Activism
In the large amount of time I don't spend on my degree (9 hours of contact time a week!), I am an enthusiastic activist for a variety of causes. Activism is important because most people want life to be different than it is: they swear at newspapers headlines, or mutter darkly about the country going downhill, and then they content themselves with complaining and carry on as usual. Activists try to change the status quo that they are unhappy with. Someone once said to me that “ activism is pointless because the people at the top don't change anything unless they want to”. I would reply that the darkly named “people at the top” change things when they feel their position is threatened, and it is an activist's job to make them fear if they do not act, action will be taken.
This is not to say that every activist is obliged to stand outside the gates of No. 10 threatening anarchy unless they get their own way. There are all kinds of people who are quietly changing the world around, through art, through teaching, through any and all means to get across the message that another world is possible. And I think when you look at what the world was like a thousand years ago, the pace may be slow, but we are getting there.
Everyone has their own favoured areas of activism, though I would say that most are not adverse to joining others from time to time. I've have attended protests and meetings for everything from peace marches to students in Iran to the American spybase at Menwith Hill, and they've all be interesting to more or lesser extents. However, I am particularly interested in the causes below:
Drug law reform: I am the Chair of Manchester Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the External Relations Director (and LGBT Officer) for SSDP UK. The efforts to stamp out drugs began 150 years and have proven absolutely disastrous, expensive, and just plain stupid. You cannot stop people taking drugs and by handing over the control of a global trade that is third in size only to oil and arms to criminal cartels, you fuel all kinds of terrorism and gang activity, destroy communities, spread disease, criminalise millions of otherwise law-abiding people and generally waste hundreds of billions of dollars on an unachievable goal set down by moralists who use fear instead of evidence. It is not drugs in and of themselves that are the problem – it is the Prohibition of them. All drugs should be legalised, controlled and regulated, and only then will we be able to start making inroads in drug-related crime and health problems. See an article I wrote here for my student newspaper on the global drug trade and an interview with me about LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) drug use.
Further reading:
ID Cards: Whatever the government tells anyone, ID cards are never to the benefit of the citizen, just the state. The Identity Cards Act 2006 introduces a system that is expensive, that is intrusive, and which fundamentally changes the relationship between the individual and the states. “People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.” The identity card is optional to carry now but will inevitably demanded on a compulsory basis as soon at the government thinks they can get away with it – and behind the ID Card there is a massive database, the National Identity Register, which records every piece of information the government has on you, to be read by every government employee and anyone willing to pay for it. Don't believe me? Read the act. It's all there. It's very scary, and it's very real, and unless we make it clear they we will make this system fail, it is going to keep happening. Stand against the database state.
Further reading:
BNP: More Important than NO2ID? - an article I wrote for my student paper after an anti-ID cards motion failed to reach quorum at a General Meeting because anti-fascists passed a no platform policy and then left en masse.
LGBT rights: Lesbian, gay , bisexual and trans rights have come on dramatically in the last few years. When Peter Wildebloode, one of the last men to have been imprisoned for being gay, wrote his book on his prison experiences, I don't think he would ever have believed that one day we would have civil partnerships. But we still aren't equal.
Further reading:
Trans and Judaism: Inclusion from the Perspective of Several Jewish Movements - An essay I wrote as a piece of coursework on a friend's relationship between his gender identity and faith.