Man willing to stand up for beliefs as long as he doesn't have to get up from futon
CALGARY, AB—As 26-year-old semi-employed writer Jason Bradford reads about the travesties that are happening in rural Mongolia on a website that ends in .info, he realizes that now is the time to act. And by "act," he means "post about the issue on Facebook."
Bradford has always considered himself an activist. "Even from an early age, I was always fighting against the big guys and corporations," he explains as he sips his $7 Americano from Starbucks. "I've always been willing to stand up for what I believe in—figuratively, of course."
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As someone who does the bulk of his social justice campaigning from his futon, the Caucasian Bradford believes that activism can take many forms. "In the black civil rights movement, you had people fighting the establishment in different ways," he explains. "You had Malcolm X who preached 'by any means necessary,' Martin Luther King Jr. who took a nonviolent approach, and people like Rosa Parks who engaged in small but powerful gestures that made people pay attention. But I bet the civil rights movement also had people who just talked about theoretically taking action and that probably helped, too."
Bradford has always been willing to project his beliefs onto others, almost always immediately after watching a documentary on YouTube. "If we don't act now, what kind of a future will our children have?" wonders Bradford. "And how will everyone know how much of an intellectual I am?"
Bradford, whose signature look involves his Che Guevara t-shirt that he purchased from Walmart over top of his Bernie Sanders t-shirt, is hard at work signing his fifth online petition of the day.
This one, which protests against child labour, comes from a friend who's "usually reliable with this kind of stuff," he shrugs. After a two-hour nap, Bradford says he plans to start searching on his favourite forums for other sociopolitical issues that he doesn't yet know he is furious about.
Ah, remember the primaries? Those were the good ol' days:
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