I used to wear a suit, you know.
I used to see my world through the prism of things my upbringing had taught me were sensible, probable and right. I used to have a settled vision of what these were, and I stacked them on the same mental shelf as ‘values’, with whom they by and large coincided.
I used to do all these things, but I never once danced.
Dancing and my body occupy different universes. There are Okapis out there with more sense of rhythm and timing than me. Me not dancing is one of my key contributions to help make a better world, along with me not singing and me not opening the batting for the White Hunters. Please, don’t mention it, it’s the least I can do. I just don’t dance.
Or at least not until last night.
Last night, I danced. I danced for nearly an hour. I danced my socks off. And my fleece, and my jumper and –almost- my shirt. I did that pointy-in-the-air stuff that John Travolta did, albeit it when he was 35 years younger and 20 kilos lighter than I am now. I stamped four paces forward and then shot my right arm rightwards, then my left arm leftwards, and then I lifted my arms like Petruvian man until the shirt came out of my trousers and my hip started to hurt. I even wiggled my backside more than once, although that was arguably more a feature of seismology than entertainment. I am not pretending that I looked anything other than awful, and not even the empowering encouragement of my fellow dancers could convince me otherwise.
If you had been at the Unitarian Church Hall in Godalming, you could have danced with me. With us, in fact. With twenty-four members of XR, all planning the coordinated moves we are hoping to display for London later in the month. It is part of the corporate realisation that fun and positivity has as much place in the long campaign to help fight climate change than pissing off good and busy people off when they are trying to get to work, and guilt-tripping others about the provenance of their hybrid car.
When I do subversion, I do it rather politely and with a wistful smile on my face. It’s why I would make a lousy Marxist, and an even worse revolutionary.
Our hope is that what we learned will eventually look like this:
In it’s purest form, Civil Diso-Bedience is not just non-violent direct dance, it’s a way of life.#ExtinctionRebellion #SpringRebellion @ExtinctionR pic.twitter.com/YyX0i9UVyw — Extinction Rebellion Australia (@XRebellionAus) October 11, 2019
Be that as it may, people are starting to ask if all this XR stuff is permanent, or if I am going to return to the adult world of porridge, petrol cars and peaceful debate any time soon. The short answer is that I really don’t know.
Life is a giant experiment, until it isn’t, and all that I have leaned in the last three or four years is that if you don’t want to be a passenger, you are bound to be a participant. And being a participant doesn’t mean that you have to agree with everything, any more than you believe in the whole manifesto of whichever political party it was you voted for on December 12th. It just means that your brain is subject to more influences than the paper you read and what Auntie tells you on the news each evening, and you slowly come to a settled conclusion from your own experience. It’s a great feeling.
The political scientist Erica Chenoweth once asserted that it takes only 3.5% of the population speaking out through activism and non-violent protest to achieve real change. Time and time again, she says, it has proved so: in Georgia in 2003, in the Philippines in 1986, for example. I love that.
So, if you think it’s perfect, crack on. But if you have doubts, not just about climate change but anything, then perhaps experiment. It doesn’t matter what it is, so long as it is away from normality and out of your comfort zone. Whatever else it does, it won’t damage or diminish you.
The streets belong to you, just as much as they do to anyone else.
After all, I managed to dance.
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