The 'Fisties: Most Ineffective Activism
Oh, how to choose, how to choose. There are simply so many Movements in this town that it's only to be expected that some would utterly fail to have any impact whatsoever on our lives, other than giving us something to bitch about. For example, there was all that chatter a few months ago about banning pit bulls. And that citywide gun ban thingy that is probably, um, well, just a wee bit unconsitutional. And did you know, there's big-business-advocacy groups like SFSOS that want to see MORE cars downtown? Sure, that'll happen. And then there's folks like Jack Myers and Supervisor McGoldrick trying to delay the building of the Transbay terminal; their only impact on its construction will be to push it even MORE over budget. And the proposition about military recruiters not being welcome at state schools -- it's nonbinding and probably won't have any impact on recruiting, or gays in the military, or the war in Iraq. But it does provide us all with excellent new scenic overlooks of our own navels.
But all those totally unsuccessful efforts pale in comparison to 2005's greatest activism-loser: the Muni fare strike. Because it could've been so awesome, if it had worked. There is no organization more loathed by San Franciscans than our self-declared "transit" agency. (Which reminds us: SFist's just inaugurating a new feature called Dear Mr. Ford in which you're invited to send in your mass-transit nightmare stories for a weekly recap of the horrors that Muni visits upon us all.) We were SO READY to all rally together, and stick it to them, and to feel all noble and Les-Miserablish about ourselves. So what happened?
Have you ever seen a bunch of kids who want to jump in a pool, but none of them wants to be the first, and they're all saying, "I'm not going to do it if nobody else is going to do it," and so they all just wait on the edge until they can all feel assured that everyone's going to dive in? Yeah ... it was sort of like that. Only we couldn't see how many other kids were about to jump, if any. As far as we could tell, the only people engaging in any fare-striking were affiliated with groups "engaged in struggles against capitalism," or had online nicknames like "AnarchistAction." And forgive us, but as liberal as San Franciscans' sympathies tend to be, at the end of the day we just don't have much interest in participating in Communist social upheaval. Life's hard enough already without being on the losing end of a revolution.
The fare strike, the way that it was conducted, required that each Muni rider be a trailblazer, speak up, and take on a leadership role. And when people are just trying to get to work in the morning, or to go to the mall, or to visit their uncle, or to deliver a package, they tend not to want to take bold positions of leadership. After all, the reason leaders are leaders is because there aren't many of them. And to borrow from Dash's Corollary, saying that everyone is a leader is another way of saying that nobody is. So as pissed as we were at Muni, potential strikers had no leadership, and had no way of knowing their own numbers. So by now, the fare strike movement seems to have run mostly out of steam; the only people still aware of it are those folks who make some nice banners, maybe some giant street-theater puppets, and have absolutley no effect on life in the city at all. So f**king Muni won. Crap.
Also, why the hell were protestors instructed not to pay at all? If we were supposed to be pissed about the fare increase, shouldn't we have simply declined to pay the extra quarter? That part never made much sense to us.