Every place has a prevailing culture. If you move someplace, to an extent you’ll do better in that place if you adjust to the culture at least somewhat.
And yet, for those of us who do activism, there are often things that we really feel an obligation to speak up about to try to change.
Sometimes speaking up can lead to feelings of shame. Like, how dare I speak against the prevailing norms.
And yet, not speaking up can lead to feelings of deep regret as it can be a violation of our moral code.
If we speak with thoughtfully strong wording, we have the potential to shake up people’s thinking and maybe shift the harmful status quo norms a bit. But then again, with strong wording we also risk being branded a fanatic or hard to deal with. (This has happened with me when I refer to mow-and-blow landscaping as “intrusive and violent.” In my own mind I’m just telling it like it is; but to the establishment it can feel like ridiculous hyperbole. And it can actually increase the resistance on the other side.)
And then again, if we try to keep our wording palatably mild and inoffensive, we risk failing to communicate the urgency of a situation.
Maybe one of the hardest things is accepting that we will rarely or never do it perfectly. But that we have to keep trying our best anyway to walk that line.
By the way, the cultural adjustment thing can also apply to cultural drift that can happen even if you’re staying in one place for years as opposed to moving to a different place.
And, to end on a positive note … Fun motivational language tidbit I saw today: A successful small-scale neighborhood developer referred to his block of various examples of “missing middle” housing as a “petting zoo of ‘missing middle’ housing.” There’s something charmingly adorable about that phrasing that piques people’s interest and doesn’t threaten their sense of safety and stability. Maybe we need some wildflower or prairie “petting zoos.”