November/December 2007 - Editors' Note

Reflect a bit on your politics.

Are you down with Palestine, with the Zapatistas, with activists in Oakland, and even the hunger-strikers at Columbia? Your political spirituality knows no boundaries, right, and you’re down with just about every struggle?

Maybe—it’d be pretty damn sweet, if you were. But down is not a feeling. It’s not something you can be by listening to el-Sheikh Imam at your apartment on Friday nights or to Gil Scot Heron while riding the bus. It doesn’t even happen when you wear Guevara on your sleeve or a kuffiyeh around your neck.

Down is not a feeling, it’s a commitment to action. A feeling can mean something to you, but it means nothing to everybody else if it doesn’t move you--physically. A feeling immaterial and uncommunicated is not activism. As a feeling, down presupposes democracy, something we have nowhere. It must, then, be active.

Being down is also a commitment to smart action. The right actions are always circumstantial. A strategy that is not based on circumstance is bound to fail. When nobody cares to listen, simply making noise has no effect. Sometimes the problem is not that nobody is saying what needs to be said, but that nobody knows how to say it.

The right actions are not determined by circumstance; we determine them, but they are still circumstantial. What this means is not that we accept what is, but that we realize what is so that we can move beyond it.

Such attention to nuance is not limited to physical activism exclusively, but extends also to our speech. The way we articulate our politics, besides being an important element and reflection of our politics, is also something we must determine by considering the circumstances.

We don’t do this out of expediency. It’s not a matter of determining what is the most “promising” or most “likely to succeed” strategy. It’s not even a matter of compromise. It’s a matter of recognizing that the right politics depends on circumstance, as does the right speech, and the right action.

It’s also a recognition that all these things—our politics, our actions, our speech—are intertwined. One cannot be altered without the rest: these elements of our political existence define each other. We don’t conceal our politics with “moderate” or “amenable” language, but we try to understand, fully, what our politics are so that we can find the appropriate articulation.

This is not a novel idea. We do the opposite naturally enough when we try to understand another’s politics by the language they use. It is, however, something that we must internalize if we want to know what being down really entails.

Yaman