We went to dinner tonight at Bombay Sweets, a small Indian vegetarian restaurant and bakery with an old friend, someone we have known since the sixties. For many years he has run a small transcribing business and been active in issues like bus and bike transportation. It is good to update our lives with friends we too not often see.
With all the good issues we all been involved with reminded how diverse the concerns and issues are today. In the sixties we came together around two main issues, resistance to war in Vietnam and civil rights issues. The same people were involved in both and we worked together. Today there many issues, lots about the environment, war and peace, poverty and justice, abortion, taxes, drones, NSA and on and on. Each day I seem to get a number of emails, some requesting signing of petition or writing letters on many issues. Diversity of concerns can be good but often he can lead to divisiveness with so many issues that we get distracted and just go from one to another. As one old friend activist told me a few years ago that I had my issues, like ROTC at Marquette, and he had his issues like lifting the boycott of Cuba.
This attitude of each person getting his or her issue and many diverse groups of activates around so many concerns, seldom working together, to me, allows the “powers that be” to be on the offensive and we are the defensive. We support each other at times but there are so many issues that you can go from talk to talk each night for a month and get information on many issues but take no action. Each time we seemed to get focus on one issue, so many more are thrown at us that we go on the defensive once again.
Our old friend asked me tonight what do we do about this diversity which leads to distraction rather than unity and I did not know the answer. I had thought of getting a bunch of groups together, agreeing to focus on one issue of one group, something that is ‘winnable’ and then moving on. But soon I learned I could not accomplish that; we all had on ‘own concerns’ that we thought that they need all our attention or we jump around from issue to issue, talk to talk, not stopping to take action. I keep on thinking about that question and if anyone has an answer please share. Diversity can be distracting.
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