ago, I posted an homage to the people who invented modern activism, the Nestle Boycott. Those visionaries had two important insights. First, they forced an enormous corporation into contention on their terms. Accustomed to using defensive tools created by and therefore favorable to huge corporations, Nestle was beaten when it faced a scale and a scope of activism it didn't understand until it was too late.

Second, the Boycott used Nestle's advantage - its ubiquity - as a tool to defeat it. Essentially, before the Internet existed, the Boycott invented transnational activism. By systematically creating boycott groups around the world, they confronted the company wherever it was on the globe - which was almost everywhere. Today's "Twitter revolutions" are the Nestle Boycott's grandchildren.

I have great respect for the many health, environmental and justice organizations around the world that work within the existing framework of science and law created by companies and their governments. Those activists go to court, work on and in regulatory agencies, and engage in endless individual fights to protect us all. I send them what support I can, and I wish them success because they are doing vital work. We need them.

I do believe, however, that today's version of the Nestle Boycott - the next wave of activism - is rising out of the Occupy movement, not from established social change groups. The Occupiers are everywhere and they are nowhere. Using an image from my incessant googling of neuromuscular diseases, it's like the powerful entities we wish to change don't have receptor sites for new activism like the Occupiers - who lack lawyers, budgets, offices, incorporation, and tax exemption. They are in many senses, out of reach.

While the new activists lack concrete edifices, they have a great ability to connect large numbers of people instantly, continually, and wherever it suits them. Their power to mobilize is only just being realized. The media, literally owned by the objects of the Occupier's attention, bends to the wind blown by the new activists, seemingly oblivious to the absurdity of enabling their opposition.

Jimmy Loves the Old Media

Another fruitful area for making change is found by consulting the long list of very large scale, seemingly indeterminate problems. Our society focuses best on sharply-defined issues like regulation of pesticides or changing how schools are funded. Those kinds of issues are hard for reformers to deal with, because the regulatory and legal framework are rigged in favor of those who profit from the problems.

But other kinds of more complex social issues that float on a different level may favor activists over the 1%. For example, some problems come to mind like:

• Punishing teachers and their students for society's failures in education and eradication of poverty
• Misusing the sharp tools of science and engineering as blunt instruments of societal regulation
• The destruction of our country's political legitimacy by corporate funding
• The collapse of an independent press 
• The accelerating impoverishment of our population
• The decline of affordable higher education

You could make your own list, there is no shortage of multi-sided, deeply rooted societal predicaments. While each of these problems has corporate and government stakeholders, big and complex issues diffuse companies and governments in the same way that ordinary people have been fragmented when trying to address "traditional" social problems like agricultural pollution or school vouchers.

Multidisciplinary, amorphous issues spread out over time and space fit our emerging model of dispersed activism - we are well matched in scale and scope. Do you need some educators, poverty experts, economists and child development psychologists to work together immediately to create a model of authentic educational reform? While we are doing this, using low-cost available tools, corporate and government departments are stuck dithering, sending memos to each other and squabbling over turf. Dispersed multi-level activism is perfectly suited to deal with dispersed multi-level problems.

I don't think we know yet how contemporary activism is going to develop and play out. In the meantime, it's a serious mistake to encounter government and company power, then play on their terms, and roll over. Outrage over corporate funded government corruption, disgust with failed education, scapegoating of a rotating list of vulnerable people, rising ill health, and declining quality of life are mighty engines to drive social change on an increasingly large and lasting scale. Activist diversity is slowly but increasingly equating less with weakness, more with strength.

Do I have a prescription? You bet, an easy one, in two parts.

First, when the time comes: act. Opportunities are steadily springing up. Where and how and for what reason you act is for you to figure out. In a growing movement for people's ownership of their own lives, there will be continual chances to do something, opportunities to latch on to some small problem -  or even some big issue.

Over time, changing the world for the better is getting easier. No doubt it will sometimes seem impossible, and we'll occasionally feel terribly discouraged. But overall, I'm fully expecting success while having a good time. Fixing things is fun; working with others to make things better feels great. You will find optimism by not predicting your future success according to the failed and co-opted ideas of the past, but from from the emerging energy, the new concepts, and the wellsprings of hope that are appearing all around us.

Finally, do not ever give up. My dying wife wrote her last blog post 36 hours before she died. She never gave up. If she could do that - so sick, unable to breathe, paralyzed - I can.

We can.