Hey, guys.
I’m not here to foment, prevent, circumvent, or repent, when it comes to revolution. Every day, you open your eyes and you look out at the world, and you judge whether it is good. If it is not good, you decide how angry you need to get.
Or, that was the plan.
I love living in the future. As a culture, we have farmed out our outrage-deciding muscles. It’s great! Somebody is available to tell you whether you need to be mad, at what, and how to respond. You still get to make the final decision, but it’s nice to have that ripcord.
Imagine living in history times. You’d see your same six friends. You might see a newspaper (depending when you think “history times” is) and it might be less than one year old. Until about the second quarter of the twentieth century, the idea of information moving quickly was kind of a fun joke.
Now, if you wake up at midnight and scrape your eyes across one of the hundred web pages and media channels packed to the very gills with suggestions, you can be mad at something different 1,440 times per day.
“Not my side. That’s how the enemy lives.” I hear you. I get it. I don’t know which side you’re on, and I don’t know who your boon enemy could be, but I get it. And you’re wrong.
See, the money is as good on the side of angels as it is on the side of murder. For every message, there is a Brand™ willing to sell you crap, or the idea of crap, or just harvest your internal, external, and ephemeral organs and sell you off to people who want to buy you.
I’ll never tell you that you are overreacting. And I’ll never tell you that the Enemy hasn’t Attacked you Personally. They probably do want you dead, I don’t know.
Consider where your efforts are going. Remember that your force is limited by your short, human lifespan. I offer you this entirely fictionalized historical reenactment, based on a Fourth Grade spent mostly making spitballs and sticking sharp pencils into acoustic tiles.
Remember the American Revolution? That’s a thing that happened. There was some combat and some ugliness, and mostly, it started around a fight about taxes and tea.
Very specifically, tea.
There is a famous story about some British gents who sought to lose that moniker, so they could pay less tax on tea. They dressed in culturally insensitive outfits and took silently to the streets. They boarded boats still in the harbor and tossed tea to the fishes.
Remember? If not, do you have the gist?
To fight the taxes on the tea, they threw the tea off the boat of the shipper (whom they also wanted to protest, you see) and into the harbor. They did not break into a single store and burn the stores of tea. They did not roust the tearoom owners from their beds and pillory them in the streets.
The retailers were complicit. They paid the taxes. They provided tea and increased consumption. They did not organize some sort of massive boycott of the tea. But, the efforts of the British gents were directed at the tea itself and at the shipping company that had so offended.
If Sam Adams had lead those brave gents against the retailers, the story would have a very different ring today.
Let’s take a hypothetical analog ripped from my imagination. Take for granted that you believe in a cause, and that cause involves a group of people who have been wronged. Suppose a corrupt government agency sets up a telephone line to snitch on those wronged persons. Bubbling foment begins online.
Suppose the prevailing protest involves calling that telephone line and singing, say, sixteen bars of Alice’s Restaurant Massacree (with the four part harmony) and then hang up. Fun. Funny! Right?
Sure, but consider this. Do you think the corrupt government agents actually check that line? No. It’s farmed out to a Yooper named Phyllis who writes up a little paragraph about each one and sends it back to them. And, Phyllis has other things to do. She contracts for about ten different companies to make ends meet. Phyllis is a rock, and Phyllis barely gets to make policy decisions about breakfast, much less the thing you hate.
That’s all I’m saying. Apply your limited forces carefully. Organize your protests, but remember that bullets don’t stop when they hit a paper target.
Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe, and I’ll see you next Friday morning for some more of whatever this is.