Everyone’s a critic… and no one does anything right… except for me (In this case, me as in whoever is speaking, not me: Theodore Maestranzi). I think that sentence sums up the bulk of humanity. It is grating to accept someone else’s viewpoint/design/project over your own. Our insides boil, our vision blurs, and a deep rumblings of regret bubble into our mind. We try to squash it, but we eventually end up questioning everything. Eventually, we will enter a state of despondency – if lucky – we will rise from that challenge and continue down our path after making valid corrections – more than likely – we will step away from that realm of life and never return. [click “Read More” for more delicious rant]
Perhaps, I am hardheaded (this is a known fact, Italians are biologically disposed to being thick skulled (I am not a scientist and I just found that factoid (factoid’s definition means false fact), in fact, Italians are likely like every other human being – maybe), but I don’t let the constant rejection of life or my ideas slow me down. If I did, this website wouldn’t exist right now, and I wouldn’t be writing religiously. So when it comes to a roadblock, wall, mountain, physical limitations of the world, I like to keep pushing and use my hard head to batter down the obstacles before me. Yet, I know many people who don’t handle differing opinions in such a way – they shut down or give up.
That brings us to the topic at hand: activism and how you are doing it wrong. Now, I don’t give two shits from Sunday about how you go about your activism – I’m just glad you have opinions and are talking about them. If you are hiding your viewpoints, congrats, you are building an echo chamber and you aren’t participating in dialogues that will better you as a person (that works on both sides of the fence, polarization is horrible (but I come from a Levinasian thought process)).
Ignoring the above tangent, I have issue with someone criticizing how you handle activism (above I criticized the lack of activism). If all you want to do is put up a hashtag, great for you. If you goal is to get a person who doesn’t vote to vote, even better. But when we belittle people or criticism them for not doing enough, and they already feel overwhelmed, you just put them in a place where they feel dejected. Now, if they are stubborn they may do more, but more than likely, you have just made them feel small and caused them to avoid helping in the future. Instead of gaining an ally who will grow over time, you have stunted their growth.
The point is to avoid telling people how their form of activism is wrong. For example, when I am sitting there and you question someone in a condescending manner about how they shouldn’t focus on creating a hashtag because it is useless, and instead, they should canvas the streets; I am going to get annoyed. So support each other and share ideas on how they can get more involved to better spread the message, but I highly suggest supporting their ideas otherwise you just lost another soldier in your political war.
~This was spawned from two friends talking about municipal elections and how one wasn’t doing enough. In that moment, I saw the other one get defeated. Since then, they haven’t discussed anything political and when the topic is broached, they will find something else to do.