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.