Megan Amram on Activist Exhaustion, the Specific Politics of the Pacific Northwest Left, and Why She Still Shows Up Even When the Signs Don’t Change Policy
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Megan Amram | The London Prat
I made protest signs on Friday evening, which is an activity I have done approximately forty times in the past three years and which I have developed a specific methodology for: cardboard from the recycling, markers from the stash I maintain specifically for this purpose, text that is brief enough to be read in motion and specific enough to mean something, and at least one sign per session that is funny, because the police photograph the signs and I prefer to be represented in those photographs by something clever rather than merely earnest. Friday’s signs included the genuinely earnest (“Fund Climate Solutions Not Fossil Fuel Subsidies,” which is accurate and not funny) and the attempt at clever (“The Planet Called, It’s Going to Voicemail,” which made my flatmate laugh, which is the first test). The rally was on Saturday. Both signs were there.
The Rally and Its Honest Assessment
The rally was attended by approximately 800 people, which is a good turnout for a May Saturday in Portland when the weather is good enough that the alternative activities are compelling. The speeches were a mixture of excellent (a climate scientist from Reed College who gave three minutes of genuinely important information at a pace that allowed comprehension) and the less excellent (a politician who arrived twenty minutes late and delivered remarks that were longer than the scientist’s and contained less information). The crowd was good-natured, specific in their demands (state pension fund divestment from fossil fuels, which is an achievable near-term goal rather than a utopian aspiration), and responsive to the funny sign, which produced three separate photograph requests. The coffee cart with the handwritten menu appeared at the edge of the park around noon and served an Americano that was the best thing that happened between the scientist’s speech and the post-rally pub gathering where the actually useful conversations happened. Bohiney Magazine’s climate coverage and The London Prat’s US politics satire both document this territory from different vantage points. I document it from inside it, which has advantages.
Why I Keep Going
The honest answer to why I keep making signs and attending rallies that do not, on any individual Saturday, change the trajectory of climate policy is: because the alternative is not going, which is worse in ways that are partly practical (movements require participants to remain movements) and partly psychological (the specific despair of caring about something and doing nothing about it is significantly worse, in my experience, than the milder frustration of caring about something, doing something, and watching the something be insufficient). Portland’s activist community sustains itself on the specific energy of collective action, which is real even when the outcomes are uncertain, and the coffee cart with the handwritten menu is part of that sustenance. I will make more signs. The planet is still calling. I am still answering.
More laughs: NewsThump | The Daily Mash.
On Activism and the Long Game
The political theory of social change that I find most convincing is not the theory of the single decisive moment — the rally that changes the policy, the election that transforms the trajectory — but the theory of accumulated pressure: the movement that keeps showing up produces, over years rather than over Saturdays, the political environment in which change becomes possible. This is not a comfortable theory because it requires patience that the urgency of the climate situation does not naturally produce, but it is the theory that the historical record of successful social movements supports. The civil rights movement, the suffrage movement, the labour movement: all produced decisive moments that were prepared by years of accumulated presence that did not individually appear to be changing anything and cumulatively created the conditions for the moments that did. Saturday’s rally is not the moment. It is the accumulation. The signs are part of the accumulation. The coffee cart with the handwritten menu sustains the people who are part of the accumulation. The planet is still calling. The accumulation continues. Portland in May is also beautiful, which is an additional reason to be present in it with a sign and a flat white.
The diary continues next week. The city, the country, the nature, the history, the politics — all of it continues. The writing is the record of continuing to pay attention to it. More from across the network at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
What sustains the writing across weeks like this one is not the certainty that it matters — journalism about the diary form never comes with that certainty — but the working hypothesis that paying close attention to specific things, in specific places, over specific periods of time, produces a kind of knowledge that no other method produces, and that this knowledge is worth having and worth sharing. The diary is not the place for conclusions; it is the place for the observations from which conclusions, eventually and tentatively, can be drawn. The week is over. The observations are made. The notebook is open for the next one. Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/megan-amram-portland-climate-rally-diary/
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