scott neigh, continued

I also have very fond memories from that first autumn of the weekly Get Up, Stand Up! Film Festival -- every week I helped out with it; every week I was rewarded by some fascinating and new-to-me blast of information and ideas; and every week I had the pleasure of walking part of the way home beside someone a little older and a little more experienced, and getting to mutually process what we had just seen. I also plunged into the print resources that the OPIRG office provides, and in my two-year term on the Board of Directors took great delight in overseeing the spending of money to broaden and deepen the collection. I got involved in other working groups, in doing other tasks, and when I graduated and drifted from a geographical identity centred around "McMaster" to one grounded in "Hamilton," I still stayed in touch.

University can be a time when some of us who didn't grow up facing them in our daily lives are first confronted by ideas and writing about the brutal realities of our society. These realities get named in lots of partial ways, but they add up to interlocking hierarchies of privilege and oppression based on class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ability, and more, in a political economy that depends on death and suffering not only to enrich the most powerful elites but to reward those of us who have more mundane forms of privilege as well. For me, OPIRG provided some tools to start learning about bits and pieces of that, and opportunities to start taking action around those corners of the beast that I was starting to see. OPIRG is just one organization, just one set of tools, and many folk might find other choices that would better suit their consciousness, their experiences of oppression, their desires to act. For me, however, OPIRG McMaster was an important ingredient in kicking off an ongoing journey of consciousness and action.

That journey has taken me lots of other places, of course, and all of them have shaped me further, but having OPIRG available when I was in a crucial stage of questioning and searching was an important catalyst. I'm still not sure how well I understand much of anything, and make no great claims for the decisions I make about acting in the world, but my journey of consciousness informs how I function as a parent, as a partner, as a person. It is a major part of my work as a writer, both in my informal personal/political ramblings on my blog, and in my central project based on oral history interviews with fifty long-time Canadian activists. And it still takes me to meetings -- thanks in part to learnings begun so many years ago with OPIRG, at last night's direct action anti-poverty group meeting I think I was a little less clueless, a little more sure of myself and my role, a little more able to contribute.