"Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable." Foucault summarizing Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia."

As the Sandy hurricane cleanup continues in NYC, NJ, Haiti, et. al., it's got me thinking about the responsibility of seriousness in the way we talk about disasters and politics. Alongside photographs of devastation, there are political reporters yammering on about how the storm will affect the presidential election. They have to do their job, and their job is to make things to talk about, so I'm hesitant to judge too harshly. And the storm's aftermath may have implications for voter turnout that are worth considering, especially if particular groups of voters are left without access to the polls in some systematic way. Whether that story is covered in the appropriate way is up to the journalists to figure out for themselves, we'll just have to hope they get it right. 

But beyond Sandy, beyond this election, when we as policy advocates and activists confront social ills, it's really easy to react with anger or sadness. When we say we're advocates for economic justice, what we're really saying is that we're fighting against economic injustice. And there's a lot of economic injustice around to get angry, sad, and hopeless about. But weeping over every statistic about the gap in educational attainment won't make rural or inner-city schools educate their kids any better. That we want to react with sadness to each of these "abominable" injustices is a good sign, yes. But sadness needn't be the dominant tone of our reactions. Sometimes that's a necessary reminder, at least for me. Otherwise we'd end up caught in a cycle of sadness, guilt, and inaction. And that's no good for anyone.