my cause braclet is better than your cause bracelet...

a post that never made it...

just over a year ago i had a bit of a 'falling out' with a community of women that had been my inspiration, my family, my passion, and my nourishment since the first year i identified as a "post-secondary student". i cringed as i watched it deteriorate into an institutional, bureaucratic 'vagina club' disguised as a progressive social movement. i listened to vacant, neo-liberal vomit tacitly invade the 'campaign' rhetoric and watched in disgust as many self-worshipping ladies ooh'ed and ahh'ed over their own photos posted in our community space; a beautiful, safe space that was increasingly becoming sexualized and exploitative and unwelcoming. it felt like each day they became more and more divorced from their herstory, less interested in cultural education, and covertly estranged from their democratic principles and grassroots philosophies. they began to obsess over policy and hierarchy. they began to criticize the people they were advocating for. they began to villainize dissident voices. and it made us want to speak and cry and rage more.

so we did.

i read an article recently called "the problem with youth activism" that has challenged me to think: where the fuck are the days when being a student activist meant risking your body and your academic future in the cry for a genuine revolution? not squabbling over which colour bracelet you are going to sell or where you can order the cheapest campaign t-shirts oblivious to whether or not they are drenched in a sweatshop, chemical-cotton history. where are the outraged, the self-critical, the resisters, the radical fucking actions of our young people? the author is right: contemporary academia has subdued our storm, trained us to procedurize and fluff our political energy and determination. she laments that our post-secondary institutions have become sites for "weekly club meetings" and self-congratulatory, ideologically-safe "gen y'ers" on cheap, anti-whatever cocaine.

it is a trendy argument about trendy activism, i know. i can accept the self-irony.

on the way down to a recent protest, i got into a discussion with the people i was travelling with regarding the "greening" of corporate america/canada. and it fuelled a growing discomfort i am developing with my personal philosophies about avenues for/of social change. i went through a phase awhile back where i adopted a certain distaste for the self-righteous "perfect activist". what the fuck is a "perfect activist" right? the other side of the double-edged sword. i mean, how can you preach inclusivity and democracy and accountability if you are only willing to listen to the granola labia-pierced birkenstock subculture of the radical left? (again, i recognize the self-irony here, trust me.) why isn't it enough that people in the infant stages of their global mindfulness are at least STARTING to recognize the rape of our earth and our women and our southern neighbours? can we accept that it is manifesting in organic wal-mart food? celebrity hybrid-drivers? lululemon sweaty yoga? vegetarian-turned teenagers who think that meat is, like, sooo bad? polite, administration-approved campus campaigning?

i don't fucking know.

all i know is that it is time for me to heal my relationship to the community of women that once inspired and deserted me. because i can't change this human-forsaken planet on my own...