The real harm in half-baked activism

Maarten Metzelaar, Staff Editor

During the moment when I should have been prepared, sitting in my newspaper class, unsurprisingly I was rushing to make it to that class.  In my confused haste, a pair of smiling faces walked up to me to offer me a safety pin.

“Would you like a safety pin to show that you don’t discriminate against race and… uh, just don’t discriminate?”

Well, you’re damn right I grabbed that safety pin so that these random people would feel better about themselves, and so that I could be on my swift way to wherever this class was. But somewhere in the haze of my frantic morning thought, whilst pinning a dingy green colored safety pin to my favorite shirt, I had a clear thought.

“Well this is kind of silly, I don’t need a pin to show people that I don’t discriminate; I just don’t do that.”

Naturally, I shrugged it off as a harmless symbol and left that pin in for a day before realizing I don’t want to poke holes in my favorite shirt.  By the time I took it out at the end of the day, I had already realized what it really was. A gimmick. A little fad. A waste of time.

By pinning a safety pin on your shirt, you are by no means solving any sort of problem.  It is simply a symbol to the world that “Hey, I’m a good person, I wanted to let you know.” More than that, it’s an attempted physical mark of “character” or “ethics”.  To me, the safety pin equates to a useless, half-vain badge of honor.

Now,  you might find this to be a bit of a drastic comment to a relatively harmless fad that, let’s be honest, died off almost as soon as it began.  But the safety pin campaign is not really the issue to me; it’s the fact that we feel the need to propagate things like this in the first place.

When you donate clothes and money to charities that flood impoverished locations with free clothes and food, you don’t really help the people from those same poverty stricken areas.  You just put the tailor, the farmer AND restaurant owner out of business and in the end close to destroy the economies and self sustainability of the same areas you’re supposedly supporting.

Just like a misguided effort to help the less fortunate can ultimately cause the harm rather than any real help, I dare say the misguided efforts to band those who “do not discriminate” together through the use of half-baked symbols is harmful.

The notion that we should wear our “open-mindedness” on ourselves like this is a regressive one. Gone are the days where character is shown through one’s speech or actions, for now every common person need not even think for themselves because a simple patch or safety pin does the trick. Why try and think for one’s self and create one’s own set of beliefs when a logo says it all to the world?  Why try to look up information about the next disgusting world atrocity and discuss it with your peers, when putting a flag filter over your Facebook profile picture got you more likes, anyway?  

I feel like being told I should wear something like a safety pin to show that I don’t discriminate causes rise to a sort of disgusted feeling, that I should validate myself with some gimmick.  I see it as an insult to my intelligence, and the intelligence of those around me.

In the end, it’s fads like this one that end up becoming huge jokes. Giant targets to those who see the silliness in the whole thing, and another reason for them to mock this generation. I know a few people who would love nothing more than to tear down, mock and ultimately discredit someone entirely due to these trivial displays of “tolerance”.

Is this the kind of ways we want to make the world better?  With vain efforts used to pat ourselves on the back?  I say this generation is better than the gimmicks others will define us by.  I say we have the power to change the world for better,  not just the power to make ourselves feel better.