Note: this post is a reprint from my Substack, The Feral Freelancer. I’m in the midst of consolidating Substack accounts but didn’t want this post to disappear entirely.

Thoughtful fox exercising critical smelling skills. Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Originally published on December 10, 2024

“I just cannot bear to look at the news right now….”

“I’m not really an activist….”

Tempted as I am to pull a Cher and exclaim, “SNAP OUT OF IT!” to myself and others, that’s not useful right now. None of us can turn back the clock to [pick your favorite pivotal date]. Right now, I too want to say to my 2017 self—”Oh, you sweet summer child. Bless your heart for hoping that a few marches would be enough.” (In my better moments, I know those marches did help with community building, and it was far better to have done them than not—registering our collective complaint was and still is important. But marches alone were never going to be enough.)

Instead, I want to think about what it means to “be an activist,” since a lot of the people I’ve talked to since the election seem to have a very specific—and (IMO) a desperately incomplete—idea of what counts as activism.

Activists—those are the people shouting on the street and carrying signs and getting teargassed, right? The street medics who help them, yeah? The people who sit at lunch counters, on buses, and chain themselves to trees and wind up getting carried off in handcuffs, right? Well, yeah—and thank goodness for those activists!

But there’s still a lot of room for other kinds of activism. In a healthy democracy, we might not even think of things like critical thinking and thoughtful reading/listening/viewing as “activism.” But right now, I think they are—and maybe they always were.

For example, how can we refine our critical thinking skills and help the people around us develop theirs? “Critical thinking” is something of a buzzword in academia, but it’s also what helps us decide which oven to buy and whether to listen to the GPS when it tries to send us on some bass-ackward route. What is the nature of the evidence? What evidence am I not taking into account? Can I trust the source, or is it biased in some way? What am I missing? Like, if I’m buying a new oven, I’m going to look for an independent and informed review—not something the oven company has commissioned. I may or may not take my friends’ experiences into account when I narrow down my list—am I going to heed the friend who rarely bakes over the thorough testing Wirecutter and Consumer Reports conduct for their reviews? Probably not. But the point is less about whose advice I choose to listen to and more about the process of weighing information.

Teaching your students and/or children critical thinking skills—and paying attention to how you exercise your own—is activist work if you let it be.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my Facebook friends for recommendations for resources to teach critical thinking skills in a fun way. Thanks to everyone who responded—it was a lively conversation! Here are some of the suggestions folks offered (disclosure: I haven’t had a chance to read/watch all of them yet):

How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, David McRaney

Think Like a Detective: A Kid’s Guide to Critical Thinking, David Pakman

Hark a Villain, Kate Beaton

Mythbusters (TV series)

Original “House Hippo” advertisement

“House Hippo 2.0”

World Economic Forum, “How Finland Is Fighting Fake News”