This is the fourteenth in a series of articles on rebels and rebellion written for the FREE section of 'The Nation'. Scroll to the end for other articles in this series. 'FREE' is dedicated to youth and youthfulness.
There will be down days. This you know. There will be days when you wonder whether
the effort is worth it, when people you trust betray or desert you, when
outcomes fought for with utmost passion don’t materialize, when defeat as they
say is snatched from the jaws of victory.
A rebel’s life is full of such moments.
The lucky ones get to Victory Day, but for the most part and even for
those who do reach destination it is all about one disappointment followed by
another. And another.
There are many ways to deal with the D-Days, that’s
‘Down Days’ by the way. Review and
self-criticism, it goes without saying, are exercises you can avoid only at
great cost. Refuse to do this and the
chances are you’ll repeat mistakes. You
have to do this if you are to come out with a thing called ‘lessons
learnt’. Invaluable in the long
run.
Defeats and disappointment cause people to lose
heart. They make it hard to keep the
company intact. Self-doubt is a
formidable enemy (which is why it makes sense to do things that make the enemy
lose heart). The rebel will often be
called upon to summon whatever resources available within him just to keep the
spirit of the team.
First of all, you can’t lie to people about what
happened and what is happening. Even if
the ill-informed are convinced, the true picture will emerge sooner or later
and that’s it – you will lose comrades and fast. Even if it is not prudent to tell all that
you know, it would be erroneous to talk of the unknown as though it’s known, to
treat conjecture as fact and so on.
Keeping things real, then, is important. That’s basic.
You can build from there. Here’s
something that might help you along.
Humor.
Someone once said ‘man was given an imagination to
compensate for what he is not, a sense of humor to console him for what he
is’. Down days are days where some
consolation is required and there’s no console-medicine that works as well as
humor does, it can be argued.
There is a man who called himself Subcommandante
Marcos. He was the spokesperson for the
EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de
Liberación Nacional, often referred to as the Zapatistas) who
gained prominence in the late nineties for his sharp, insightful and even
hilarious communiqués. His communiqués
are on the internet and are classics in the art of pamphleteering not just for
style but content, the attention to details and the particularities of the
political moment commented on as well as understanding of the wide sweep of
history, the ways of oppressor and oppression, economic as well as
cultural. He drew heavily from things
traditional, especially from the EZLN’s political home, Chiapas of Mexico and
the indigenous people of that continent.
Now Marcos, among his
other exceptional qualities, had the ability to laugh at himself. He conjured a dung beetle whom he called
‘Durito’ with whom he created amazing conversations which he ‘transcribed’ into
his various communiqués. I believe
those ‘conversations’ are now collected in a book. There was one classic Durito-moment when the
rather serious and politically astute dung beetle described a particularly
‘down moment’ as ‘strategic retreat’.
Marcos’ version was on the lines of ‘fleeing with tail between the
legs’. That’s funny. That’s also a lesson.
There are ways to say
the ‘as is’. Many ways. Inject a little humor and it cleans the blood
streams. Makes things more palatable. Lifts spirits. Turns desperate individuals lined up at a
border and ready to enter a country called Capitulation think twice. That might make a big difference. Humor does that, at times.
Other articles in this series
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