Can Joy Make Us Better Activists?
Remember the 2024 Democratic convention when Kamala Harris and Tim Walz brought joy to the front of their campaign message? Many of us wondered with relief, “Is this what we were missing? Can we win this way?” Of course, we didn’t win. But that doesn’t mean that we weren’t missing the joy.
Humans weren’t made to be angry all the time. It’s just not sustainable. If we’re angry all the time, we suffer health and relational consequences. Trauma gets stuck in the body. Without release, it feeds anxiety and manifests in poor sleep and poor health. If we don’t find a balance to deal with it, we take the negative emotions out on our loved ones. Without a path to care for ourselves, we flame out early and our power diminishes.
What can balance out the anger, frustration, and sadness we feel daily as we’re assaulted by bad news?
Joy.
Joy helps us navigate every other negative emotion clamoring to control us.
Embrace Joy When We Experience It
Are we so wrapped in anger that we can’t even recognize joy when it comes along? Something I heard from Diego Perez on the “That’s Total Mom Sense” podcast hosted by Kanika Chadda Gupta struck me. He spoke of the impermanence of joyful feelings, meaning we must be especially mindful of them and embrace them when they happen. He said,
“When something is really heavy, whatever the emotion is…when that heaviness is moving through, you just understand that no storm lasts forever. Right? But the same thing when you have a joyful, beautiful, momentous time with someone that you really care about. It’s also really important to understand…because this does not last forever, that should inspire me to be really present and be there and really embrace what’s happening.”
I want to be so ready and open to joy at this point that I don’t miss it! I’m just starting Perez’ latest book “How to Love Better: The Path to Deeper Connection Through Growth, Kindness, and Compassion,” which he wrote under the pen name Yung Pueblo. I hope he has more insights on how to dwell in the positive.
Joy helps build and sustain movements
Can we employ joy as a strategy in our activism? I believe we can.
Dallas Goldtooth was a spokesperson for the activists known as Water Protectors at the Standing Rock protest in South Dakota in 2016 and early 2017, a mass action to stop a pipeline from being built on Indigenous-held lands. He became known for using humor to draw people into the message and movement. Adrienne Maree Brown interviewed him for her book “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good.” She asked him to react to her theory that people who already feel hopeless don’t want to spend time around serious and dire movements where activists look burnt out and tired. Here’s a snippet of his response:
“Standing Rock was that moment where it was like me wanting to be contrary to the narrative that you have to be a f—ing angry-ass protestor. Or an angry-ass, down-ass motherf—er, like, with a ‘f— the police’ kind of narrative. And I’m like, I wanna go a different route…
“I’m like, man, you know what, I wanna just f—ing livestream me doing some sledding down the hills and showing people having fun because that’s what’s happening in the camp, like, people were having fun. People were enjoying themselves, but yet the camera comes on and they play the narrative. They played into the dogma of it: We have to be hard. We have to be serious.
“That’s the transformative nature of humor and comedy. I think it really heals us and helps us let go. Anger is extremely powerful. And it can transform amazing things. But it also has its obstacles. It sets up walls. The counterbalance to that is laughter. And we have to not be afraid to use that.”
Goldtooth was doing some of the most demanding activism ever, but he took the time to share his delight in sledding down a hill. Let me never become so wrapped up in righteous anger that I won’t smile at a child beside me at a protest with a bubble wand. In fact, maybe I’ll bring my own bubbles next time.
Joy helps build and sustain movements. Anger might inspire people to show up, but joy will keep them there. This joyful kind of thinking can help us follow the words of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:"Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you."
Look for joy and nurture it
Now, it’s time for a joy exercise together. Think of some things that bring you joy to help you when everything seems too heavy to bear. I picked up a self-help book my teenager discarded and found a brilliant question to jump start our thoughts: “What unfailingly makes you smile with delight every time it happens?” The word “delight” brought out some very specific sensation images for me:
Big fat snowflakes falling on my face when there is no wind
“Falling” on a gravity drop theme park ride
Holding an excited and affectionate puppy
The opening chords of Huey Lewis & The News’ “Power of Love” when I hear it out in public
How does that help me? Two ways. First, identifying them means I can call upon those images to help pull me out of a funk when I’m overwhelmed by negativity. Second, thinking about them helps me to recognize positive feelings of delight in other everyday happenings, so I don’t let them pass me by.
I thought about this while lobbying in Washington D.C. with the ONE Campaign about foreign aid in March. We had an enormous struggle since DOGE had cut 87% of humanitarian foreign aid programs. Vulnerable people were (and still are) dying because of the sudden withdrawal of USAID workers, medicines, and food.
There was every reason for despair, anger, and fear. Yet I also had the joy of doing the work with friends I had not seen in a very long time. And amid all the chaos of Congress…cherry blossoms! I’d never seen blossoms bursting all over Capitol Hill like that because I’m from the mid-west and never got to be there for that fleeting season.
Awareness of my reaction to that bit of nature and appreciation for my friends helped me through that challenging day. I could feed my joy and see it reflected at me in the faces of my fellow advocates.
Giving ourselves permission to experience the good and the bad together binds us closer together and makes us want to come back to the ONE Summit next year and the next. That’s how movements continue.
Joy is resistance
Joy is the thing that can remind us of why we fight and resist. Author, podcaster, and LGBTQ activist Dan Savage shared this on his Instagram account in February:
“During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now, but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.”
Let his words remind us that when things are dark, we must seek the light with passion and intention. When we seek joy, we find more joy. When we nurture and feed joy, we can carry more burdens than we believed we ever could. And - best of all - we can spread it to others, so we can all grow in our power.
Dealing with anger and sadness? Check out my posts "Caring for Ourselves Through Advocacy Grief” and “How Should I Use Anger in My Advocacy.”
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