The Limits of Activism
Throughout the summer, I have been studying the work of Chuck Raasch. After reading several of his articles, I came to understand many things about him and the way he carries himself. He is a left-wing Democrat. His syntax is quite simplistic. He often uses diction to enforce his points. These facts, however, do not define him. They do not give us any insight onto his purpose.
One thing that I have begun to notice over the summer is the fundamental flaws within the concept of “news” Having these programs simply means that the only issues being talked about are the ones that have majorly imploded that day, that week. Never talking about ongoing issues, things that are just as bad. In order for a news sight to have any chance at being successful, it must have flashy, often misleading titles, spoonfeeding the viewers the things that they want to hear to keep them coming.
This means that issues, issues that have existed long before our lives began, are time and time again ignored. Or, even worse, they are forgotten.
In Raasch’s article titled “Some workers face danger for our convenience,” he discusses how a recent mining incident sparked a conversation about safety, or lack thereof, in certain essential jobs. While he spends the majority of the article discussing this topic, he closes the article with a statement that encapsulates his purpose: “Tragedies like these pique our interest as we watch the familiar scenes of grieving families…Almost all big pushes in mining safety have come in bursts after disasters like this.” People only ever care about something when they are reminded of its existence. Once that big push is over, the issues often go back to silent struggles.
And this is Raasch’s purpose. To remind us of this and to tell us to do better. To defy what we know about the news by saying “This is not good enough”.
Do you believe that activism is limited? What can we do to combat this? Are there any specific movements that suffer from this phenomenon?
I believe that, yes, activism is limited in certain cases. I think your words perfectly describe these cases with, more often than not, the advocacy that occurs being constricted to what is popular in the news. As soon as it loses traction in the news, these topics fade out of existence in people’s eyes. This subject is difficult to combat as, while the news is technically there to inform, a lot of what is published involves topics that will make money. If the issue can no longer be utilized for monetary gain, it gets thrown to the side. The best way to fix this from my point of view is attempt to separate companies from this belief that what is produced must be these headliners that pull in tons of money. However, this is essentially impossible with the way companies are today. While this isn’t a movement, I did see the discussion of the Russia and Ukraine war begin to fizzle out over time. While still talked about, it is not discussed in the heightened amount it once was.
I agree that activism is limited and enforced based on what news titles gain the most traction, or money, for. Fighting this system is not easy though, but I think it can be achieved through not promoting big companies that are not as consistent with their subjects, in comparison to maybe smaller news companies highlighting the affects on ongoing problems. However, it would take communal effort to achieve this, which is sometimes hard to carry out, and it may just pass as a trend, similar to said news titles/highlighted problems. The first movement that came to mind when reading this was the war going on between Russia and Ukraine. Several months ago, every news station was talking about it, but I now find myself having to actively search for information on the subject.
Activism is definitely limited and unfortunately it would be hard for it not to be. In our digital age we are exposed to a lot of things which can simultaneously show us things we would never have heard about and also hide certain issues depending on people’s opinions, fears, and our standards of what we consider a crisis after being shown so many issues. As messed up as it sounds the media thrives on bandwagons and once a newer flashier story pops up people can switch their point of interest as fast as they switch between their favorite movies. The problem with us getting our information from the internet, instead of being able to see the effects right in front of us, is that it does seem more like a story or movie that we can dissociate from real life and therefore not take as seriously. I’m not sure how we could combat this issue as people’s attention spans are only getting more and more limited and crazier issues are overshadowing normal ones that also need looking into.
I do think that activism is limited. For regular people it takes a lot of time and money to make a substantial change in issues like the coal mine that you discussed. People need to take time out of their workdays to protest and lobby and take money out of their paychecks to donate to causes. For a majority of americans doing this can worsen their own situations. These things also hardly ever work due to the people who are able to make the change such as politicians or CEOs not caring about the plights of these people at all. There is also the problem of so many issues being shown to all people on the internet that people can struggle to find empathy when it is a constant barrage of issue after issue. It’s hard to see the people behind the issue when there are so many of them. Some of these issues will not go away and we need to just work around them, we can try to elect people who care and will hold companies accountable or we could put more security in jobs and money for people so that they can go out and try to change things. However both of theses solutions are unlikely to happen in the near future.