Would we dare try in this age of fear for our jobs?
Gloria Steinem in an interview 20 years ago in MotherJones Magazine: There’s such a deep part of our conditioning that is to make nice. That has an upside, it makes me a peacemaker. But a major problem I see is that we are into this kind of inner-outer division, so that activism is perceived as an activity in which you kill yourself and burn out. There’s that joke, you know, that death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down. Well, burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle. If we want a world in which you can tell jokes and get massages and have sex and dress however you fucking well please, then we have to create a form of activism that reflects that, and have fun while we’re doing it. Actually the women’s movement has been pretty good at that, but we constantly get sucked back towards the culture in order to prove Seriousness. So we have to be conscious of the fact that as Gandhi said, and Martin Luther King said, and Emma Goldman said, and everybody else in the world who has had this experience has concluded, it isn’t that the end justifies the means, it’s that the means are the ends. And if we can do that, you see, it makes for joy, and mind-expansion, and friendships, and jokes in the process. And that means we can go on forever.