Photo credit: Mickey Z.
Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
Before you hit "post" on your next clever and profound critique of a group, tactic, and/or fellow activist, you might wanna ask yourself a few questions:
- Did I check my privilege?
- Will this post serve to further unify or divide my activist community?
- Is it more designed to stroke my own ego than to advance the struggle?
- Is it founded on accurate and verifiable knowledge or is it based on hearsay and rumor?
- Is it more likely to inspire a reasoned, useful discussion or a time-eating, unproductive flame war (see below)?
- Am I using this post to address a personal vendetta in a passive-aggressive manner?
- Would it be wiser to turn off my phone/computer and arrange a face-to-face conversation about this issue?
- Do I regularly allocate my precious time to participating in lengthy social media flame wars (please see below)? If so, why?
- What am I doing on a regular basis -- beyond using social media -- to advance the cause of collective liberation?
- Seriously… did I check my privilege?
With the vast majority of humans -- especially American humans -- living in a world of willful denial and/or tacit complicity, our tiny population of activists cannot afford to endlessly bicker and fragment.
Yes, social media can be effectively used as a powerful catalyst for organizing, sharing urgent info, and connecting kindred spirits -- but they are ultimately designed for the same purposes as mass media: distraction and division.
Facebook Flame Wars: The Fire This Time
For anyone who is serious about inspiring, creating, and participating in social change, please allow me to mansplain a simple bit of unsolicited advice: AVOID FACEBOOK WARRIORS.
You know the type. They don’t necessarily troll, but rather start and maintain flame wars, provoke drama, sow division, and -- of course -- are way more involved with social media than activism.
I know it’s tempting to put such bullies "in their place” or to imagine yourself as the one who can and will change their ways, but again, I urge: Avoid them. Don’t “like” their posts. Don’t visit their pages. Remove them from your newsfeed. Do anything you can to prevent their insecure, cynical, and negative energy from slowing you down.
Consider this: While you got sucked into one of their counterproductive two-hour flame wars, about 150 women were raped in the United States; roughly 15 plant and animal species went extinct; 17,000 acres of rainforest were destroyed (mostly to make way for doomed cattle); 22,000 sharks were hunted down and killed while 2 million chickens were murdered for “food”; 222 children were born into poverty in the United States, while -- globally -- 2,500 children under the age of 5 died from preventable causes; and 3,600 humans starved to death.
All this and so much more happened while a few privileged humans focused their skills, time, and energy on an ego-tripping, movement-dividing social media melodrama.
Hopefully, you don’t need anyone to provide a list of the many progressively productive ways you could've utilized your time, but since it involved you sitting still and typing away, imagine if you instead chose to set aside those two hours to write letters to prisoners?
Is there a single person reading this article who would posit that two hours of flame war bullshit is time better spent than two hours of reaching out to those incarcerated within the Prison-Industrial Complex and letting them know they are not alone?
Here’s my story: Anyone who creates and/or participates in divisive social media flame wars is no comrade of mine.
Here’s my question: Are they comrades of yours?
#shifthappens
Mickey Z. is the author of 12 books, most recently Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on the Web here. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here.
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Social Justice via Social Media? by Mickey Z. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://worldnewstrust.com/social-justice-via-social-media-mickey-z.
Buy these books by Mickey Z. here:
Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism A Q&A guide to becoming an activist by a leader in the Occupy movement in New York City. Full of insights into what it takes to be an activist, accompanied by quirky toons by Richard Cole, Mickey Z. advocates saving our world from the tyranny of global environmental disaster, animal abuses, war profiteering and the abuses of government against its citizens. Occupy this Book is a daily reminder of how to stay in the movement and to stay in top shape as an activist. Buy Now: | A Darker Shade of Green J.T. is a sensitive but privileged 12-year-old who s runaway to New York City. He soon comes under the guidance of Allie Romano, a homeless man who stays afloat by challenging people to chess and scamming book clubs for free books to sell. Allie quickly becomes a teacher and mentor for J.T. setting off a chain of events that just might explain how an American chess champion could wind up wanted by the FBI for eco-terrorism. Told in a documentary style, this manifesto/expose weaves internet posts, diary entries, quotes and interviews to tell stories within stories. The reader, much like J.T., has a lot to learn. Award winning author Mickey Z. brings an unrelenting compassion to the troubles of our modern world, pointing us in one clear direction: It s time to embrace a darker shade of green. Buy Now: | Dear Vito James Hemming is a personal trainer who, in his spare time, enters air guitar contests mimicking Vito Bratta of the old hair metal band, White Lion. He meets the waif-like Indigo at the gym and recruits her into a plot to make himself famous while resurrecting Vito's legend. The tale unfolds through a pasticcio of flashbacks, diary entries, letters to Vito, and related vignettes that suddenly segue off to introduce back-stories, underlying themes, and other unexpected intersections. It's funny, quirky, perverted, and guaranteed to provoke a response. Buy Now: |
Self Defense for Radicals Radicals, feminists, environmentalists, activists for animal rights, human rights, civil rights--there are plenty of rebels and dissidents putting their safety on the line for what they believe in. Conversely, there's never been a shortage of reactionaries seeking to repress such vision and passion, often turning peaceful demonstrations into violent clashes in the process. This guide gets readers off and running in the right direction. From eye gouges to groin punches, they'll find a powerful collection of tactics which they can use to fight back. Buy Now: | No Innocent Bystanders: Riding Shotgun in the Land of Denial No Innocent Bystanders is a manifesto in fractals. Transcending labels and political parties, it gets to the heart of our planet's rapid decline using a blend of facts, humor, vignettes, and relevant quotes and lists. On the liner notes for The Freewheelin Bob Dylan album, it s stated that the song A Hard Rain s A-Gonna Fall was written during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. A desperate kind of song, Dylan called it. Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song, he explained. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one. No Innocent Bystanders has been created in that spirit. Buy Now: | CPR for Dummies The world is creeping towards destruction--no, not theoretically--it's really happening. In these last hours will humanity come together to correct their collective wrongs? Or will there be rampant beatings and kinky sex? A group of strangers are brought together by synchronicity to answer the age-old question: you lookin' at me, punk? The answer entails the comeuppance of the rich, police brutality, aerobic instruction by the Messiah, sexual slavery, and mutating genes.(Is this sounding good? I hope so. It's not easy writing these. I'm just a corporate monkey trying to snag your hard-earned dollars but don't let that get in the way of buying this book. Did I mention SEX yet?)Author Mickey Z's experimental tour-de-force is a funny, challenging deconstruction of the concept of the "novel" as well as life in the United States of America. Buy Now: |
50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism As new book. In this invaluable reference guide, you'll find 50 reasons to be a proud, progressive patriot, including: Thomas Paine fueling the revolutionary fire with common sense. Emma Goldman spreading anarchy in the USA; Eugene Debs running for president from his prison cell. etc. Buy Now: | A Gigantic Mistake Articles & Essays for Your Intellectual Self-Defense. Includes an anti-introduction by Howard Zinn. Buy Now: | The Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda An essential guide to finding the truth hidden behind the lies. Buy Now: |
The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet Looking back on their lives, people often ask themselves "Where did the years go?" "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet provides a wide ranges of provocative answers to that question. Edited in the style of a documentary, "The Murdering of My Years is a compendium of stories by activists and artists about how they manage to get by in America. They talk about the jobs they've had (as cabbies, organizers, waitresses, clerks, drivers taking scabs to secret scab trainings, telemarketers, etc.), how they were initially politicized, the nature of their art, and how they feel about working (or resistance to working) in a political context. The stories range from the absurd to the heartbreaking, from the exciting and strange to the depressingly banal. The book examines the pain, disillusionment, and fundamental hopelessness that afflict many workers. It also tells stories or triumph, joy, and subversion in the workplace. Buy Now: | Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of the "Good War" Saving Private Power questions the ultra-patriotic assumptions we have been taught since birth. The U.S. did not enter WWII to end the Holocaust, to make the world a safer place, or to stop fascism. The opposite is true. The U.S. business class traded with Hitler and Mussolini up to and even during the war. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh's public Hitlerphilia were symbolic of big business's admiration for Hitler's anticommunism. Using techniques gleaned from modern advertising, the U.S. Office of War Information injected anti-Japanese bloodlust and hysteria into the population. When the U.S. killed 672,000 Japanese through indiscriminate bombing, even Secretary of War Henry Stimson wondered why "there has never been a protest over...such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. There is something wrong with a country where no one questions that". Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation are cashing in on the revived interest in World War II. But time's up for the trafficers of cheap nostalgia. The media elite have sold us the myth about the U.S.'s noble role in the "Good War" for too long and the facade is beginning to crack. The recent release of John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope is only the beginning. Saving Private Power digs deeper, to find the truth about the this war and the world it left in its wake. Buy Now: | |