Hillary Rettig - The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way

The Life long Acti vist

How to Change the World Without Losing YourWay

Hillary Rettig

Lantern Books - A Division of BookLightInc.

2006

Lantern Books

One Union Square West, Suite 201

New York, NY 10003

www.lanternbooks.com

Copyright Hillary Rettig, 2006

All rights reserved. No part of thisbook may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording or otherwise, without the written permission of LanternBooks.

Library of CongressCataloging-in-Publication Data

Rettig, Hillary.

The lifelong activist : how to changethe world without losing your way / Hillary Rettig.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-59056-090-6 (alk.paper)

1. Social reformersLife skillsguides. 2. Political activistsLife skills guides. 3. Socialaction. I. Title.

HN18.3.R47 2006

303.484023dc22

2006009735

Dedicated with love to myparents, Gloria and Julius Rettig

Ebook ISBN: 9781590562468

Smashwords Edition,License Notes

This ebook is licensed for yourpersonal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or givenaway to other people. If you would like to share this book withanother person, please purchase an additional copy for eachrecipient. If youre reading this book and did not purchase it, orit was not purchased for your use only, then please return toSmashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respectingthe hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank George Lewis formore than twenty-five years of love and friendship, as well as forhis comments on the manuscript. Also, our Sudanese sons DanielMamour Agok, Phillipps Lual Baguoot, Aleer Galuak Deng and Dau NunDeng, and our nephew, Angok Adier Angok, for sharing their liveswith us. Meth e ran pioc path ben tenewarkendit . And also Orbit, Comet, Elvis,Hawkeye and Neutrino, for more unconditional love than any merehuman could ever provide.

I also wish to acknowledge the loveand support of my sisters, Diana Presser and Lisa Rettig-Falcone,as well as of Larry Presser and John Falcone. AndI am trulyprivileged to be the aunt of three very specialindividuals: PaulBusch, John Falcone III and Julia Falcone.

I am grateful to Melanie Joy, JohnThompson, Patrick Tyrrell and Adam Weissman for their detailedcritiques of the ideas in this book, which is much improved bytheir input.

I also wish to thank my friends andmentors Lois Arthur, Lisa-Claudia Brown, Brent Hymer, David Karp,Bill Merklein, Lisa Norling, Lydia Ross, Michael Stiefel, VincentSuppa, Joe Valof and Bill Wollheim for their wisdom and generosityof spirit.

Also, Aryenish Birdie, HilaryFriedman, Ch Green, Stephanie Mittak and Nicholas Read for theirclose readings of, and detailed comments on, parts of themanuscript.

Finally, I wish to thank my editor, MartinRowe, who supported this project from the beginning.

In dreams beginresponsibilities. William ButlerYeats (famously quoted by DelmoreSchwartz)

Be regular and orderly inyour life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and originalin your work. Gustave Flaubert

Introduction

I wrote this book because I believe thatprogressive activists are the worlds most precious resource. Wetackle the most difficult and important problemsincluding hunger,war, disease, poverty, violence, cruelty and exploitationand workto further humanitys evolution in the direction of compassion andkindness. Conservatives may create more wealth, but we create moreof the values, including justice, equality and freedom, that makelife worth living. As history has repeatedly shown us, and as weare unfortunately witnessing in the United States today, wealthwithout the tempering of progressive values and mores leadsinevitably to corruption and despair.

Imagine how different the worldwould be if there were twiceor ten times!as many progressiveactivists as there are now, and if those activists were happy andeffective and enjoying long full-time or part-timecareers . Entiresocieties and cultures, and quite possibly every society andculture, would be transformed.

Thats why I wrote The Lifelong Activist , aguide to building a sustainable activist career. It is aimed atyou, the activist, volunteer or other politically active person whois considering your long-term career and life options. My goal isto empower you to live a happy life that includes an effective andsustainable activist career, and in particular to help you avoidthe burnout that afflicts so many activists.

This is not a typical book onactivism, perhaps because my background is different from that ofmany activists. Although Ive long been involved in progressivecauses, including labor, feminism, and, most recently, animalrights and vegetarianism, I have chosen to earn my living as anentrepreneur, business journalist and business coach. Prior towriting The LifelongActivist , I spent three years working aslead business coach at a Boston nonprofit, where my team and Ihelped more than 1,000 economically disadvantaged people of diversebackgrounds start or grow businesses, professional art careers andnonprofit organizations. In that position, I was able to witnessfirsthand what causes intelligent and dedicated people to succeedand what causes them to fail. That is the knowledge I bring to thisbook.

That knowledge is, in a nutshell,that the secret to success as an activist,as well as in life itself, is to live a life that is as much aspossible an expression of your core values. The Lifelong Activist is a guidebookfor doing so, and it is based on the premise that you succeed bymaking conscious choices about your life, specifically in the crucial areasof your mission, time, fears and relationships.Self-actualizationa term coined by the late psychologist AbrahamMaslow that refers to the cultivation of your unique strengths,talents and charactershould be your primary goal, since the moreself-actualized you are, the more creativity, energy, focus andother positive attributes you will be able to bring to youractivism and other endeavors. Self-actualization is also, as Idiscuss in Part IV, entirely congruent with your progressive ethicand mission.

Self-actualization begins withbreaking free of other peoples inappropriate influence and controlover your life. Some of these people might mean well, while othersmight mean ill; still others might not care about you at all butare simply pursuing their own agenda. Some might even be otheractivists trying to bully you into working on their cause ormeeting their standard of ideological purity. You need to breakfree of all of these inappropriate influences so that you can startto build a life in keeping with your values.

Perhaps because of my background, aspects ofthis book may challenge, and even anger or upset, someactivists:

My business background,naturally, influences my perceptions and advice, and so you may seemore approving references to money, materialism, hierarchies andcompetition than you are used to seeing, or like to see, in a bookaimed at progressives.

I believe that activists need toplace a high priority on moneyor, more specifically, on creating asustainable income for themselves. I understand that this can bedifficult in a society whose values are opposed to your own. Butour societys capitalist structure isnt changing any time soon andyou still need to earn a living. The good news is that you probablyhave more choices than you realize: Chapters 12 through 15 in PartI will help you sort through them, and through your feelings andthoughts regarding money.

I also believe that an activistshould live the lifestyle he or she wants to live even if thatlifestyle seems unacceptably bourgeois or materialistic. We arenot machines and cant program our likes and dislikes. Moreover, alife built on self-denial is bound to be an unhappy one, and anunhappy life, besides being tragic in its own right, is likely tolead not to lifelong activism but to burnout.