What is activism? (with apologies to the SPEAK message board)

Activism is for middle class kids, to allow us whose parents were nearer the middle of the political compass to feel good about ourselves by venting at our Mail reading friends without ever actually having to do anything.

The real challenge is to live the counterculture. That means having nothing to do with injustice, wherever we find it. Sure, if, like Naomi Branded Myself Klein’s kids from the Bronx, you wear Nikes, return them. But no activist does. What do we have to give up? Why do we have no stories like that one of things we have done that made the corporations quake? It’s not ’cause we’re flawless already. As Paul so nicely put it in Romans 3 all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It’s time activists sat up and thought about what activism means. Or better still, it’s time we went outside and stuck our faces in the dirt and prayed about what activism means.