RE: My response to ECOTRAIN QOTW 10.7
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myself and fellow activists positively engaged with more people in that 30 minutes than we engaged with during our PR works during the King William/parliament House portion.
These will have been the receptive ones and I'm guessing you weren't exactly inconveniencing them at this point. This is the way to do it. When you inconvenience, you get people's backs up and they switch off to the message. In some cases they can even turn against the cause when they previously supported it because they begin to feel like people are going too far and causing harm or even feel personally attacked. I've actually seen this happen a lot lately with those who were once sympathetic, but now feel under attack.
Shout, scream, irritate, inconvenience, bug, pester
You need to make sure you are doing it to the right people, though. If you take a blanket approach, then you're covering your would be allies too and they don't need or want to be shouted or screamed at, inconvenienced, bugged or pestered for something they are already doing their best with.
While I was writing my reply to your comment, I was struck dumb by the ludicrousness of the conversation and the original post.
According to the best stats, the best science and gazillions of observable phenomena, we are facing with, if not a cluster of extinction level events, a series of disasters that will kill millions and, reshape our whole society and redesign the stage upon which we act.
And we're arguing about whether it's right to 'inconvenience' someone.
Lol! And we wonder why people just switch off to surrounding events beyond their control and just get on with life. When it comes down to it, living out best lives without harming others can as much as possible just makes the most sense. Our time here is fleeting after all.
Still, it can be helpful to have these chats, it stops us getting too caught up in our tunnel vision. I rather like that I can have these discussions with you where we may not agree, but can still get a good debate without it getting nasty.
Agreed. Debate is far better than argument and I think we both respect each other enough in real life not to get bogged down in straight up arguing. If we had all started living the best we could without hurting others centuries ago, all would be good but sadly, that hasn't been the case and here we are, many of us living in a way that hurts not only others but ourselves and our future selves too.
Unfortunately we can't control what happened centuries ago, only what we do now. Unless you're also working on a time machine in your workshop. 😏 It may be too little too late, but I feel like the 60s/70s hippy movement started a ball rolling to the point where most people now are certainly more aware of problems with the damage we've caused and more receptive to conversation about it.