Why Do People Join Social Activism

Ziad Munson’s The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works, gives a different perspective of political activism. The main question is why do people join social movements, is it the fact that they genuinely care about the movement or do they do it for other reasons. In other words, do they have a belief or an idea about the movement before they join, or do they join for other reason? Munson uses the Pro life movement to explain his case that most people do not join movements because they have a general belief or idea about the issue, Munson believes that people initially join social movements for other reason, besides them caring about the issue. Munson suggest that people initially join movements because of complex …show more content…
There are four different types of streams, these include politics, direct action , individual outreach, and public outreach. Public Outreach can take two different forms adverting or personal education they use billboards and other types of advertising just as any other business would use. For example they will use pro life mesaages on billboards. They try to educate the larger audience about the horrors of abortion. Individual outreach is much more individualized, it seeks to have one on one connections with women. These may be women who are considering abortions or women who had abortions and suffered some type of trauma, so they may be able to share their experiences. Direct action is when the immediacy of an issue is emphasized this is the group that people generally think about when they think of activism. This is the group who target abortion clinics and protest. Politics stream is the stream that is concerned with passing laws and lobbying. This is seemed as one of the most tactical because in this stream things are actually getting done, no one usually, is getting attacked and its legal and usually …show more content…
Munson tries to dispel the idea that people join social movements because of ideas or believes that they have about the movement and the cause. Personally, it is believed that Munson over simplifies an answer to a complex question. It seems that Munson is suggesting that generally people do not have a set feeling or belief about a social movement that they have social networks and ties that get them involved in a movement, before they join the movement. In truth, I personally believe that Munson is partially correct, and many of his stages of mobilization are also correct. However, I think that Munson wants to totally discount individual’s ability to think critically about an issue and then create a position or belief on the issue without outside influences. It seems that Munson is underestimating a human’s ability to create a belief on their own, which is not only unfair, I think that it is partially wrong. I think it is a combination of what Munson has stated, along with the idea that people create some type of idea about a belief, because a person would not be motivated to continue with the stages of mobilization that Munson highlights. In answer number two, I tried to put Munson’s idea into practice in a real life situation. However it was hard. It was hard because I could not understand why a person would even consider going to rally without having a thought. For