The activists' anxiety... a big mistake

Many years ago I was very enthusiastic about the social and ecological struggles on some issues that seemed very important to me. I was an impetuous activist and my everyday life was filled with meetings, voluntary work and ceaseless explorations about our worst global problems.

Being a cultural creator, my contribution was on the way of culture... It was an intense constant production of “meanings”: articles, films, art and propaganda. And it was very fast: everyday my hands drawing, painting, writing, filming. There was no time to stop, there was a world to save.

_{I rapidly designed this flyer to the worldwide campaign against biotech corporations and genetically modified crops}

I thought that maybe the intellectual nature of my work could save me from the worst consequences of the power conflicts. I was greatly deluded.

Evidently, to be an activist is something risky everywhere, because you are attacking the subjective and/or objective spaces of powerful people. But to carry that endeavor in Latin America is a very dangerous thing from which you could easily not survive.

Fortunately I survived (many friends couldn't), and had the opportunity to grow and understand more wisely the nature of the world, now far from the war mentality that normally blinds every person who welcomes that lifestyle of struggle, dismissing the importance of a life of understanding.

My attitude now is quieter and slower, and that's a beautiful instrument to understand deeply the social problems. But my freedom from the anxiety of the “activism” is not a blinding feeling. I still realize how bad is the human situation and am still concerned with our worst social diseases... but now I don't intoxicate myself with the fanatic stupid belief that those things will or must change.

“Must” is a word with an awesome capacity to delude people. Most often that belief is a wall that makes impossible to understand clearly our reality, and hence many "fighters” stay defending the wrong side of the field... completely unaware of their big mistakes.

Life is what it is, what every constituent makes of it. Life is not what we want it to be.

That's why I give much more importance to the profound reflections on our issues than to the action on them.

Don't you care about the real danger to be defending the wrong values?
Don't you care about the possibility to be strengthening injustices in this world?

Of course, I've seen that the ideological blindness and fanaticism have deeper causes, rooted in the psychic wounds of the individuals. But the beginning of healing is exactly this will to accept our own fallibility, to open the door to our psychic humbleness. Only then you will understand why this slow rhythm of thinking and deciding is so important to our lives.

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PS. However, please don't think that I've posted this flyer against biotechnological corporations to show that I've changed my mind about that matter... When you calm your pretensions, it's still perfectly possible that some opinions of your past prove themselves even more accurate, under the light of a good careful reflection.

In some future post I will show the process of that artwork.