Laura Crossett's points are superb, and I am reminded of my own quandaries
during the late 1960s--how to avoid what seemed the inefficacies of simple
moral witness and of socialist groups' prose, to avoid real violence (by
"real" I mean, more than window-smashing and the like--which, whether wrong,
counterproductive, etc., on a given occasion, still are far from the violence
of war or of the owners' System), and so on, yet work for change. One of the
most effective methods has seemed, since, certain forms of what might be
called real-world agitprop--for instance, in the Berkeley area, the "napalm
escort truck" with "Napalm Bombs Ahead" signs and little red
fire-extinguishers that a few people would drive behind the napalm trucks on
the freeways. Another example was overnight billboard emplacement/switching.
There were some collage-type posters some of us put up. What these things
have in common is the humor of satire and activeness; they both empower the
activist and encourage, in an amusing thus palatable way, the audience. (I
don't want to get into the parallels but one can think of this stuff as
Brechtian.)
Then there was the stuff that followed the old organizing rule--don't
teach, just ask people, one-on-one or so, about their lives and what's wrong.
Yet I found moral witness demonstrations more important, eventually--and
the other modes of change. Thank you, Laura, for bringing these things up.
Paula
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Mar 02 2002 - 17:09:49 EST