Why don’t you get a job you tree hugger?

This is a new one to us here, I’ve asked a few activists if they had heard this question before and I struggled to find one. Seriously though, it is true some activists are unemployed – some through choice, some through illness and some are “in between jobs”.

Most however are employed in various professions including, teachers, doctors, lawyers and various other “upstanding” positions within our society not to mention many working in service industries and other sectors. These people might also not fit into the various stereotypes of a skinny white student with dreadlocks and a body odour problem that can usually be found tunneling under a proposed bypass in the countryside.

Some activists are unemployed through choice because they don’t wish to be a part of a system which uses public taxes to fund the very exploitation they are fighting hard to stop. Some don’t wish to work in jobs which force them to make decisions which compromise their ethical integrity.

Many activists use all their spare time working to stop the exploitation of animals, humans or the environment. The same sort of people were suffragettes, fought for the abolition of the slave trade and brought about massive change which we sometimes take for granted but benefit from on a daily basis.

The government are delighted however whenever the general public make such statements about the protest movement as it shows an underlying apathy which in turn, allows them to make new legislation which takes away our fundamental right to live as free people in our own country.

First they came for the Communists,
- but I was not a communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists,
- but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews,
- but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
-  Pastor Martin Niemöller