I'm a little sick of saturation.

Well, I guess it's not necessarily true. It's just that I was reading this article (as a former member of the funding world, I am starting to think I really ought to start to joing the ranks of those writing about how social justice foundations are threatining social movements), and it reminded me of something that always has irritated me: just how many blogs, magazines, organizations, etc. there are dedicated to similar causes. Then when I thought about it more, I realized there could be two reasons for this:
a) a whole host of sociological reasons (everyone wanting to carve their own niche, increasing isolation in the technological age) that indicate that our current sociopolitical culture engenders more, increasingly less effective, organizations dedicated to finding niches rather than working to build collective power
b) due to social movements' investments in empowerment and turning back to local issues, the proliferation of organizations and media sources represents a greater number of people interested in affecting social change, and doing so at the local level where they have a greater degree of both autonomy and ability to make change. This also means, as the article suggested and as people I used to meet as a funder suggested, that many organizations were founded by people that were marginalized by the bigger, collective movements they started out in: feminists of color marginalized by the mainstream feminist movement, environmental justice advocates marginalized by the mainstream environmentalist movement, prison abolitionists marginalized by the mainstream anti-death penalty movement, etc.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, with a whole host of other factors complicating it. In general, I'm glad there are so many people working on so many issues in so many places. It's what keeps me motivated, and let's face it, my job is to create more activists to cook in this crazy ass pot.

But it's just hard when one wants to try to figure out how to be effective given all of the nuances of the all of the issues that one cares about, all of the actors in the game, and the limitations of time/resources/interest, etc. I also wish that it was possible to have a collective spirit of activists that wasn't marginalizing to so many people. Sometimes I feel like that's happening at protests, when I'm surrounded by people waving free palestine and stop the drilling in the arctic and spank the world bank signs, and everyone seems equally passionate, and ready to work together to work on whatever cause brought them all together. At the same time, though, in those moments, I'm also filled with the idea that it's all so tragically ineffective.