Confessions of a late-blooming activist

Draft first 2 Episodes of a new The Truth Lies In Bedtime Stories podcast.

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Episode 1: Coming Out

[FX: room noise, inaudible conversations, chairs scraping on floor, abruptly stop.]

Narrator:

[Clears throat]. Hello everyone. I’m new to the group. 

My name is SternWriter. I’m stale, male and pale. I’m about to turn 60 and I’m an activist.

[mumbled chanting] Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Narrator:

I’ve been a proper activist for about 4 years now.

I’m OK acknowledging that, now. But after being in the closet for most of my life, I’m still getting used to hearing myself say it out loud.

Looking back, I realise I’ve been struggling with activism my entire adult life. 

It’s always been in me, but for whatever reason – convention, ambition, not wanting to risk alienation – it’s been a long journey.

I had three major career changes, and a long period of depression, before embracing my inner activist.

In 2021 I decided to stop making a living, follow my dreams, and become a full-time, unapologetic activist.

Ironic, maybe, that it took me a lifetime to conclude that life’s too short.

I’ve done various jobs over the years. They all required me to keep my activism secret, or to some degree suppressed, especially in my early career in business.

But the spark of my activism has always been there. It’s innate, I suppose. A natural urge, long smothered, and recently, finally, allowed to burn freely.

For the past thirty-something years, my work environments have, for one reason or another, frowned on overt activism, tolerating it so long as I was discreet and didn’t shove it down peoples’ throats. 

I’d say that, in general, things have improved over my lifetime, but as I’ve discovered since coming out, activism is still far from universally accepted. 

Most people might not come right out and say it aloud, and I doubt anyone I’ve every known or worked with would have described themselves as anti-activist, but there’s nothing quite like telling strangers you’re an activist to discover that it’s not exactly like telling them you work for Medecins Sans Frontieres, are a neo-natal nurse, or rescue abandoned dogs.

I may be being over-sensitive to activist-phobes, but if I am, it’s because I used to be one of them. I recognise all the subtle activist-phobic barbs because I would have said similar things before I came out.

In many ways, like many of the gains progressives believed were irreversible, things are slipping back. We’re now seeing an overt anti-activist backlash. 

Certain vested interests, whose profits are threatened by activism, are deploying the same tricks they’ve used to co-opt, and then toxify, other words once worn with pride. These tricks have worked just fine with words like ‘woke’, ‘radical’ or ‘liberal’, and are now doing the same with ‘activist’ and ‘activism’.

Four years ago, when I decided to stop earning a living and become a full-time, unpaid activist, I came up with what I thought was a snappy mission statement for the activist network I was preparing to launch. It was only 9 words, the last 5 of which were ‘by turning Inactivists into Activists’. 

I was pretty pleased with this, but fortunately decided to run it by a veteran activist friend before committing. She warned me she’d observed vested interests were already succeeding in turning the term ‘activist’ from a positive, or even just neutral word, to a negative one. 

The past four years have entirely borne out her hunch. Track the term ‘activist’ over recent years, first on social media, and now on mainstream media too, and get an AI robot to do ‘sentiment analysis’ on how it’s used.

You’ll see that ‘activist’ and ‘activism’ are increasingly being deployed in negative, pejorative, contexts. What was once a badge of honour is being turned into a term of abuse.

Fortunately, I heeded my friend’s warning. Before launching the website and printing name cards, I changed the last bit of the Goal from

‘by turning Inactivists into Activists’

into 

‘by helping the Inactive Become Active’.

One word longer, but ‘Active’ has so many other positive associations, it’s harder to toxify than ‘Activist’. 

Give ’em time, though, and I’m sure they’ll try.

Interestingly, coming out as an activist hasn’t just changed the way strangers talk to me at parties.

I’ve been amazed –  disappointed, even shocked – that when they learn what I now do, even some people who’ve known me for decades say the very things that people I’ve only just met say.

This has made me reflect on what I suppose I should call my own ‘activist journey’, though it still feels weird to think of it as such, and why I thought I’d share my experience with you.

By the way, if you’re offended by me co-opting the Alcoholics Anonymous framing for my closet activism, know that I did so neither to trivialise alcoholism nor to elevate activism. My purpose was simply to highlight my recent experience of telling people what I do.

‘So what do you do?’ is what adults ask other adults they’ve just met, and everyone develops their own responses.

Over four decades, my own response has tracked my particular career zigzags. 

• In the 80’s I said ‘student’, then ‘international textile trader’. 
• In the 90s, it was ‘network news Producer, then Reporter, then Bureau Chief’.  
• In the 2000s, I’d switch between ‘documentary filmmaker’, ‘broadcast consultant’ and ‘Chinese language game show host’. 
• In the 2010s, as the Internet steadily undermined Old Media, I’d reply ‘documentary crowdfunding expert’, ‘charity video maker’ or ‘social media content provider’.

I’m aware these are not standard jobs – except maybe the last one these days. 

So I reckon I can confidently claim that people at parties have historically asked me more follow-up questions than average, or than they would have had I replied ‘dentist’, ‘bus driver’, or ‘receptionist’.    

But I don’t remember anyone ever immediately saying things like:

‘You do realise you’re privileged, don’t you?’

Or

‘That’s a luxury most people can’t afford, you know’

Or

‘Oh, so you’re retired now.’

We’ll come back to my comebacks and how they go down, but it might help if we first took a quick skip through my lifelong relationship with activism to see how I arrived here.

In Episode 2: How I Became A Full-Time Activist, SternWriter deploys hindsight to chart his journey to coming out as an activist in his mid-50s.

Episode 2: How I Became a Full-time Activist 

My first proper job out of university was at a big business. In fact, by the time I quit my high-flying corporate job in 1991, it was literally the biggest in the world.

As a local hire for a multinational headquartered a continent away, I was a bit of an outsider. I’d often find myself to be the only foreigner in the room.

For me, however, this turned out to be the opposite of being a problem.  

I was welcomed, trusted and accepted by a different culture. My efforts to learn their language, social norms, corporate culture, appreciate their cuisine and arts, follow their native sports, were all sincerely appreciated, and reciprocated with goodwill. 

I enjoyed a far more intimate relationship with my employer than most of my university friends had at their first jobs. But my employers weren’t a charity, international friendship association, or diplomatic agency. They were paying me – handsomely – to make an enormously wealthy company even richer.

It was a good job, flying around the world business class. I was ambitious in the way young men in their first jobs can afford to be. Long hours are just fine when you’re in your early 20s, get paid overtime, with few responsibilities and much to learn.

I worked hard, got promoted, got promoted again. A hot-shot executive from Head Office hand-picked me as his local protegé. He promoted me further, making me the youngest section manager in the company’s 150-year-history.

Soon, I was the only foreigner in the room when big decisions were made. Sometimes, at my boss’s urging, I was telling colleagues twice my age what they should do to avoid getting left behind.

This career may have appeared stellar, but on the inside I never felt one of them. 

This feeling wasn’t just down to being a foreigner – I was now fluent in their language, and had a better command of its formal office register than many native speakers my age.

Rather, it was a nagging feeling that I didn’t belong in this world. 

Looking back, the higher I was pushed up the corporate ladder, the more intense this feeling of alienation became, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on it at the time.  

All I had was a growing sense, despite the business class flights, sharp suits and corporate brownie points, of being in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, 

Hindsight should be treated with caution, but it’s only now I’ve come out as a fully-fledged activist that I reckon I can single out the single incident that pushed me to reject all the riches and status of the corporate world. 

Looking back, it was one lunch with one strange old man that awoke me to my true nature.  

These days we’re not supposed to think of ‘activism’ as a kind of sin, or even an affliction. These days, most people accept activists as normal members of society. Many admire them. 

Activists themselves wear their activism as a badge of pride, not a mark of shame. 

In the real world and online, there are entire communities where activism is seen as perfectly normal. Same-activist couples raise activist children, supported by activist grandparents of all backgrounds, ethnicities and orientations.

In 1980s London, though, it was still very unusual to see a distinguished-looking gentleman with thinning white hair, immaculately dressed in tweed jacket, tie and brogues, carrying a polished leather briefcase, walk up to reception in the London office of the world’s biggest company, openly identify himself as an activist, and politely ask to talk to a company representative.

I didn’t witness this scene myself, so can only imagine the impact it must have had, and confusion it must have sown. 

Back then, as probably now, activists showing up unannounced at the front desk of a multinational in the heart of the central business district, could expect to be turfed out by security as troublemakers. 

Easy when they’re students with dyed hair bearing placards. Harder when they look like gentlemen who’ve just played a hand of bridge at the club. 

Clever.

Somehow this old activist’s request ended up on my hot-shot boss’s desk – maybe envious colleagues were trying to take him down a peg or two and humiliate him by being seen in public with an activist.

If so, he outmanoeuvred them by saying he was busy but that his trusted assistant – me – would meet him.

My boss called me from my desk, told me to take this old activist out to lunch – just a café, not a fancy restaurant –  hear what he had to say, and report back. 

Clever.

But my boss surely couldn’t have suspected that this lunch would ignite my own smouldering activism. He could not have had an inkling that, over a bacon and avocado baguette, this polite old gentleman might inspire me on a course that two years later, lead to me quitting my high-flying job, in a bid to satisfy my activist urges in the corporate world. 

Who knows, though? Until recently, I assumed my boss was palming off an awkward customer to his junior protogé to get him off the premises at the cost of lunch for two. 

Now, though, I wonder. He was a wise man, a great reader of people, and given his position as a pillar of the corporate establishment, exceptionally open-minded.

This is pure speculation, but was my high-flying boss, in his own way, a bit of an activist himself? Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if he may have recognised a similar spark in me? Could he have been curious to see how I’d react when exposed to an out-and-out, self-declared activist, in a work environment?

Maybe he was unconsciously giving me the chance to be the activist he could never have been, constrained as he was by the conservatism of his generation and culture.  

Who knows. Deep waters.

Whatever my boss’s reasons, that lunch with the old activist did ignite some activist spark in me. 

His mission touched a nerve in me that led me to mothball my sharp suits and move to the most expensive city in the world to pursue my corporate version of his activist mission.

I failed, fell into journalism. I felt more at home in this world, and had much to learn, and the need to appear professionally neutral meant concealing my activist colours rather than displaying them on my sleeve.

For the next decade, working for American network news around Asia, I did what I could to smuggle my activism into my work without losing credibility or looking unprofessional.

For the decade after that, now with the responsibility of feeding a young family, I did the same thing as an independent documentary filmmaker. I discovered that the leeway that documentaries give you to show your activist hand, is more than counterbalanced by the fact that it’s so much harder to make a living at.

Independent filmmaking was precarious enough as a career, without attempting to pick and choose what stories you told. Convincing broadcasters to pay you at all was hard enough, without the additional complication of smuggling activism into broadcast documentaries. 

And then along came YouTube, undermining the entire broadcast industry and rendering all the broadcasters increasingly impotent and irrelevant.  Now everyone expected to see everything, especially documentaries, for free. The old-school gatekeepers no longer had exclusive access to viewer eyeballs, and less and less of a pittance to disburse to baying throngs of hungry filmmakers.

YouTube was great for viewers. Not so great if you expect to get paid to make documentaries.

I did what I could to adapt to, even to embrace the brave new world of social media, but with a wife and two daughters to support, options were limited for any kind of work, let alone activism-infused projects.

Pandemic lockdowns gave many of us pause to reconsider our lives, careers, purposes and priorities. 

For me Covid, was part of a quadruple-whammy –  recovery from a long period of depression, my adult daughters leaving home and leading independent lives, and the end of a long marriage.

Again, nothing unusual in that. Plenty of men my age face similar situations. 

Things only got weird when I decided to stop earning money, and become a full-time activist.

In Episode 3, ‘Privileged’, SternWriter starts getting asked some odd questions about his new career path.

If you’re curious how stories like this can further the See Through Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active, the podcast’s carbon-reducing mechanism is explained in this article, and demonstrated in any See Through podcast.

The same ‘transparent Trojan Horse’ technique is deployed whether a Truth Lies podcast (entirely true, largely) or a See Through Prod-cast (entirely true, full stop).