Wise Up: Activism
By David Bruce
June 2, 2008
• On Jan. 8 1999, Wangari Maathai and some friends started to plant a tree in Nairobi, Kenya. Suddenly, 200 armed guards attacked them. Ms. Maathai suffered a deep gash in her head, and she went to the police to report the attack. She wanted the police to go with her to the site of the attack to investigate the crime, but instead they wanted her to sign a formal report. Ms. Maathai dipped a finger in her own blood, and then signed the complaint with an X. No one was ever arrested for the attack; in fact, that evening, she saw TV news footage that implied that the police were on the side of the attackers. Ms. Maathai has done much work for the environment in Kenya, often facing hostile developers who would like for her to be dead. In 2004, she won the Noble Peace Prize for her environmental work.
• Not so long ago, gays were regarded as mentally ill; psychiatrists, including Charles Socarides, forced some gays to undergo aversion therapy in which they were shown photographs of nude men, then were electrically shocked or forced to vomit. Some gays were even given legally given electroshock treatments. Gay activists fought back, and in 1970 they infiltrated a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. A film shown at the meeting depicted gays being forced to vomit whenever they saw photographs of nude men. When the film was shown, the gay men infiltrating the meeting waited until photographs of nude men appeared on screen, then they cheered. A few years later, the APA decided that being homosexual was NOT a mental disease. (One wonders if Dr. Socarides ever apologized to the gays he tortured.)
• Sometimes, computer video games will include content that makes a political statement. For example, the 1985 Cold War strategy game “Balance of Power” made an anti-nuclear war statement. Players were supposed to avoid a nuclear war in the game. Knowing that some players might create a nuclear war simply to see some neat computer graphics, the creators made sure that when a nuclear war erupted in the game, a screen would appear that said simply, “You have ignited a nuclear war.... We do not reward failure.” Another example of political content occurred in the game “SimCopter,” one of whose creators, Jacques Servin, got fired (in 1996) because he had secretly written computer code that resulted in certain male characters in the game kissing other male characters.
• Vera Cáslavská of Czechoslovakia engaged in an impressive act of activism at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. The Soviet military had rolled into Czechoslovakia two months earlier, putting an end to free speech. In Mexico City, Ms. Cáslavská won the gold medal in the women’s gymnastics all-around competition and received a total of four gold and two silver medals at this Olympics. She shared the gold medal in the floor exercise event with Soviet athlete Larissa Petrik. While the Czech national anthem played, Ms. Cáslavská stood tall and was proud, but when the Soviet national anthem played, she hung her head and was sad. Everyone at the Olympics knew what the Czech citizen was sad about.
• Eileen Daffern was 93 years old in 2007, but that did not stop her from being an activist, especially when it came to resisting nuclear weapons. She says, “The great challenge is to make people realize the power they have to change the world. It can be changed, you know.” She is healthy for her age, she inherited good genes from her parents, and she takes pride in her appearance. When her mother was 90 years old, Eileen saw her looking at her appearance in the mirror. Eileen says, “Her gestures were those of a young girl preening herself... I, too, look in the mirror.” In fact, when sees photographs that make her look “too ancient,” she gleefully destroys them.
• Women’s sports and women athletes have not always been respected. For example, in the 1960s (well before Title 9) at Ohio University, Catherine L. Brown used to teach field hockey on a field that was also used by ROTC cadets. Sometimes, the ROTC cadets would act as if the women athletes were invisible and march onto the field — even during games. On one occasion when this happened, the ROTC cadets were standing at attention — meaning that they could not move — so Ms. Brown ordered the game to continue, and she rewarded each woman athlete who managed to hit the legs of an ROTC cadet with the ball.
• Gay and lesbian activists sometimes have to fight scary battles. In the 1960s, some members of the American Nazi Party wanted to cause trouble at a conference of ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organizations). The gays and lesbians banded together to keep the American Nazis out of the auditorium where the conference was being held by locking arms and forming a human barricade that refused to let the American Nazis through. Among the activists barricading the door was Nancy Garden, lesbian author of “Annie on My Mind.”
• Activists do good deeds by fighting back against such evils as sexual harassment. In New York City, 17-year-old LaTosha Belton hung up posters that declared, “Street Harassment is a Crime!” This didn’t stop a group of guys from looking her over and shouting come-ons at her. She approached the guys, gave them a poster, and told them, “Read this.” One guy responded, “What, I can’t tell you, you look nice?” Ms. Belton pointed to the poster and told him, “What does this say? You are harassing me, and I don’t like it.”
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