Liz Crow

Interviewer: Will McCabe
Interviewee: Liz Crow

Liz Crow sitting in a Bristol Park, her elbows on her knees and chin resting on her hands

Art as activism

Will (00:00:01):
Okay. It is the 19th of October. I’m Will McCabe, and I’m interviewing Liz Crow. First question: When did you start to use art as a form of activism?

Liz (00:00:28):
It was really early on in the sense that I got involved right at the beginning of the disability arts movement. I wasn’t doing my own practice at that point, but I was always interested in the arts, quite a creative family, and I could straight away see the possibilities of disability arts for us discovering a new identity and communicating that both to ourselves as a community and to the outside world. For me, it was always a really integral part of my activism.

The Real Helen Keller

Liz (00:01:01):
But it was only later that I moved into film and then TV, so I started out by getting involved in disability arts, involved in consultancy and training and working with a lot of arts organisations. And then, there was a day in the late 90s when I read a book about women anti-militarists, and there was this woman called Helen Keller in one of the chapters. I was thinking, “Well, it has to be a different Helen Keller. It can’t be the Helen Keller I read about in school, who was the poor little blind deaf girl, who learned to speak and what a miracle she was.”

Liz (00:01:41):
And I actually had to read the chapter twice before I realized no, no, no. It was that Helen Keller, and there was a whole other life that I just hadn’t heard about of her as an extraordinary, ahead of her time political activist. As soon as I clocked what the bigger and real story was, I contacted a friend of mine, Ann Pugh, who was a filmmaker and also disabled activist. And I said to her, “Any chance you’d make a film with this.” She said, “Well, only if you’re coming on it with me.” We eventually managed to get a proposal commissioned through Channel 4, and we worked on that, co-produced and co-directed that. I guess that was my second … Gosh, I’ve lost the order now.

Liz (00:02:36):
No, maybe that was my first. That was my first film, and I think it was particularly when I entered the edit suite and realized the process of constructing a story and communicating those ideas and seeing what you could do with it, that’s when I got really excited and realized that there’d been that missing piece through my life.

Fourth plinth and Aktion T4

Liz (00:02:58):
So I continued making film, and then subsequently, I was working on Resistance, which was a big moving image piece. In 2008, that launched. And coincidentally, the sculptor Antony Gormley got a commission on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. He decided to do a piece in which, every hour for … I think it was 2400 consecutive hours, somebody would go on the plinth, a member of the public, and do something, do their thing.

Liz (00:03:35):
And you put your name into a hat, basically, and they drew out that 2400 people. I thought, “Right. We’ve got to get disabled people up there.” Started putting word out, put my own name in, and then when it was drawn out was like, “Oh, it’s non-transferrable. I can’t go to an actor friend and say, ‘Are you interested?'” And I realized it was a really amazing opportunity, because the work I was looking at in Resistance was Aktion-T4 and the Nazi campaign against disabled people, and how we had been the first community selected for mass murder. They prototyped their later methods on disabled people. I was trying to draw attention to that history and its contemporary echoes. The launch year coincided with the 70th anniversary of Aktion-T4. The plinth just seemed like an opportunity [inaudible 00:04:38]. Are you getting crossed wire at your end, or is it all right?

Will (00:04:45):
I think I was trying to up the volume.

Liz (00:04:49):
Okay, all right. There’s some weird signal thing going on. But yes, I got onto the plinth and I did my hour, in which I went up using my wheelchair and also dressed in Nazi uniform. What happened was you got those incredibly conflicting images just bouncing off each other the whole time, so you couldn’t resolve it. What I found incredibly compelling about it was the way that it just kept people looking, but in that live space, you could create something that held people’s attention, got them asking really profound questions, and then continuing to think about it afterwards. That’s when I realized that both the film and the performance were really compelling media to work through.

Will (00:05:35):
Why do you think art is such a powerful form of activism?

Liz (00:05:49):
For me, art is about communicating, so that’s about making connections with people, connecting viscerally. Not just emotionally, but that whole body connection. It raises questions more than it provides answers, which actually, as activists, is what you need to be doing. You need to be getting other people involved in the ideas that you’re working with. Not simply saying, “This is what’s wrong. This is what needs to be done better. This is how you need to do it.” Or maybe sometimes, “You’re a really bad person because you’re not doing it this way.”

Liz (00:06:28):
Actually, what we need to be doing is drawing people into it so that they start to take ownership of the ideas, and start to work them out through their own minds and imbed those ideas in themselves. And then what you get is much more sustainable change. I don’t think activism necessarily has to involve art, but art as a medium really lends itself to that way of working, because it’s just its natural form of working. That’s why I keep coming back to it, so I wouldn’t exclusively use that as a medium of activism, but it just is really compelling, because it seems to connect with people or has that potential to connect with people on that really profound level.

Discrimination and inaccessibility

Will (00:07:27):
Has the history of art’s exclusion and erasure and objectification of disabled people and disabled bodies impacted your work?

Liz (00:07:37):
Yeah, in the sense that I’ve never been able to go to art college or film college, although I’m of the generation that, for the most part, didn’t have access to professional training. Straight off, I was very late to enter that area of work. I tried in my 20s to do things like get into journalism school, radio training, get into television work. Whilst they’re difficult sectors to get into anyway, I found repeatedly doors being closed for very clearly discriminatory reasons, and at a time when it was entirely legal to do that, so people didn’t even feel the need to cover it up.

Liz (00:08:30):
In fact, the first solo film I made was with an organization that was in the process of making its facilities accessible, but at the time, they were on the first floor with no lift. I was given a choice of postponing the film for too long or working with the building they had. That just really shocks me now, but for every day of the edit, I crawled up a flight of stairs, and I took my own bucket it. They put a room aside so that I could go to the toilet for the hours that I was there. I think we were in a time where, if you really wanted to do that stuff, you had to be prepared to take measures that were never acceptable.

Liz (00:09:18):
I guess in doing that, it opened the doors to ourselves, but also to other people too. I think my own experience was to meet very, very clear barriers. And I lost track of what your original question was. Sorry. Do you want to come take me back to it?

Will (00:09:39):
I think you covered it.

Liz (00:09:42):
Okay.

Being an activist in Bristol

Will (00:09:47):
Has Bristol’s reputation as an artistic city made it more open to art as a form of activism, in your opinion?

Liz (00:09:59):
Gosh. It’s really difficult, isn’t it, because I’m in Bristol. I’ve lived in London and I’ve lived in Bristol, so very hard to know how that compares to other parts of the country or other parts of the world. I don’t know if I can answer that, and I think it does vary. This isn’t a comment on Bristol, but I think I’ve found quite a lot of activists who have a real antipathy to the idea of arts being a vehicle for activism, as though it’s a lesser activism or a less committed activism. I’ve come across that a lot of times, that in order to be a pure activist, you simply get on the picket lines, or you do the blockading, or you do whatever the this is. And you don’t involve arts, because somehow that waters it down or makes it more moderate. Which is a position I disagree with. All activism, whether it’s through the arts or not, can have a wide range of radicalism in it. It really depends on the people practicing it, how they practice it.

The Social Model

Will (00:11:33):
Changing subjects slightly, has your interpretation of the social model caused conflict with other people in the disabled people’s movement?

Liz (00:11:45):
Yes, and also, a lot of people have thanked me for it. But I think I want to clarify what I said. I don’t think what I said was necessarily very controversial in that, for me, the social model is a completely transformative mechanism. I genuinely think it’s saved lives over the years to introduce that incredible clarity in the way that we can explain our lives. Instead of medicalizing ourselves and understanding all of the difficult experiences that we have, the being left out, the being set aside is coming from our bodies and the way that they work, to understand that actually social structures are a mechanism for excluding particular social groups, it is just incredibly radical and life changing.

Liz (00:12:53):
And I have no argument with that whatsoever. My argument was, and to some extent still is, that as a movement in the way that we applied it, we tended to set aside impairment. I think, a lot of the time, there were very good reasons for that, that if we were communicating the social model to people who were completely unfamiliar with it, particularly non-disabled people. That simplification and absolute clarity was incredibly useful. I’d done disability equality training where I’ve done an exercise that got people to separate impairment from disability, and there would be a moment where you could see the light in somebody’s eyes change as they got it.

Renewing the Social Model of Disability

Liz (00:13:42):
And I wouldn’t ever want to change how deeply you could get somebody to connect to it, but the article I wrote in 92 initially for Coalition News Manchester with the Manchester Coalition, and then eventually made it into a chapter for the Jenny Morris book and its various reprints, came out of a period where I’d had an impairment for quite a long time, but then I became very ill in my 20s. I spent years in bed. For that period of time, I was basically faced with the fact that, when I was in bed, I was separated to such an extent from the outside world, that actually most of the discrimination I’d experienced receded.

Liz (00:14:32):
It didn’t go away completely. It still filtered into my home and my life, but it became a much smaller proportion of what I was facing. My illness was still a very profound part of my everyday life. It’s all-encompassing. I remember having a conversation with another activist one day who said, “Oh, how are you?” I said, “Actually, I’m finding really hard at the moment. Being ill can be really hard.” And he said to me, “You can’t say that.” There were only two of us in the room at the time, and I realized that, if as disabled people, we couldn’t say to each other, “I’m finding it really hard at the moment, and it’s to do with my body. It’s not purely about the structural stuff. It is my body that’s hard to live with. If we couldn’t have those conversations supportively with each other, because of the way we organised, we were doing ourselves a terrible disservice.

Liz (00:15:24):
And the situations in which it was a really complicated intermix between how your body worked and the ability to deal with the structural stuff to remove obstacles. If we didn’t actually acknowledge and understand that interweave, then we would fail to understand the structural stuff. What I’m saying with the social model stuff I’ve talked about is that the social model is itself. The social model isn’t about impairment. It is in relation to you and entangled with it, but actually is a very simple representation of the discrimination and structural barriers that we face.

Liz (00:16:05):
It’s brilliant. And in the way we then live it and in the way that we organise activists, we have to understand that we also live with impairments, and that actually those are relevant to our lives and the way we live them. For the world out there, the thing they need to focus on, unless they’re medical professionals who we are deliberately consulting, is the structural stuff. That’s where people have a role in addressing the structural stuff. I hope that makes some sort of sense. But I think-

Will (00:16:41):
Yes, it does.

Liz (00:16:42):
The critical thing was, there is a model that came out of academia. It is an incredibly useful way of explaining things. And then ultimately, that becomes applied, and sometimes in the way it’s implied, it actually becomes distorted. I think, as a movement, we’ve very often distorted its application, and that has actually made us less effective than we could have been. It has prevented us from supporting each other and including our widest membership as effectively as we could’ve done.

Inclusion of chronically ill people

Will (00:17:18):
And how has the inclusion of chronically ill people evolved in your opinion?

Liz (00:17:40):
Sadly, it has become really clear that the majority of chronically ill people either never come across the social model or experience it as something that really doesn’t have much to do with them. Either they feel excluded from the movement, because of the way the movement presents itself a lot of the time, or they understand a version of the social model that I’d argue is not the social model, but that basically says all your difficulties are structural. If we remove the structural barriers, there are no lingering difficulties. And of course, what people are saying is, “I’ll still be ill.”

Liz (00:18:25):
My experience, for me, if all structural stuff is removed, that will have an impact on my illness. I’m more ill than I need to be, because I’m navigating those barriers the whole time. Some of those barriers are in the medical profession, and the medical profession treats people with certain illnesses and certain groups of people far less well than others. The stigmatizing and the disbelief and the gaslighting and all of that sort of thing is about structural barriers. It is not intrinsic to being ill, so the social model for absolutely addresses that.

Liz (00:19:04):
How I feel about myself as an ill person is incredibly bound up with the social model, and my ability to organise as a community is incredibly bound up with the social model. Now, all of those have illness aspects too. If you remove all the structural stuff, yes, I’ll still be ill, but it is a separate thing. And I might choose, as a lot of people do, to organise purely on the illness side. Or I might choose, as I have done, to organise on the disabled people’s movement side, but there’s actually a middle ground of those two talking to each other and overlapping hugely.

Liz (00:19:47):
And actually, when you look at the work of the illness movement, even when it very often doesn’t start out that way from the individual perspective, it becomes highly politicized. It’s clearly highly politicized. If people are looking for which illnesses get funding, in funding terms, there are very popular high profile ones that get lots of money, and therefore get better treatment. The reverse is also true, and all of that, for me, is related to the social model. It’s all about the politics and the structural barriers to that group of people getting their needs met.

Liz (00:20:25):
And my needs might be something as clearly structural as needing a ramp, but they are also very much health related in terms of needing useful medical treatments and management processes. But actually, all of those are profoundly bound up with the social model. I’ll just say, there’s some hugely interesting work being done by Catherine Hale at the moment from the Chronic Illness … I’ve lost the name of it, Something Project. One of the big questions she’s been looking at really is, “Where do people with chronic illnesses fit in relation to the social model? Do people see it as relevant to them, and if not, why not? But also, where does that group of people sit in relation to the larger movement? What kind of conversation needs to be had between those two groups, where they are separate and think of themselves as being quite distinct, and maybe even sometimes as antagonistic to each other?”

Disabled people’s movement’s intersection with other social movements

Will (00:21:56):
To what extent does the disabled people’s movement intersect, do you think, with other social movements?

Liz (00:22:07):
I want to say it does more so over the years, but I think it never entirely didn’t. But it didn’t happen wholeheartedly, so if you look at the very earliest days, there was the Liberation Network of People With Disabilities, which subsequently did change its name to Disabled People, and they had a very clear sense of the term then being multiple oppressions, so intersectionality as a term has come much later. And that’s part of the problem, that actually if you searched for intersectionality 30 years ago, you probably wouldn’t have seen it. I don’t know exactly when the term would’ve been first used.

Liz (00:22:52):
But it didn’t mean none of that work was happening. Nonetheless, the disabled people’s movement originated with white men, predominantly, with spinal cord injuries. There were really quite easily identifiable reasons for that. That relative to some of the other groups, they had a greater ability to come together and to organise. They had relatively more access to things like education. It might still have been very poor, but it was relatively better. Somebody with a spinal cord injury might’ve found that happened a little later in life, where they’d already been through education, perhaps got a established sense of themselves, where they fit in the world, maybe then with income. Again, they built a base in which they had more resources with which to come together and talk politics and create a movement.

Liz (00:24:02):
Our history comes out of a relatively small group of people, whose experiences were significantly embedded in how the ideas were constructed. I think that’s probably so of most, if not all, social movements. Then, what you find is, it’s further down the road that you’re finding people coming in and saying, “Yeah, but what about … Yeah, but we’re missing this perspective. Yeah, but that excludes that perspective.” Very often, it’s like trying to then change the base to admit the new people coming in, who of course should have always been there, but weren’t for historical reasons. And so I think, like any social movement, we’ve grappled with that to lesser and greater degrees, but still a lot needs changing.

The disability justice movement

Liz (00:24:54):
I think there’s some really interesting work happening in the disability justice movement, which is much more recent, and particularly comes out of the experience of Black disabled women or people of color, I think particularly in the United States. There’s some really interesting, very clearly intersectional work happening there. My hope is, with newer generations coming in, that the legacy is also drawn into it, so that the incredible strides that we’ve made through things like social model are not lost. You’ve got a movement that, for all its flaws, has an incredible amount of experience and expertise.

Liz (00:25:49):
It becomes really important the next generation comes in, makes it in its own image, but doesn’t lose sight of the historical knowledge. I think in feminism, we were a generation who came in and, because it was our mothers, we maybe disparaged it and thought we could do it better. And it’s actually only as I’ve got older, I’ve gone, “Those earlier feminists were actually phenomenal, and I hadn’t realized how many choices I had in my life precisely because of the work they did. I just took it as read.” That’s a bit of a tangled answer, but I think all the different generations feed one another, and there’s pros and cons of that. The new generation has a possibility coming in and actually improving and sometimes remodeling what has gone before.

Liz (00:26:46):
But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater is my kind of caution with that. And on intersectionality, I think there are pockets that are doing great work. If you take the movement as a whole, there’s an awful lot more work to be done. I think some of the exchanges that are happening have just incredible potential, actually. It’s really exciting. It only makes it better if it involves more people. That’s really, really simple. If you can only make it better.

Language

Will (00:27:20):
This is completely off topic. In regards to language, to me a lot, when I see your work, it very much feels like almost a reclamation of disabled existence. In regards to language, I noticed in your [inaudible 00:27:57], you used the word cripple to describe yourself. Is that-

Liz (00:28:04):
Did I?

Will (00:28:08):
I can’t figure out how to frame it as a question. Do you understand what I’m trying to ask?

Liz (00:28:13):
Yeah. I’ll try, and then, nudge me if I’m not giving you what you’re hoping for. I think the idea of telling our stories and telling our lives has been a really integral part of my work. I guess I’m telling those stories to us, maybe sometimes first and foremost, but I’m also trying to put those stories and those lives on the record in order to change ideas and mechanisms out there. Early on in the movement, we very clearly reclaimed the word crip from cripple, and it just happened organically. I think at the time it was a really very small movement. I guess in the UK, it’s not quite true that we all knew each other, but everybody had heard of everybody else.

Liz (00:29:15):
And then obviously it has grown exponentially, but we’d find ourselves in situations together, and just the word would be there. It would just be an easy usage from one crip to another, and it was a way of recognizing each other, and it was a way of naming the shared experience. You might have a group of people with incredibly different impairments, but what we got was where we sat in society, the barriers we were facing, and the fact that we were coming together as a political force to challenge them. It embodied that whole thing that we were in. For us, it was really, really celebratory.

Liz (00:29:59):
For a non-disabled person to refer to us as cripple or to pick up the word crip, it felt really wrong. It was very much about reclaiming and subverting a word that had historically been used against a community, had been used to suppress and oppress a community, and suddenly we’re using it as a tool of liberation. And I still love the word used among disabled people. Actually, it’s funny, because I guess the way my life is at the moment, I don’t hear it enough between disabled people. And yet, actually, just thinking about it now, it does fill me with joy, because it was a really joyous word in the way that it connected us and it expressed who we were.

Positive experiences with activism

Will (00:31:04):
What were or what have been some of the positive experiences of the disabled people’s movement?

Liz (00:31:11):
What have been?

Will (00:31:14):
Positive experiences.

Liz (00:31:18):
Do you mean from in my experience within the activism?

Will (00:31:23):
Yes.

Liz (00:31:26):
I think lots. I guess the things that are most memorable for me, because I suppose they were really, really visceral, would’ve been particularly on actions or in places where disabled people … I’m going to talk about two things. One was just those moments where, a group of disabled women sitting around the pool, all wearing swimming costumes, all with our different bodies, and just the ease of it. And I guess that was the most extraordinary and beautiful and exhilarating thing, that there we just were, and there was nobody else, where we could just be at that time.

Liz (00:32:26):
I guess there’s that, on the micro scale if you like or an intimate scale. And then I was thinking of a time when we were in Birmingham with Disabled People’s Direct Action Network, and we had three days where we kept going out and blockading the city. At the end of those three days, the city council had a major order in for a new fleet of buses, and it changed the order to make sure that they were all accessible buses. It was an immensely successful few days, but also a particular moment where we’d blockaded the city centre, and we were headed back to the hotel where we were staying. Because unlike most activists, we had to stay in hotels. We couldn’t find anywhere else that could actually accommodate us all.

Liz (00:33:13):
We filled the streets, and there must have been maybe a few hundred of us. We walked and limped and rolled back, and sang this, what became an anthem at the time, where the words were, “We’re DAN and we’re proud of it.” It just repeats the same phrase, and we just sang it round and round and round and round. We were in this road with these high buildings, and it echoed off the buildings. And the sense of possibility was probably like nothing I’ve ever experienced, really. And for me, that was maybe what was so extraordinary about the time in which I got involved in disabled people’s politics.

Liz (00:34:06):
I feel, in one hand, the discrimination we experienced was mind boggling. It was really horrific, and yet, I had my 1960s in the 80s and 90s, and not many people of my generation got that, because the 60s were past. I feel incredibly fortunate to be there in the very early stages of a movement, which is in a really different phase at the moment. I think I was there at a very, very precious time, and I hope it feels, in many ways, that it’s dormant and it’s perhaps changing form at the moment. And I hope we’ll find a way back out to somewhere, so that more people experience something of that. The exhilaration and the fact that I suppose, in a sense, as a huge collective movement, it was the first time round.

Liz (00:35:20):
It was the first cycle of it, and in a sense, things were bad enough that they could only get better. And I think we were inventing it for the first time. I think coming into it again, as what we won is eroded and demolished, and we’re facing such terrible times with austerity and now the pandemic and the threats to our lives, that it’s very hard thinking, “Right, how do we reinvigorate and fight some of the battles we’ve already fought? And some that are maybe even more terrifying?” But there were moments in that first cycle that were exquisitely beautiful, actually.

Will (00:36:14):
I suppose on the flip side, what were some of the more negative experiences?

Liz (00:36:25):
I suppose if that was about building community and a sense of possibility, and starting to really see things change, I guess the hardest things for me would be the opposite, would be functioning in isolation and hitting the brick walls that haven’t gone away and sometimes change forms. But a disabled person is going to recognize some shape or form of trying to do some very simple thing. Whether it was going to college or getting somewhere to live or going into a shop or a cinema or any of those sorts of things, and coming up against brick walls that simply didn’t need to be there. And being alone, and it feeling like the loneliest place on earth.

Liz (00:37:23):
Of course, that’s why, when we came together it was just so absolutely extraordinary. We were fighting our corner collectively, but I guess we also started to fight each other’s corners. It’s always easier to advocate for somebody else than it is for yourself. I think it shifted all the possibilities of that. I think in movement terms,

The Disability Discrimination Act individualised structural biases

Liz (00:37:52):
I think the thing that’s so sad for me, for so many others, and you probably heard it in my last answer, is that I think, later into the 90s … Well actually, once we’d got the Disability Discrimination Act, which was not the legislation we campaigned for and which we were really sold down the river on that legislation, it looked as though we’d got what we campaigned for, and it was a really poor piece of legislation that individualized the structural barriers rather than understanding them politically.

Liz (00:38:31):
I think that was all intentional on the part of the Thatcher Government, but at that point, I think broader society thought, “Well, you got what you’ve been campaigning for. Things might not be perfect, but they’re not for anyone, so put up and shut up.” For me, what had changed from predominantly pity shifted gear into an area of resentment and hostility. And then, when new Labour came in, they were really hard to campaign against, because it was like blancmange. Whereas with Thatcher, it was so clear what the opposition was. It was really easy to organise.

Liz (00:39:09):
And increasingly over the [inaudible 00:39:11] years, money started to be removed from our organization, so a lot of the centres around which we were able to organise relatively easily started to disband. As a movement, we lost our way. We lost our ability to organise. We lost the clarity, because I think some of the wins that we had in the early days were relatively simple to communicate. If you’ve got public transport, and a whole sector in society can’t use it, it’s not public. It’s really hard to argue against that. People did, but it’s still really hard to argue against it.

Campaigning on complex issues

Liz (00:39:50):
Once you get on to much more complex issues, particularly things like the right to be alive, it’s much much harder stuff to argue and to communicate effectively. And I think as a movement, we haven’t made, we as activists, the shift to find ways of dealing with the complexities. Taking to the streets and doing blockades just made sense conceptually. It made sense. If you’ve got buses you couldn’t get on to and use, but what is an effective way to communicate to people on the fact that, in the middle of a pandemic, disabled people and older people are seriously being debated overtly for their quality of life and whether they should be allowed ventilators, or whether the ventilators should be rationed to people who are young and healthy.

Liz (00:40:49):
You can’t simply get out on the streets and blockade and handcuff yourself to buses to communicate that. I think we haven’t, as a movement, where we have failed is to find a way of adapting our methods to deal with much more complex things. But we’ve also faced that in context, things have changed, in politics, things have changed. And we need to adapt more to that. It’s been really, really difficult, and that’s become a really waffly answer, but I think I feel a sense of sadness that what we had, some of it was very precious and has dissipated. That’s a loss for my generation, but also, I would love us to be able to give that to the next generation. To have the joy of it, because perhaps more than anything, it keeps you motivated to keep protesting. We have to get back there.

Will (00:42:00):
Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Liz (00:42:13):
Perhaps, just picking up from that is, I think movements go through cycles or waves. I think we’ve had the first wave for the disabled people’s movement, and we’re in that holding zone, I guess, before the next wave really takes form. Each movement wave has to adjust the previous form and find something that fits the context that they’re in now. I think that’s just as true for the disabled people’s movement. Intersectionality is part of that, but it’s also looking at the methods we use in activism. Whether the arts has more of a role to play, more centralized role to play. Whether we expand our horizons for what activism is beyond the really big spectacle activism.

Liz (00:43:07):
We need to be quite self critical and reflexive of the ways that we work and keep on updating them. And I think maybe when a second wave of a movement really finds its form, actually maybe you know that when the joy comes back. Because you really know you’re doing something. You really know you’re part of an identifiable movement. You’ve got people around you who are working for the same ends, and you have a cohesive method for working. I feel like we’re somewhere in, not necessarily the bottom part of that wave. We may be coming back out of it, but we’re not in that wonderful place where you know you’re driving things forward. And my hope is the newer generation comes in, keeps taking it up that way, learning from what came before. Bring the best, and jettisoning the stuff that doesn’t work. Bringing the best of it, and creating the next wave for now, and that’s what we need. I think that’s it.

Will (00:44:32):
I can’t think of any more questions, so I think that’s it.

Liz (00:44:35):
Okay, thanks Will.

Will (00:44:39):
I’ll stop recording.

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