Don't Stop Now
It’s easy to want to stop. Progress is opaque and difficult to comprehend. It’s almost unimaginable that the time, effort, and resources being put towards causes that are often on the margins will amount to anything meaningful in the short term; often that perception is correction, short term gains are as rare as they are fleeting. However, one must imagine those watching Sisyphus.
The original story of Sisyphus, recontextualized by Camus, is synonymous with futility; pushing the boulder up the hill results in its inevitable descent. One can imagine him as happy, the full spectrum of human emotions existing within him, and fluctuating when he reaches the top, but it still leaves the boulder tumbling to the bottom. However, someone is aware of his efforts, perhaps many people; at the very least Camus, who gave Sisyphus an audience, viewed his seemingly mundane, endless task meaning.
It’s not always apparent the impact any sort of activism. It feels Sisyphusian at times to donate money that could easily be spent on justifiable comforts, to go out with a group that seems to always be decreasing in size to advocate for a cause that creeps closer to being fully criminalized by the world’s collective governments, to scroll and post and share online a never ending stream of content so harrowing to behold that actually living the experiences is incomprehensible to the minds of most. It’s a valid desire to want these limited forms of effort to correlate with some visible, material progress.
One doesn’t get to see the slow change in a person that the drives by a protest as they react first with anger, and then eventually curiosity. Seeing someone in their community push for a cause, however demonized, perhaps even more so if demonized, forces a person to confront the idea that they are told that no one like them cares about this. Someone does, and they start to wonder why. Maybe it comes up in conversation at a dinner with friends or family, and they find out someone else in their life, someone even closer to them, also cares about this.
The process is slow, opaque, and frustratingly nonlinear, but it’s undeniable in its existence. No one was born at a protest. The imperceptible series of events that lead someone to care about the issue can rarely be traced back to a single event or individual, but instead is the culmination of the work of countless who devote themselves to something beyond their immediate comprehension, and with little process of reward. By continuing in that tradition, and trusting that those impacted will continue to do the same, the balance will eventually shift.++