A “tussendoortje” about boycotts

What difference does taking a stand make?

In Dutch, we call this een tussendoortje: a wee snack-ette to stave off the hunger pangs till the big feast.

My avowal to adopt a policy of BDS, or at least B, against the United States (that being those of America, not of Mexico, between which there is a gulf of a difference) has provoked some reaction from various quarters.

One correspondent wrote, “That’s not the solution,” and I replied, “Nothing is ‘the solution,’ unless you’d like to define ‘the problem.’ It’s a statement of principle, and a statement of principle is not there to solve anything. It’s there to state the principle.”

This is always the problem when one decides to take a stand. There’s a supermarket that I used to pop into on my way back from Brussels. One day they sold me something that had a discount of two euros, but to get the discount the cashier needed to tear off a strip from the label at the cash desk. I paid, drove home and discovered the strip was still attached. I had not received my two euros discount. So I got back in the car and drove the three miles back to the shop and complained. Instead of just giving me the two euros in exchange for the label, the cashier called the manager. As he mulled over the situation, I said, “For all the trouble you’ve put me to, I would think it appropriate to reimburse me the full four euros that the item cost.” He regarded me grimly and said to the cashier, “Give him his two euros.”

The supermarket is still there, still doing business, but it isn’t doing my business. My business will never make or break a business. But it is my business to take where I want to take it, and I don’t want to take it to a supermarket that values two euros over a gesture that would have secured my loyalty to the end of time. There’s another supermarket within a mile of where I live, and I don’t go there either, because they’re ignorant: they love selling stuff, but they don’t know anything about it. I was once asked, when I enquired about fresh milk, “What is fresh milk for?” It’s true, most milk in Belgium is long-life milk. But, seriously, they asked me what on earth I would do with fresh milk? Pour it over their heads, I would.

Not joining in with a collective action is something that each individual must decide for themselves. I’ll do it if you do it? Does that mean principles only crystallise once they’re shared by enough of your mates, that you’re unable to take a stand on your own?

American anti-Trump commentators, like Robert Reich and Rebecca Solnit, are issuing advice on how to take a stand against the most radical government in the history of the USA, which poses a danger to many Americans, as well as to many non-Americans, not to mention the entire peaceful basis of the international world order. You may feel that that is a situation against which it is not necessary for you to take a stand. So be it. But each of these writers has a simple underlying theme: every little counts. Maybe each little is no solution, but it is when it’s all you can do, if only because it resolves your desire to do all you can.

Each potential contributor to collective action must decide whether, where, and against whom they will take a stand. But note this: when he against whom one might swither in taking a stand wishes to exert a form of collective repression that happens to include you, there will be no swithering. Regardless of how little you matter.

Feast’s on its way on Sunday.