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The Action Is the Message
We want to be the change we want to see in the world, and that change is not another permitted march down an empty street in DC surrounded by cops. Gandhi wasn't writing a t-shirt slogan, he was giving us a tool, a way to change our part of the world, today.
And he took his own advice. When Gandhi wanted to protest the British monopoly on salt production, he broke the law and made salt.
So how do we follow Gandhi's example? It starts with asking our community and ourselves what we really want. What does our world look like if we win? What is our message? Then, we find ways we can make that world a reality, even if only in one spot, only for a moment. We create actions that allow us to be the message we're trying to send.
This is not a new idea, just one we often forget. The Civil Rights Movement was filled with people who practiced this concept every day. Do you believe that blacks in the South should have the right to vote? Go register them. Should lunch counters be free from segregation? Sit down together and expect to be served. Too often, we only remember the celebration, the culmination of this effort: the March on Washington. But before they marched, the men and women of the Civil Rights Movement made civil rights a reality, one church, one bus, one person at a time.
And they're not the only people to whom we can turn to for inspiration.
- People who believed that bicycles have the same rights to the streets as cars created Critical Mass.
- Korean farmers who wanted to attend a meeting of the World Bank, but were blocked from accessing the peninsula where the meeting was held, jumped into the ocean and swam.
- Housing activists who believed that homes were more valuable than parking lots built a tent city right in the middle of one in Boston in 1968. You can find the spot today, just look for the mixed-income apartment complex called Tent City.
None of this is easy – the easy choice is another march, another petition drive, another rally. As one of our clients said after coming up with an action that fit their message perfectly, "First, we needed to know why we're doing this." And this doesn't mean we'll never march again – before Gandhi made salt, he marched for 23 days, but the march served to build suspense for the real action. No one mistook the march for the main event.
The Action Mill creates our own actions based on this idea. When we wanted to show that Bush didn't have a mandate following the 2004 elections, we organized more than 5,000 people from 47 states to converge on the inaugural parade to turn their backs on the presidential motorcade. When we wanted to show that America and Iran can negotiate, we worked with Iranian bloggers to set up public hotlines where Americans could pick up a phone and talk directly to an Iranian.
