Don't Forget - Activism during Summer

Summer usually is a weird time for me, a mixture of days blending together into a working-swimming-meeting people routine and holidays, mine and other’s, disrupting the routine. The monthly meetings of young people in IFOR Austria do not take place in July and August as summer tends to scatter us all around the globe. It is good that we get the chance to have a break, see new things and clear our heads. But…

 THINGS TO DO

Back in June I thought a lot about the fact that summer and (maybe) more free time also gives us the opportunity to deepen our involvement in peace work. If the jumble of hot days and vacation trips does not lead us to forget about it that is. I wondered how to devise a way to stay involved, to keep connected to other activists during the long summer, looking for something that would motivate us to make the effort and seize opportunities for involvement. I came up with a very simple plan, an idea that struck me as something worth trying, but so basic that I was kind of nervous to tell my friends about it. Thankfully, they seemed to be interested.

At our last meeting before the summer at the end of June I presented some opportunities for involvement during the upcoming months, ranging from small things one could do at home and things like helping with the IFOR Austria magazine to preparing an action for Hiroshima Day on August 6^th. Others brought up additional ideas. As our summer plans were not all set up back then we did not yet know who would be available to do what. But we were ready to commit to doing SOMETHING – and we settled on each of us trying to be involved in three actions or events before September. Setting us this personal goal and having noted possible opportunities for involvement is supposed to motivate us during the summer and thus far it worked very well.

At the beginning of July we collected photos of our shadows for Nuclear Abolition Week (set up by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons www.icanw.org) which were posted on the IFOR Austria Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/IFOR.Austria/photos_stream , some of us started reading books on nonviolence to further educate ourselves and an action to be part of the event of the Wiener Friedensbewegung and the Hiroshima Gruppe Wien on August 6^th is in the making.

I do not know if these things would have happened anyway, but I do know that my commitment to “3 peaceful things to be done this summer” is something that I think about regularly. It’s something that keeps me on the lookout for opportunities and makes me reach out to the others to ask about what they are up to and to invite them to join me in my quest more often. And I am really looking forward to what we will have to tell each other in September when we finally meet again.

Lucia, July 2013