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With Absolute Good, You Create Absolute Evil
The last few years of my activist life, I grew more and more desperate trying to stave off despair.
My friends and I organized. We built activist groups out of nothing and kept showing up, protest after protest. Sometimes, we were there among dozens of others. Occasionally, the die-hards were joined by thousands.
But nothing ever seemed to change. The wars didn’t end. The police were never reformed (let alone abolished!). Capitalism kept chugging along, its track as immovable as ever. Even when the moments of “mass upsurge” that we craved did periodically materialize, our transformative, world-shaking goals remained stuck in the far distance. The beauty of our vision (plus our bubbling disgust at mainstream politics) fed our commitment and passion. But as the lean years added up, we faltered — at least, I did. At the time, it seemed spiritually nourishing to dream about a liberated future after the empire fell. But it wasn’t enough.
I wanted goodness. I wanted justice to win and oppression to stop. I saw evil. It surrounded me; I swam in it. No reform was enough. No shift in public opinion went as far as I needed it to. Small changes were too rare. And when they did occur, I felt like I couldn’t, in good conscience, let them count. Every time I got too optimistic about some incremental improvement, I pointedly…