This draft communicates a slightly different feeling, much more coherently, and is a substantial improvement in every literary sense over the last draft.

Young people may at the moment be mistaking social media activity for political activism, but this is hardly the first generation over the last several thousand in which young people mistook socializing for working. Political movements are disciplined organizations of free volunteers, in our society; the conflicts inherent in that composition are what they are.

All sorts of political organizations are learning to use network interactions in order to collect information about potential allies and organization workers. Polls, emails requesting advice or action, social media participation campaigns—these may not be activism, but they are activities that help organizations maintain contact, and recruit.

So I wonder again about the stage at which feeling gives way to a determination to inquire. You are quick to deplore, but your particular role (because you have chosen to be a lawyer rather than a social worker, for example) may be to create mechanisms on a different scale than those that activists themselves, unaided, cannot reach.

*** I later found out I was the only lawyer (law student) in the room.

The words, which in a “normal” academic setting would have dropped the room into a stunned and sober silence were met with cheers. In a room full of academics, students, community organizers, formerly incarcerated men and women, social workers, and other change agents***, it became very clear that these were people who had long since understood the gravity of their battles. There was no place for performance. There was no time for empty action. Urgency was the name of the game. I realized I was surrounded by people who carried an awareness of the consequence and levity of their actions; they knew people were dying at the hands of an unjust world and time was of the essence. And in this academic setting, they carried that with them.

That urgency is rare, and its rarity is unsurprising in this age of hashtags, media attention, and obsessive over-analyzed thought pieces, all of which purport to be doing something—and indeed they are doing something---but they are not always doing the things that need to be done. People are still dying, but we are blinding ourselves to their plights, even as we “engage” with them. If one person shares a million articles about an issue, tweets about it, zealously discusses it at every open opportunity, we applaud that person for “being involved”.

Even at the law school where lunch talks abound, issues are discussed and dismissed. Students looking to become involved with certain issues are never actually encouraged to engage in them. There is no immediacy. There is no presence. There is only academia. And Famiglia’s pizza.

The problem is we have lowered our standards of what it means to be involved.

Direct engagement is something that is largely missing in this modern wave of liberal activism. To be fair, this is not the case across the board. We have people risking life and limb for incredible causes every day. However, this is not the norm. Speaking to my peers in the western world, from whom I don’t assume any great moral distance, we can’t afford this newfangled complacency. We tweet and march and pen and protest, but largely in the comfort our own circles of liberal friends. We shy away from throwing ourselves against the issues we purport to care about. We close ourselves off from the people those issues affect. There is no urgency. There is no engagement. And this is what we must fix if we mean to live the lives we say we want. To be liberal is to do more than vote Sanders and to be an activist is more than tweeting #Black Lives Matter. We have to engage with the communities and issues we claim to care about. And we have to act as if we know that our action or inaction has consequences. In case you haven’t heard, people are dying.

Endnotes * A Stan is a superfan; this term originated with the song “Stan” by Eminem in which a superfan becomes obsessed with the rapper to the point of self-harm; the term is often employed in association with celebrities with intense fans; ie. Beyonce stans are really intense; you can’t say anything about her without getting at least a few of them on your case. **HeForShe is a campaign Emma Roberts (Hermoine from the Harry Potter movies) started to encourage men to stand up for women vis-a-vi “feminism” * I later found out I was the only lawyer (law student) in the room. (Endnotes not included in the word count)

We need to start over here.

First, what is the idea of the essay? It isn't about Arnold's thinking man, because it has no relation to the idea he expresses, so that's just a borrowed phrase. The three paragraphs you seem to have meant (I inserted the blank lines between paragraphs for you) don't develop an idea: they ramble. One can tell that you have some strong feelings, but not what they are about, or how they are related to some idea we can get from you. Apparently you don't think much of the Atlantic, which doesn't mean much to me, or to any reader who doesn't think of magazines as a unit, but rather as containers of ideas that may or may not be productive for them. A distaste for Kant and Marx is communicated, but neither a reason for the distaste nor a basis for confidence that you've read them. In the conclusion, we are told there is a "system" handcrafting and packaging ideas "for us," (I'm not sure how it is packaging Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Plato for me, let alone Newton, Maxwell and Einstein or Marshall, Taney and Holmes), which is either a big idea needing explanation or no idea at all.

Let's start by putting in one sentence, as the theme of the essay, the idea you want the reader to take from you. The first paragraph in addition to expressing the short, lucid expression of your idea, should give the reader some attractive reasons to keep reading. Subsequent paragraphs should develop the idea, showing where you got its components from, how you put them together, what the likeliest objections or questions are, and how you answer them. A conclusion can then sum up what you have taught, and provide the reader with one or two consequent ideas she could explore on her own using the idea you've provided as a starting point.

I won't say this can't be done in 575 words, if you take great care to formulate everything as clearly and succinctly as possible. But in general it will be difficult to do in fewer than 600 words what is assigned to do in 1,000. Brevity is easier to achieve by editing what is good but too long than by starting with a slipshod draft that doesn't capture your meaning clearly at whatever length.

-- JinduObiofuma - 19 Feb 2016

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