Only crisis can bring about needed revolution

By Barry Levey

At the first-annual Michael Hollander Memorial Lecture last week, Kevin Jennings urged his audience to be part of the gay rights movement by demanding that his own film documentary on gay history be shown in high schools across the country. I went home unmoved.

Matthew Shepard of Laramie, Wyo. died last week, targeted in a robbery because of his homosexuality. Merely reading this news made me want to fight for equality.

We are "a generation without a revolution," activists lament, not for lack of worthy causes but because we do not feel collectively threatened by adversity. We are all moved and in turn motivated by various injustices, but we have yet to unite behind a single one. The sad truth is that we need a crisis--a catastrophe so great it mobilizes all of us behind one cause--before we can have a revolution. We will never become a collective until some crisis threatens us collectively.

Liberal, revolution-hungry students, urging us to graffiti construction sites and enshrine Store 24, decry this outlook as self-defeatist and reactionary. We need to be proactive, they say. We need to jettison our complacency, stop taking our freedoms for granted, and get our names in the history books.

But we cannot choose our revolution. Revolutions are not chosen; they are imposed by a crises. And while, thankfully, there is a small, dedicated minority working to combat the world's awesome and obscene inequalities, it cannot and will not turn its dedication into a revolution. There is a truth in platitude and a tide to history. Right now, we are at a trough. And until a crisis carries us to a crest, we have nothing to fight for collectively.

We need only to look at what motivates us individually to see how this holds on a collective scale. Jennings's speech was alarming. He spoke of the intentional isolation of gay youth, of the destruction of most of the documents of gay liberation, of the oppression of gay support groups, of the only gay analogue to black churches, which served as community and information centers during the Civil Rights movement, being bars and clubs. I was disturbed. But without a tangible crisis, I was not threatened.

It took a violent hate crime to do that. And sadly enough, it will take a whole rash of them to threaten the American population at large. Only when the oppression of gays is grossly and pervasively tangible will the public at large feel that its own humanity is at risk. This is what a crisis gives the public that activism does not: the threat that its very humanity depends on revolution.

What, then, is the role of visionaries like Jennings who fight without a revolution? What purpose do those people combating the harassment of black motorists, the suppression of female professors, the enslavement of Afghanistan's women, serve when we are not collectively threatened by any of these issues? Their job is to keep pushing until history catches up with them, to have an infrastructure of revolution in place when the tide carries us back to a crest.

How could Jennings have made me a revolutionary? How, when I am convinced into complacency by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), by Dave Matthews, by Will and Grace? Any activism that ignores our basic need to be threatened is doomed to failure. Jennings's documentary, for example, won the participation of Gwenyth Paltrow and the Best Documentary prize at Sundance, but has yet to win any high school students' souls.

Concession to the tide of history is not an objectively good thing (one need only look at the Holocaust to see that), but it has one great advantage over blind faith in revolution. There is a sobering clarity that comes from accepting the fact that it will take a crisis to motivate us, the realization that a certain evil is destined to arrive. Our visionary activists should not expend their energy trying to fabricate a revolution. A far more profitable enterprise would be to anticipate the crisis that will finally impose that revolution upon us. People who really want to motivate the masses should stop illustrating the masses' apathy and start identifying the crisis that will make such apathy intolerable if not impossible. The speaker capitalizing on an epidemic of brutal hate crimes will motivate many more people than Jennings did by capitalizing on a Sundance prize.

Some generation, perhaps ours, or very probably another, will have to confront the crisis that is brewing. And they will write on the Blue Wall. And they will be revolutionaries. But they will not be born until the crisis creates them. The most visionary activists will be those who force the crisis to its head: those who seek it out, promote it, present it, and use it to ride the waves.

Barry Levey is a senior in Davenport.

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