Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

by Srdja Popovic

As an activist, you have two choices. The first is to do what Harvey Milk started out doing and seek to rally the people who already more or less believe in what you have to say. This is a great way for coming in tenth at anything. You’re always guaranteed a small and enthusiastic fan base—including your friends, your neighbors, and your grandma—who will support you no matter what. The beautiful thing about this method is that you always get to feel that you’re right and just and pure and good. The downside is that you never win. The other choice is much better and, surprisingly, not a lot more difficult. It requires listening and finding out what other people care about, and fighting your battles in that general vicinity. Milk, whose tenacity eventually got him elected to the San Francisco city council, realized that average straight people really didn’t care too much about the homosexual struggle for equal rights. That fight wasn’t going to be won on the merits of justice and equality alone. Milk needed to attack it from a different angle, and even though hard-core evangelical Christians across the country were using San Francisco’s gay community as a stand-in for all that was evil in America, Milk sought to stand up for his community by focusing on something that all San Franciscans lived in fear of: dog shit.