Activism: My Years of Magical Thinking | Mickey Z.

Photo: memegenerator.net 

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Oct. x, 2018

I met a friend at NYC’s Union Square Park the other day. When I arrived, she joked: “Did you know Yemen is starving?” I glanced to my right to see a “rally” in which “activists” were holding a large sign bearing the words “YEMEN IS STARVING.” So, I joked back: “They won’t be starving long, now that those folks are on the job!”

The “activists” were about a dozen shoddily-dressed white men and women with an average age of at least 70 -- a group of people I’d seen at “protests” throughout the Big Apple for decades. I once stood beside some of them at a few of those “rallies.” Eventually, however, the absurdity of this concept became patently obvious to me.

It’s virtue signaling, a self-fulfilling protocol of failure, to convince oneself that a few random humans holding a random sign in a random city on a random day can magically impact policy or behavior or anything -- anywhere on the planet. Yet, this is the “activist” paradigm and each ensuing generation is conditioned to embrace it and thus, ensure their failure and complicity.

This musing got me thinking about comedian Bill Hicks and how he once pondered why we commemorate the death of Jesus “by telling our children that a giant bunny rabbit left chocolate eggs in the night.”

EMBED VIDEO HERE:

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As Hicks pondered, “Why those two things? Why not “Goldfish left Lincoln Logs in your sock drawer”? As long as you’re making shit up, go hog wild. At least a goldfish with a Lincoln Log on its back going across your floor to your sock drawer has a miraculous connotation.”

“As long as you’re making shit up, go hog wild!”

I offer this same advice to “activists.” If you wanna believe that #Yelling4Yemen is somehow a productive action, why not make it more fun and viral? Go hog wild and create #Selfies4Syria!

Who doesn’t love taking selfies? No one, of course. So, let’s add in some delusion and allow ourselves to imagine that our obsessive egoism is actually saving lives in a war-torn Mideast nation! Going hog wild allows us to not even leave home as we invent stuff like #Memes4Medicaid and #GIFs4GunControl. All this “protest” wearing you out? Sounds like the perfect time to take #Naps4NoNukes. 

I mean, if we’re gonna just make shit up why not #JerkOff4Justice on our way to #Climax4theClimate? Come to think of it… isn’t masturbation as activism a redundancy in terms?

P.S. If you have the time and desire, please go hog wild doing something far more productive, sustainable, and meaningful than “activism.”

Mickey Z. is the founder of Helping Homeless Women - NYC, offering direct relief to women on the streets of New York City. To help him grow this project, CLICK HERE and make a donation right now. And please spread the word!