aka Ken Smith: Consumerism vs. activism

If you broadcast the hottest new band on the Ed Sullivan Show, you might move young members of the audience to talk to their friends and to purchase some new recordings and to change their hair style. They already know how to do these things, and they already do these things, but now for a while their conversations and purchases and stylings will be inflected with the Beatles. Their actions flow like water through channels already in existence. When the Kinks take their turn on the television screen someday, it will all happen again, but inflected with the Kinks. We all know how to consume pop experiences.#

As I was recalling a Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie concert the other day, it occurred to me that part of the goal of their music was to encourage people to go home and do something. But not something they already did, as with the Beatles and Kinks example above. Something new to them, which was to affiliate with others and live more of a life of active citizenship. So when millions turn off the Ed Sullivan Show, hundred of thousands of them take up actions that flow through channels already in place, already familiar to them. When the thousands head out to the parking lot of the Seeger and Guthrie concert, they may feel something rather keenly but it's not clear to me that there are channels in place for them. The pathway of activism, it seems, barely exists. Most people don't know where to find it, how to walk along it, how to meet others there. Seems that way to me, anyway.#

See for example the best op-ed you find in the paper over the next few weeks. It might move you, might persuade you, about some matter of public urgency, but the odds are very good it won't say a single word about how to affiliate with others and help move the issue forward in our civic life.#