We are all organizers, and no organizer should ever end a meeting or a book without ideas for practical action. After all, a movement is only people moving. What are we going to do differently when we get up tomorrow?

I generally thought reading Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem was a chore. Even the more potentially likable parts of the book were tainted with fanaticism. For instance, I was looking forward to reading Steinem’s essay on transsexualism, but it was misinformed, judgmental and ignorantly unsympathetic. And then there was the exposé on Playboy bunnies, which was ruined by Steinem’s heavy-handedness and overstatement. A lot of the book was just flat-out boring, too.

But it wasn’t a total loss. It helped me put the overall women’s movement into perspective, and I also generally like being exposed to ideas that span the spectrum, even if I don’t agree with some of them. I simply read the book with a proverbial grain of salt and gleaned the good stuff. Also, I did come away with genuine inspiration after reading a couple of passages about activism and self-empowerment in the section titled Far from the Opposite Shore. One of the quotes is above. The other:

… I now often end lectures with an organizer’s deal. If each person in the room promises that in the next twenty-four hours beginning the very next day, she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the cause of simple justice, then I promise I will. It doesn’t matter if the act is as small as saying, ‘Pick it up yourself’ (a major step for those of us who have been the servants in our own families) or as large as organizing a strike. The point is that, if each of us does as promised, we can be pretty sure of two results. First, the world one day later won’t be quite the same. Second, we will have such a good time that we will never again get up in the morning saying, ‘Will I do anything outrageous?’ but only ‘What outrageous act will I do today?’