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Don’t Be An Instrument
Lately I’ve been rebuilding my relationship with my brother. The last time we were close, we both still lived at home. But now, after years of distance, we’re finally befriending each other as adults.
Catching him up on the last decade, I told him about my activist experience. I didn’t just attend protests and go home. I believed that I had a moral duty to totally subordinate my life to the radical cause. I built the movement while I was awake and dreamed about it when I slept. I called myself a revolutionary cadre, a “soldier who trains soldiers.”
Anyone who lives like that is going to become a “cadre clone,” a bit of a robot. Leftist ideology started to swallow my personality whole. But I never felt committed enough — and I never accepted that anyone else was, either. So when I started teaching other people the basic skills of organizing, I insisted that to really make a difference, first you need a mindset of total devotion. Like C-3PO witnessed in the Star Wars prequels, I became a machine making machines (“how perverse!”).
Did my political work accomplish anything concrete? Occasionally, yes (although never as often as I hoped). But imagine, for the sake of argument, that I’d found my Excalibur, a technique forged out of lightning by the organizing gods that could guarantee victory 100% of the time. Would it have been worth it then to cadrefy…