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Courtney E. Martin

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Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists Kindle Edition

by Courtney E. Martin (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 66 ratings

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If you care about social change but hate feel-good platitudes, Do It Anyway is the book for you. Courtney Martin’s rich profiles of the new generation of activists dig deep, to ask the questions that really matter: How do you create a meaningful life? Can one person even begin to make a difference in our hugely complex, globalized world?

Print length

225 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

Beacon Press
Publication date

October 13, 2010
File size

359 KB
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Martin (Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters) attempts to galvanize a new generation of activists, exhorting them to abandon puffy "save the world" rhetoric in favor of action. A passionate champion for social justice work of all stripes, she profiles eight activists who have managed to "soothe the critics and pessimists in their own heads and act," among them Rachel Corrie, the young American crushed to death under an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes. While Martin's intentions are good and the individuals she writes about are compelling and complex, there's a lingering naïveté and puzzling ahistoricism. She writes about the need for a new generation of activists without addressing what battles have been fought and how. Without an attention to the past, she cannot speak to the efficacy of certain tactics above others or how to tailor social justice work to be of maximum benefit to specific campaigns and communities. Nonetheless, Martin is successful in cheering on would-be activists to struggle and fail and struggle again. And while the book may raise more questions than it answers, it initiates a vital conversation at a time when the world and its challenges seem more intractable than ever.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Courtney Martin’s portraits of eight young activists reveal people who are flawed, scared, and human—which makes them all the more inspiring. An elegant, effortless read that confirms what we already know: young people continue to change the world.”
—Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, authors of Manifest and Grassroots

“Do It Anyway asks the most difficult question possible: how can I make my life meaningful? The answers are varied, transformational, and necessary for us all.”
—Jane Fonda

“Courtney Martin is one of our most insightful culture critics and one of our finest young writers. She’s written a lively, compelling, and very important book for people of every generation who want to be fully alive in and to the world. Take in what she says and you may find yourself turning to that impossible cause you care about and ‘doing it anyway.’”
—Parker J. Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak

“Unlike a lot of authors, Courtney Martin isn’t trying to sell you activism and why you should (yawn) get involved. Instead, she goes deep into the stories and lived experience of eight individuals. Do It Anyway is a treasure and deeply affecting.”
—Billy Wimsatt, author of Bomb the Suburbs and Please Don't Bomb the Suburbs

About the Author

Courtney E. Martin is a senior correspondent for the American Prospect and an editor of Feministing.com. A 2002 recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, she is the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters and coauthor of The Naked Truth. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Newsday, the Christian Science Monitor, and on Huffington Post and Alternet, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Save the world.

Where were you the first time you heard those three little
words?

It’s a phrase that has slipped off the tongues of hippie parents
and well-intentioned teachers with a sort of cruel ease for the
last three decades. In Evangelical churches and Jewish summer
camps, on 3-2-1 Contact and Dora the Explorer, even on MTV, we
(America’s youth) have been charged with the vaguest and most
ethically dangerous of responsibilities: save the world. But what
does it really mean? What has it ever really meant—when uttered
by moms and ministers, by zany aunts and debate coaches—to
save the whole wildly complex, horrifically hypocritical, overwhelmingly
beautiful world?

I for one had no idea, but that didn’t stop me from internalizing
the message. I swallowed those three little words—a trio
of radioactive seeds. They looked innocent enough when poured
into my palm, but when swallowed, they buried themselves
deep in my gut and started to grow. South African novelist J. M.
Coetzee wrote, “All creatures come into the world bringing with
them the memory of justice.” Shortly thereafter, if all is right, the
world breeds in us an outrage over injustice.
At first I engaged my outrage like a true-blue white girl from
the suburbs. I sent letters to the managers of Arby’s and Wendy’s
in my hometown, begging them to stop using Styrofoam cups
in their establishments for the good of our Mother Earth. No
response.

I volunteered in an assisted living facility, screaming the
letter-number combinations for a comatose game of bingo.
Though the residents attempted to adjust their hearing aids, my
voice was too high to register. They screamed, “What? What did
that girl say?” to one another, but everyone just shrugged and
smiled at me sympathetically.

I worked at the local soup kitchen, dragging wet rags across
Formica tables with my eyes diverted straight down, hoping
none of the homeless people would actually speak to me. I was
frightened by the ones that smelled, but even more frightened
by the ones that didn’t smell. The ones that looked like me and
my mom. The ones that I’d seen walking around downtown and
never even known I was supposed to save. I couldn’t name it yet,
but it was the first experience that called the conventional wisdom
at the time—that there were savers and those to be saved,
and that these were immutable categories—into question.
When Sally Struthers commercials came on, featuring little
African babies with distended bellies and flies hovering around
their eyes, I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I took
it personally. After all, I had been charged with saving the world,
as had my friends and little bike-riding neighbors. The adults in
our lives had drawn a line directly between the suffering of the
world—the African babies, the growing hole in the ozone layer,
the homeless guy who lay listlessly on the bench outside the
library—and our own nascent sense of purpose.
Once, agitated with one epiphany or another, I decided I
would march around my neighborhood—middle class, suburban,
white—and ask people for money for “the poor.” I found an old
glass jar in my playhouse, cleaned it fastidiously, and headed into
the suburban wilderness for my first experience of fund-raising.

It went pretty well, actually. I was cute at the time—frizzy
hair permanently set in a side ponytail, big blue-green eyes with
dark, thick eyelashes, and a pair of magenta Converse high-tops
(it was the eighties). I think that the smiling neighbors, pried
from their daily dose of Oprah, took one look at me, heard my
half-formed rationale, and sympathized with the familiar ache in
my heart. They dropped quarters, sometimes even dollars, into
my jar and sent me on my way.

I rounded the block, growing more and more excited about
the efficiency of my tactic. By the time I returned to my playhouse,
I had over ten dollars. But as I sat on the wooden planks,
my legs splayed, and pushed the coins around with my fingertips,
a bad feeling started to creep over me. I realized that I had no
idea who “the poor” really were.

I didn’t know if I had met them before. There were kids at my
school with less trendy clothes than all the others, but did this
really mean they were poor or just that their parents were strict
or stingy? There were those little babies with the bloated bellies
on the commercial, but would ten dollars really help them?
It seemed like they needed much more. I could find some of
the homeless guys near the library, but they might spend the
money on drugs (by age eight, I’d already heard this warning
many times). And how would I choose which people to give the
money to anyway? Who was the most deserving? How could you
predict that they’d use it for good? What if you gave money to
someone and they were insulted—angry that you assumed they
needed it?

The questions washed over me like a tidal wave, and suddenly
everything about my initial intention—so pure, so heartfelt—
was murky. I piled the money back into the jar and stared at it
disapprovingly. There is, perhaps, nothing more paralyzing than
a good intention suddenly proven naive. I decided to bury the jar
in the shadow of my playhouse until I knew what to do with it.
If you go to 1718 North Tejon Street in Colorado Springs, you’ll
find that it’s still buried there, along with my childhood illusions
that “saving the world” is a simple or pure prospect.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003WUYPDS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Beacon Press (October 13, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 13, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 359 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 225 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,621,569 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #113 in Volunteer Work (Kindle Store)
- #539 in Civics
- #1,023 in Political Advocacy Books

Customer Reviews:
4.2 66 ratings

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Courtney E. Martin

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Courtney E. Martin is an author and entrepreneur. Her latest book is Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from my Daughter’s School. Courtney consults with a wide range of institutions, including TED, The Obama Foundation, The Aspen Institute, and IDEO. She is also the co-founder of The Solutions Journalism Network and FRESH Speakers Bureau. Courtney has authored/edited six books, including Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists, and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women. Courtney has a popular Substack newsletter, called Examined Family, and speaks widely at conferences and colleges. She is the recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre, and an honorary Ph.d. from Art Center of Design. She lives with her family in a co-housing community called Temescal Commons in Oakland, and is currently the storyteller-in-residence at The Holding Co, a lab for redesigning care for the 21st century. Read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.

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Peter Prichard

Inspiring individuals creating profoundly positive societal changes

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2017

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This brilliant book is a must read for anybody who is despairing about the state of our world, looking for real examples of positive changes that are being made, interested in what those under 35 are doing to have a positive impact and finally, anybody who needs a comprehensive listing of organizations and resources that speak to these topics.

A major advantage regarding how Courtney E. Martin has written this book is the fact that she is brutally honest about the realities we are facing and the challenges that confront anybody who endeavors to create positive change. This is no fairy tale about simply needing to envision change and it will happen; this is a hard-hitting book full of concrete examples about what real people are doing about real problems. The author states this focus quite clearly in her introduction, “Activism is a daily, even hourly, experiment in dedication, moral courage, and resilience. This book is an exploration of that effort.”

The author writes about eight individuals and the changes they are trying to make. The stories are quite different regarding the details of each act of activism since she is telling the true stories of a peace activist, prison reentry social worker, veterans’ activist, filmmaker, radical philanthropist and others. Because of the diversity of individuals under thirty-five who are honored, each story is a deep learning experience.

The author’s concluding chapter provides the reader with well thought out ideas about how to move forward with “good failures” broken down into five ways of acting that are practical and relevant. The multiple pages of resources include organizations, readings and films that are comprehensive and diverse in their perspective about the realities of activism.

Courtney E. Martin’s closing statements were well written and thoughtful, including the following challenge, “Our charge is not to ‘save the world,’ after all; it is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.” This book energized me to think more deeply about how to do that in these times of compelling and terrifying change.

3 people found this helpful

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veggielover

Heartful, honest, invigorating

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2015

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As someone who drank a lot of the "save the world" cool-aid as a kid in the 90s, and experienced major activist burn out after college, this was a great read. I particularly loved the wisdom shared in the last chapter, framed in a discussion of good failure (as opposed to some simplified list of recommended actions). Inspiring, truthful, wise and helpful book, especially for anyone overwhelmed by socio-econ-political realities.

2 people found this helpful

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Manisha Thakor

Yes You Can... Make The World A Better Place

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2010

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If you have a nagging feeling inside of you that there are changes you want to see happening in the world... you MUST read this fantastic new book by Courtney Martin. One of the driving forces behind today's feminist movement and a committed champion for change - Courtney will literally unleash your inner activist. Her compelling, moving, and insightful portraits in this book of 8 modern day activists make you want to jump off the couch, head out the door, and say - "Enough with my armchair rantings. I'm going to DO IT ANYWAY and make a difference with my life!"

One person found this helpful

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Student_

Ok

Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2014

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The book is written in "blog style." It is casually written, and doesn't go very in-depth into the biographies. However, it is still a unique perspective that is worth while to read.

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JillSusan

I love this book and this author!

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2010

Verified Purchase

I saw Courtney at a retreat in Boston and heard her speak about her inspiring story. I immediately bought the Kindle book and then ordered copies to give away to all my family for holiday gifts. I even "proposed" to her for my son, but darn it, she has a boyfriend, so that's out. :-) Do yourself a favor. Buy and read this book. Then pass it on to a friend. Or buy them a copy, as I didn't want to part with mine. If you were ever thinking our world is going to hell in a handbasket, you'll find Courtney and her generation are hope for the future.

One person found this helpful

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Wendy

I am changed for the better

Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2020

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It was everything I didn’t know I needed. My best friend got me this book because I was in a place of feeling that I needed to try and change the world. And it showed me how I can in my own way without being paralyzed by the thought of failing and not doing enough. - Acey (wendy’s 24 year old daughter)

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Jill

inspirational and enlightening

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2013

Verified Purchase

Great read. It inspires you to do something and not just know what needs to be done. It was so inspiring to get to get a piece of everyones journey and how they are makeing a difference in so many people's lives.

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Reader

Challenge + Encouragement

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2016

Verified Purchase

The author challenges us to do something vs. nothing, to know we can't save everyone yet to make a difference anyway. This same wisdom has been hard earned in my own life but the alternatives are despair or moral failure or sheer self-indulgence. I also came away appreciating her generation more.

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