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Seek out the small revolutions…in your coffee or your mailbox.

Submitted by riisa on March 17, 2005 - 3:13pm.

This recommendation may not be that unique but I think it’s important to remind ourselves to rethink our daily routines, challenge the norms and take pleasure in disrupting the system. Ian Urbina brought these thoughts to mind in a very nice little article he wrote for the New York Times about creative ways to deal with small annoyances.

  • Why do we have to say “grande” when we just want a fucking medium coffee?
  • Why not just press “0” immediately and waste no time talking to a computer when there are real people with real ears who can understand you even when there is minimal back ground noise?
  • What would happen if you made a little stack of the subscription cards that fall out of your magazine and send them back blank to the manufacturer so they pay the postage without gaining a subscriber?
  • Have you heard of www.bugmenot.com? They make it possible to read online articles like those you find on the New York Times without filling out a profile fit for a job application with the FBI.

Small and trite they may be, but these are our weapons.

To examine the little weapons people use for everyday survival is to be given a free guidebook on getting by, created by the millions who feel that they must. It is a case study in human inventiveness, with occasional juvenile and petty passages, and the originators of these tips are happy to share them.

"They're an integral part of how people cope," said Prof. James C. Scott, who teaches anthropology and political science at Yale University, and the author of "Weapons of the Weak," about the feigned ignorance, foot-dragging and other techniques Malaysian peasants used to avoid cooperating with the arrival of new technology in the 1970's. "All societies have them, but they're successful only to the extent that they avoid open confrontation."

The slow driver in fast traffic, the shopper with 50 coupons at the front of the checkout line and the telemarketer calling at dinner all inflict life's thousand little lashes.But some see these infractions as precious opportunities, rare chances for retribution in the face of forces beyond our control.

What do you guys think? Are actions like these important? Or should we,“oh ye fine ruling-abiding North Westerners” just go with the flow?

riisa's blog
Scoring against the man

Riisa, thanks so much for sharing this with us! I think that small actions that make you feel like you have a little bit of control of the world around you are tremendously important. If we believe that our actions, no matter how small, are contributing to the creation of the world we want to see then we feel validated in doing other small things, like voting or writing our $10 check to the organizations we support. Independently they all seem insignificant and small, like trying to justify the importance of my one vote in an election where 200 million votes are cast, but when you break it down to the parts we actually interact with--school levies, PUD elections, city councils, you start to see how your small action has ramifications that you could not have predicted.

Submitted by Adrienne on March 21, 2005 - 9:15am.

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