Everycause Activism

Everycause, or Omnicause, Activism is where activists bypass intersectionality - the point where different causes have a common goal or mutual ideals to work toward - and try to create links where none exist.

You can say that Black Lives Matter AND acknowledge that violence isn't exclusive to cops and fair-skinned people.

You can decry rape culture and point out that misogyny hurts everyone, AND agree that mens services are underfunded.

You can say that Harry Potter shaped your desire to fight for a better world and improved child literacy AND admit that Rowling has done a lot of harm, not just to trans people.

Oppression Olympics, where you compete to claim who has suffered most, is a competition with no victor, no qualified judges, and a trophy that no-one wants.

Does one big act of violence outweigh a hundred microaggressions? Is verbal abuse worse than Financial or Psychological abuse? Does physical abuse trump everything else? What about sexual violance?

By trying to include everyone, you end up helping no-one, because there comes a point where needs clash, and the group is paralysed with no way forward.

Most activists manage to pick a common ground, agree to work on that and come back to the rest later. There was no way all black men were getting the vote when not even all white people could vote. But by campaigning for women to be afforded the right to vote, Voting was no longer a privilege exclusive to wealthy white landowners.

And once women had equal (and equally restrictive) voting rights, there was a greater push for all men to have the vote. Which then pushed voting rights for all women, which led to universal suffrage. Was it a perfect solution? Absolutely not, but it was progress, which led to more progress.

Championing education as a Universal Human Right was a step on the road to intergrated schools.

Family planning and Birth Control for married women was a step toward normalising those things for ALL women regardless of age or marital status.

A rising tide lifts ALL boats.

As an example, some months ago I was in the city to take my laptop in for servicing, and it happened to be the same time as the weekly hatefest, sorry, Pro-Palestine Demonstration.

Yes, I use the word HateFest, because none of the shouted slogans advocated for getting rid of the government that oversaw 90% of the population living below the poverty line and uses it's own people as human shields. No signs encouraged finding common ground. No megaphone bellowed for peace.

Only hate.

There were calls to globalise terror, for the Final Solution, to wipe Israel and it's people off the map. There were signs displaying swastikas, and glorifying mass murder.

Pro-Palestine demonstrators don't want a peaceful solution, they want the extermination of one people, as if that will fix the problems that another people face.

One man with a megaphone had managed to blame The Jews Israelis for the Stolen Generation, American and European Colonisation, the Great Depression, Global Warming, and everything else they could think of.

That's not intersectionality, that's a bunch of anti-Semetic conspiracy theories presented as fact. There's a lot of that going around right now.

What happened to fact checking? Basic media literacy and research skills? I got taught how to look for Weasel Words and biased reporting in high school; when did schools stop teaching how not to be a gullible idiot?

Another example is the current riots in France.

It started as student-led demonstrations shutting down schools that were under-funded and facing months long teacher shortages. Public opinion was generally on their side, and the protests were mostly peaceful. You'd have been hard-pressed to find anyone who didn't think they had a right to be upset.

Then Palestinian flags started appearing. Then other movements, less peaceful and less organised, shoved their way into the protests. Then buildings started getting set on fire, protests stopped being peaceful, and opinions changed.

These protests started as an intersectional issue. France has a very robust social scheme: open immigration policies, free schooling, universal healthcare... but it all has to be paid for, through taxes, fines and other government fundraising, and there are some benefits that only apply to citizens, or have waiting periods for non-citizens. A lot of young people, likewise, are seeing a future with little hope, between the rising unemployment and cost of living, and several years of budget cuts.

One could certainly argue that the budget cuts were necessary, because France's current national debt is 119% of its GDP, and something has to either change or give. Just as one could argue that the money could be raised by cracking down on illegal and off-the-books employment (which have gone up considerably over the last financial year) and making migration and family reunification conditional on being able to support yourself and your family, and therefore contributing to the social safety net. Many other countries are facing similar problems, or know that they will face similar problems soon.

But there is no faster way to lose public support than by being an obvious detriment to Society.

Mobs smashing storefronts, looting family owned stores along with retail giants, and cheering as historic buildings and cultural heritage institutions are set on fire, do not gain sympathy from the general public, or the people in a position to make changes. Setting fire to the very schools that students claimed to want properly funded, leads to the very people who were cheering you on, to stop.

If you look at media coverage now, vs last week, popular opinion has shifted from support for a single cause, to broad condemnation for violence and destruction.

That is the problem of Everycause Activism: movements hijacked, and the original cause buried under violence and brutality.