ANGER LOVE RAVE * by Flick Ruby

"Denied the airwaves, we trust in the wind to carry what we say
  But sometimes we found ourselves shouting into the wind
  When we should have been confiding in each other."  CRASS

As political activists we are motivated, inspired, guilt ridden, angry,
achieving, despair filled, joyous, argumentative, passionate, suspicious,
involved, connected, disconnected, worried, hopeful, harassed,
confrontative, prophetic, burnt out, dancing.  We live out our politics on
a variety of levels and I feel that we don't spend enough time validating
and supporting each other through the sanity compromising emotional process
of activism.  The ways we work and the language we permit ourselves in many
groups only serves to drain and not sustain action, does not recognise that
the most important political resource is us.  Often the response to this is
"Yeah, but there isn't enough time to deal with people's psychological
shit, this isn't therapy group y'know, this is political."  I suppose it
isn't it political that the largest growing organisation besides the ISO is
the Charcoal Club, that we have to keep reinventing the wheel because
people keep burning out and falling out of the movement like overripe fruit
from a tree, or they end up joining a hierarchal organisation because  we
haven't got our shit together with regard to a number of issues one of
which is the respect we have for our psychological health while being so
very concerned about social global health.

I agree with Robin Morgan when she says "Yet the basis of all ideology is
the experiential perspective.  As a feminist, I know that the personal IS
political, and that an affirmation of subjectivity is the mark of an honest
and humane politics."   One of the most successful movements that sprouted
from that politically out of it time of the late 60's and early 70's was
feminism and integral to the empowerment process was the shedding, with
others, of the psychological blankets we as women begin to acquire from
birth that suffocate us to death.  Capo-patra imperialism really does get
in, inside us all, and not unlike sand paper, scrubs away at our soul.  To
be aware is not necessarily to be immune and the contradictions we all
house clang around sometimes unbearable loudly.  Our reactions under the
pressure of political work can sometimes serve to make activism  most
unattractive to those `apathetic lazy bastards'.

 My argument is that depressed, stressed and abusive guilt slinging
activists screaming a litany of apocalyptic scenarios is no inspiration.
But surely I am only talking about individuals here and about the lessons
of finding your own limits and expectations, perhaps myself? Yes (and sorry
to all snapped at and eye rolled at people in meetings I often rendered
paralysed by my toxic anxiety), but I'm also talking about a  problematic
pattern, a mode of political activism which continues to separate the
personal from the political and is not creative in the ways it operates.
Too often the needs of the individuals that are created by the work of the
group need to be addressed in some way.  Often the problem is not able to
be pointed at, it is about power relations that are intangible, or
impatience or you are not confident to speak because you feel like your
solar plexus has been surgically removed.  At these times the words "I
feel" may need to come into a political forum. EEEK!!  But when people are
busy with the who is killing themselves fastest and best list, or who is
citing the most reasons for cynical defeatism, who's got time for some
dork's ideas about needing some support with all these new thoughts about
them being a white middle class rapist and that perhaps some  discussion
rather than guilt releasing lists and envelope stuffing for the dorks could
help the effectiveness of the groups political message.  "Sorry dork, no
time, we're busy duplicating the very structures were opposing."

There needs to be some mechanism of self reflexivity in each and every
group.  Feminism has taught that working through the shit of it all with
people is important.  Too often those who can inspire and achieve change
have been separated via the mechanisms they need to know well in order to
smash; jealousy, fear of lack, violence, hate, rape, fear.   The kind of
content I'm talking about is not necessarily heavy tissue boxes strapped to
the shoulder kind of stuff but is the courage to enter into the language of
the personal to the extent that is intersects with the political.
Specifically for men what I'm describing is terrifying.  Being arrested at
an action is all very well and good but unless we are freed from the
permanent state of arrest in our own minds we are corruptible, cynical and
are obedient to the patriarchal father who couches heroism and politics in
terms of emotionlessness and revolution in terms of violence.

What we need to dare is some shameless idealism which comes for me after I
am able to break the vibration of negativity and paralysation with
laughter.  As the `sun never sets on the brotherhood,' neither could it
career its path without the exhaling breath of those laughing in real joy
and love, urging it on.   My belief in the existence of that somewhere I
realise now is essential to my political and personal survival, although
often things are not all that amusing. My belief in love and the need to
create the environment, physical, psychological and psychic, in which to
unfold and curl into a love purified of the dis-ease it currently harbours
and is the excuse for, is my most radical belief.  It is for me the source
of both extreme hope and despair which I feel are the parameters of
existence for the political activist which I would like to see validated
and the process of sanity, I believe, could be made not easier but less
lonely if we see all people as agents of incredibly bruised potential that
need nurturing.

