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She seems to be mixing apples and oranges. She talks about occupying classrooms and being in militant demonstrations and says she's now all grown up and doesn'
by pastProlog 12y ago
She seems to be mixing apples and oranges. She talks about occupying classrooms and being in militant demonstrations and says she's now all grown up and doesn't do that now. This is very normal - young people are impatient, passionate, tempestuous, etc. Older organizers generally are not doing that stuff as much.
Then she associates this with changes in political positions. This is something else, it may be connected for people like her, but not others. There are plenty of people in their fifties with "radical" positions who are writing essays, organizing voter drives, walking picket lines, volunteering at a community radio station and so forth. They are in it for the long haul, and usually getting more done. Going to a demonstration and yelling at a cop might give someone an adrenaline rush. However, long-term efforts to work with others on seemingly minor changes to attain a broader goal is usually what gets more done.
She seems to think there is some connection between wanting the NDP elected, or for US cabinet officials to not be former Wall Street CEOs, to young people ranting and raving in the street. There isn't. She has little to say about the left - she was not part of it, then she became a Fox News caricature of what an organizer is (scratch that, she probably thought of herself as an "activist", not an organizer), then is unhappy and renounces it all. She was never really on the left at all. They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for this "God that failed" stuff nowadays. "I was a teenage agitator"
- idiotclock 12y agoSure, "people in their fifties" (and of all other ages) are doing a variety of things to promote social justice. But I don't think it is helpful to put down Aurora's effort -- including yelling at the police at protests. Besides, "getting things done" is not always an innocent or simple approach. And having nuanced views does (slowly) shape the world. I don't think she intends to give up and renounce it all (in fact it sounds like she's looking for new spaces to take action. She (quite candidly) relates her struggle mixing maturing political views with the clichey activist scene in Montreal -- which as she correctly points out (I too live in Montreal) is like any subculture, ripe with dogmatism. Just because she doesn't fall into your category of left doesn't mean she isn't a part of it. That is the very problem.
- neilk 12y agoDid we read the same article? She's not condemning all left-wing activism. From the article: > My current political worldview falls under the umbrella of leftism [...] What I feel compelled to criticize is only one very specific political phenomenon, one particular incarnation of radical leftist, anti-oppressive politics. Furthermore she points to concrete political action as the way out. Again, from the article: > Treat the pursuit of the best kind of society as an engineering problem. Think about specific, concrete proposals. Would they actually work? BTW, I'm very familiar with the kind of cultish activism that can consume the lives of young people -- indeed from her description, it seems to have hardly changed since I was a student in Montreal. McGill is perhaps at an unusual nexus, because many students there are from comfortable backgrounds in English Canada, but are suddenly ensconced in a province with a different activist tradition, that's far more left-wing.