Activism: action taken with purpose. A low bar. Easy to miss.

In our class discussion today on Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, one point really called my attention. Someone mentioned how they would have respected the actions of the gang more if they had accepted responsibility for them, or at least hadn’t actively tried to frame others. This made me think about who, in the end, will actually face the consequences of the actions taken by the gang. They are trying to fight the big corporations that are ruining the land for profit, but in the end it is far more likely that the laborers at the sites they are vandalizing will face the worst of consequences. The gang abides by the rule that they kill monsters, not machines, but what does it mean when laborers lose their jobs because of the actions they’ve taken? Obviously they haven’t killed them, but they have significantly harmed the life of someone who had no decision making power in mining the land.

This leads me to the real problem I found myself coming back to with the characters in Monkey Wrench Gang, which was their lack of thoughtfulness. My bar for activism, as we’ve discussed in class, is pretty low. I have refined it a bit since class, but not in content so much as in articulation. Any action taken with purpose. Even with a bar this low, somehow I think the gang has managed to miss it. Part of acting with purpose involved the critical evaluation of those actions, especially when you claim to be doing the same to others. The gang is fighting against actions they view as unjust on the part of the corporations, but they spend very little time considering what unjust consequences will result from their own actions. Will their destruction of machines really hurt the owner and decision maker behind the mining, or will it simply inconvenience them and require them to buy more machines. Will this decision lead to the firing of a minimum wage worker who is working to support themselves and their family? Does littering on a road because you don’t like it hurt the road, and the people who put it there? Or does it just add more litter into the world. Does your choice to pin the blame on Native communities give them the glory you claim to be ascribing to them, or will it bring more anger and blame to an already marginalized community? I feel like these are just some of the questions you need to ask if you are going to be taking actions that will affect people other than yourself. The gang simply appears to have no well-defined purpose.