Criticism…. Icks!
Life not Money campaign diary post no 7 (ish)
I find this Facebook business exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. All those people you can communicate with for free – and then being taken apart by people you have never met…
I have always been an innovator and it’s an occupational hazard that people think you are mad (and often bad) when you deviate from “the way things are done”. The mad thing is that when you are successful people think you are great and if you are not people think you are a twat. What neither group seem to realise is you can’t be successful without risking being a twat – you never know. With Kings College Climate Emergency we got a good bit of flack (one experienced activist told me “your plan is a really bad idea”) but then it all turned out fine. With Life not Money we are still doing our “strangers at the gate” routine and not broken it down yet and people think we should be “working with the cleaners” and what not. So what with the stress of trying to have myself arrested and put into prison I slightly gave up. If I was a bigger better person I would maybe still be striding on but – without wanting to turn this post into a therapy session I should say I had a somewhat overbearing mother (and reading Plato at 13 at a working class Manchester comprehensive in 1979 was asking for a good beating behind the bike sheds) – so I find it difficult to deal with criticism from “our own side”.
But then in the darkest hour I get a call from the Union - things are heating up (Owen Jones has done a video supporting the cleaners campaign and 100,000 people have watched it) and yes direct action is definitely necessary and the cleaners are all for it happening. So we’re back in business – the Brazilian horns have been ordered and we are all set to exercise our democratic right to make lots of noise and do a bit more chalking… “a cleaner is a person” written over and over again - that’s the top and bottom of the message of this campaign I think.
