If you're not angry then you're just stupid you don't care how else can you react when you see something so unfair when the man of the hour can kill half the world in war, make 'em slaves to superpower and let them die poor

—Ani DiFranco

In college I was taught, and came to believe, that every act is political. Any act favors some political viewpoint over another, and the seemingly apolitical, or politically-disengaged, is an act in favor of the status quo. "To speak of the trees is almost a crime, for it is a kind of silence about injustice," as Brecht wrote ("To Posterity"). To paint a beautiful landscape is to condone the torture of political prisoners, to drink coffee is to enslave the coffee workers. To fly a kite on the beach is to send the world to hell, in a handbasket no less.

And Ani DiFranco's lyric, above, echoes a common turn of phrase amongst radicals: "How else can you react?" or "How can you not take pity...?" or "How can you sit still?"

But that turn, that "How else?" is a way of naturalizing a political viewpoint—making it seem natural, rather than taken. It presupposes that you agree, and then submerges the choice into a mechanism of biology, or force of human nature. "How else can you react?" implies that there is only one way to react: the muscle of the human mind will simply contract when thusly prodded, the song seems to say—unless that mind is altogether dead. Such is the implication.

But there are many ways to react to an unjust phenomenon, or rather, to a phenomenon. Where one woman is called to stand up and speak, another man is called to sit down and think. One is called to spray-paint slogans on walls; another will write tracts with a typewriter. One will condemn the action and all those involved, another will criticize the details and call for the perpetrators to adjust. There are many temperaments and many avenues of attack toward a political question, and indeed (of course!) there are many gut reactions, and many considered opinions in relation to it.

Today I need to revise that exhortation, "Every act is a political act," to: "Every act has a political dimension." I can't argue that to fly a kite does not have its own political impact; its political cost or value should be examined and weighed, in view of one's political values. But the politics of each thing need not overwhelm its other dimensions. A human being is a member of a polis, indeed—and that fact should not be neglected out of privileged complacency. But to leave one's aesthetic, spiritual, athletic, intellectual, kinetic, emotional, tactile, breathless, technical, sleepy, barefoot, abstract or laughing sides unattended is not—should not be—the real aim of political call to action.

This is why you will not see me sitting in a campaign office licking envelopes, or calling voters at home to ask them who they're voting for. Each of us has our talents, and our pleasures, and each of us is moved differently by those myriad (in)justices that we're exposed to each day. I intend to make a better world—indeed I intend to spend every waking moment in such pursuit—but not solely in the political dimension. I must react, must not be stupid, must care—but only with the magics of your particular being.