I'm a Loser, Baby

I’m a naturally competitive person with few measurable skills and an unwavering belief that my favorite sports teams will win every championship every year. If there’s one thing I have a strange expertise in, it’s losing. The problem is, I am a terribly ungraceful loser. I take it personally, I become emotionally erratic, and I launch into irrational long-term grudges against people and places. It is not a pretty thing.

Examples, you ask? When the Washington Capitals lost in the playoffs this year, in a moment of tearful vulnerability, I bought a one-way ticket to London because I didn’t want to have to witness another team celebrating the championship. I no longer read Marie Claire magazine after the Fashion Director voted against my designer on Project Runway a year ago. Once, I was upset after losing in foosball (foosball!) in college and “jokingly” threw the ball at my friend/opponent who ducked, and I hit my professor in the face. And it gets even worse when the things I am fighting for actually mean something.

One of the first organizing projects I took part in was the 2006 fight against the Big Stone II coal plant proposal. The Sierra Club had been shutting down coal plant proposals left and right, and I assumed that all I needed to do was gather up a bunch of students, bike down to a hearing, put something on the record about “you’re destroying our future,” and boom! coal plant gone. When I found out the following day that the coal plant was still on the table, I was not only heartbroken, but personally offended. How dare the commissioners be so careless with my future and my community? More experienced organizers and campaigners will laugh at my naïveté, but this was the fight where I learned an incredibly important organizing lesson: Organizers lose a lot. All the time. Small losses, big losses. It wouldn’t be a struggle if we didn’t. But after Big Stone II was moved to the next phase of approval, we stepped up our game: built exciting new coalitions, found creative ways to engage on both legal and grassroots levels, and engaged with communities across the Midwest. And we kept at it, for years. My good friend and ridiculously talented Midwest organizer Juliana Williams called it “the plant that never seemed to just kick the bucket.” But miraculously it finally did. In 2009, three long years after that fateful hearing, we won. And the victory party was not only awesome, but much, much bigger than it ever would have been had we won after that 2006 hearing.

The beautiful thing about losing in any arena is that it builds community in a way that winning just can’t. After the Boston Bruins recently won the Stanley Cup (grr), columnist Dan Shaugnessy lamented that, “a teenager in Greater Boston knows only championships. There’s no Curse of the Bambino, no Too Many Men on the Ice in Montreal, no pathetic Patriots of the 1990s, no 22-year Celtic drought.” Losing can foster more dedication and commitment, and it definitely builds stronger and more resilient organizing teams. It builds a compelling and accessible narrative for your movement or campaign’s story. It forces you to be creative, to find new ways to win, to build more power, and to engage with communities and styles of organizing that you haven’t before.

There’s a point in every game as I am desperately clinging to my chair when I say “why am I doing this to myself??? I could be NOT losing right now, if only I hadn’t turned the television on!” And there’s a point in every fight, when my team has experienced a setback or full-on loss, when I ask myself why I keep organizing. But I still turn on the TV for my favorite teams, and I still go out to the next fight, every time. I do it because one day, the Washington Capitals will win the Stanley Cup, and one day, we will shut down every coal plant in this country, and I am already planning our victory party.

Laura Bartolomei-Hill is Logistics Coordinator at NOI

Photo from antigallery via Creative Commons license