Hope, Lies and Making Change

I was up early as usual yesterday morning to sneak in a little quiet reading time before heading off to set up for our local monthly recycling drive we've been operating for 28 years. It was chilly (14 degrees) and dark when I loaded up our 1999 Ford Ranger, 4-cylinder truck with our material before swinging by the elementary school to load some of their recycled paper, tin and plastic to our drive site. 



This monthly adventure allows me to catch the national NPR show, On the Media, which is unfortunately the only time I ever hear it. Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone have been doing this always thoughtful and reflective show for many years.


Since the truck was not yet warmed up I had the heater fan off, which made listening to it easier. Before I got to the school they aired a segment that inspired this blog post. Bob Garfield was demonstrably depressed by the state of our politics and the press and he was trying to cope with it. Wherein a colleague referred him to a book by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark. [Those of you who may been occasional readers of this blog will note that name, and even that book, from which I have added one of my favorite quote, which I'll add at the end. Here's another blog post that excerpts a quote from a 2013 essay or this one from a post-2016 election essay.]



But Garfield went further than just trying to summarize the book. The colleague suggested he contact Solnit to see what she had to say and therein lies the reason for this blog. I have never heard Rebecca Solnit. I knew that she was one of my favorite writers - penetrating, lyrical, powerful and unafraid to stare into dark corners of our world. But Solnit is not simply a writer. She is also an activist and it is from that personal engagement that the fire and power of her writing emerges. I was somewhat anxious that she would not be as powerful a speaker, especially in an interview environment. Some people we know write beautifully, but speaking live on the spur of the moment doesn't allow for the editing that good writing does.

Not to worry, despite a very different voice than I expected, the exchange with Garfield, by both of them was uplifting in ways I cannot give adequate words to. The 11-minute audio track from the show is a necessary vaccination for all progressives as we enter the dark times. Please take the time to listen to this segment. I also suggest those of you who have access to On the Media through your local NPR station, add it to your regular diet of listening.

Below is a quote I have used in many talks and in many things I have written. If by the time you get this far in the blog you have not listened to the interview with Garfield, perhaps reading this tiny excerpt from the same book that inspired Bob Garfield to call her for an interview, this might nudge you to do so. I believe you will be glad you did.

     Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army.         It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away a stone, an                 earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a                 movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people             change the world; sometimes they start a movement and millions do; sometimes         those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change                 comes upon us like a change of weather. All of these transformations have in               common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s         to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and               uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is             the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, “The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.” To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. 

             -Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark,

If you need an extra boost here's a link to Stand Up (and Be Strong) by Keb Mo 

The Time for Expanded Fellowship

I read this passage the other morning. It's from a book I wasn't looking for when we were browsing through its many floors of used books at one of the great used bookstores in the world, John K. King's in Detroit.

 

     "Without some notion of brotherhood, civilization, indeed the very life of the race, would have been impossible. But, through the ages, the idea of brotherhood has generally been restricted to members of the same family, tribe, nation or race, or believers in the same religious or political creed. There will always be a particular sense of fellowship resting upon common loyalties. But today the peace, and certainly the happiness, of the world requires a larger and more inclusive sense of brotherhood for all the sons and daughters of earth...This brotherhood must take account of the existence of important differences of opinion. Its emphasis must not lie on imposed unity of thought, but on a common abhorrence of cruelty, oppression, and everything that would reduce human life to the status of a commodity and man himself to the level of a thing."




Norman Thomas, letter to Everett R. Clinchy (1950) quoted in W.A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons 1976, p. 331.

One of the reasons I believe it struck me enough to mark the page so I could go back and copy the quote, was that I have been reading more and more about efforts to end war, to create some vibrant form of global governance, and also reforming the United Nations. The issues we face, especially on a single finite planet that is both increasing in human numbers but even more so human impacts, requires us for survival to work together. To find in Thomas's words from more than 60 years ago "a larger and more inclusive sense of brotherhood for all the sons and daughters of earth."

I find it hard to imagine given those increasing challenges that only one year ago all 193 nations of the United Nations agreed on a need and commitment to reduce greenhouse gases for the betterment of all. And yet one year later, we have an election where the purported winner and his nominees are collectively hoping to unravel that essential foundation for a less troubling future. Mr. Trump's erratic hyper-individualism that he hopes to impose on our nation, if not the world, is truly in this writer's mind the most troubling of the results.

If it was simply himself, and we could hope that the democracy once created could work to constrain his excesses, perhaps we might survive his worse inclinations. But so far, I am seeing very little from the governance sector, save a few lonely Democrats, joined by sincere libertarians like Sen. Rand Paul, who dare confront this demagogue. This fear of confrontation, of standing up for what one believes, especially permeates the Republican Party with unfortunately rare exception, even at local government levels.

If we believe that Thomas had it right, and I certainly do, it is up to us to stand up for building and strengthening that sense of global brotherhood and sisterhood. The initial nominees of the president-elect are of course not only from the well-connected club of wealthy insiders, so much for "cleaning the swamp", but they are of a view that governance is bad, unless of course it profits a business they support. The reports of conversations that the president-elect has had with other national leaders shows he is still seeking advantage for his business ties, either directly his own, or for his 'friends'.

I am not optimistic about the next four years, but there is so much that we cannot predict, although we're pretty certain climate as we have known it for thousands of years will continue to destabilize. Perhaps one of our finest writers and thinkers Rebecca Solnit says it best.

“When big changes and dangers arise, you have to think big. You don’t put out a forest fire with a glass of water. Thinking small can prevent you from even recognizing trouble, let alone your options for overcoming it. There’s never been a time when thinking big matters more than now. Many across the United States are now trying to figure out how to survive Trump, but it may still be possible to stop him. His regime is not yet inevitable.

It’s a long shot, but one worth trying, the way someone diagnosed with a disease with a 3% survival rate might want to do what it takes to try to be part of the 3%. You don’t get there if you give up at the outset. Trump represents a catastrophe on a scale many seem to have trouble grasping, an attack on what remains democratic and uncorrupted in our old and messy system of government, a threat to international stability, to efforts to address climate change, and to human rights at home and around the world.”

 …read the whole piece here:

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/29/us-election-recount-long-shot-alternative-catastrophe

Duck and Cover or Better Active Than Radioactive

Bert the Turtle in the 1951 classic nuclear preparedness film taught us school children to Duck and Cover in the event of a nuclear attack.


A decade later, President Eisenhower warned us of the power of the military-industrial-complex in his farewell address to the American people.

     "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial-complex. The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Indeed we may well have that alert and knowledgeable citizenry to thank that we haven't already blown the world up with nuclear weapons.  As history professor Lawrence Wittner so clearly demonstrates in his eye-opening book, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. In this 2008 title Wittner notes the pressure that citizens around the globe have fashioned to bring us back from the brink of nuclear madness.


Courtesy: Stanford University Press

Let we think we have put all that behind us, last week Sen. Edward Markey took to the Senate floor  as the President (the Nobel Peace Laureate?)was visiting Hiroshima, to try and hold up the President's development of a new nuclear weapons, under the rubric of a nuclear 'modernization' program. (A shorter essay by him in the Boston Globe is here, or an even briefer report here.)

Markey bravely takes on the sitting president of his own party with a fervor rarely displayed in these highly partisan times. Markey has been a long time advocate for ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Last week he challenged the madness of the Obama approach along with the apparent hypocrisy from the pledge Obama made when receiving the the Nobel prize in Prague. He particularly goes after the nearly $1 Trillion dollar investment the Obama budget. In doing so he highlights a key component of this $1 trillion waste - building new nuclear weapons (modernizing) that would arguably make the use of nuclear weapons more 'thinkable'.


Courtesy: Oxford University Press

Joseph Sitacusa in his recent update to the Oxford University Press Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction notes that one of the chief effects "of the spread of nuclear weapons will be the proliferation of threats to use them, which will greatly complicate global security and in many respects be harder to undo.... The likelihood of mishaps along the way is only too real." (p. xvi)

Sen. Markey offered an amendment S.Amendment 4241 to SB 2943 the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017 on Thursday to halt authorization of funds for the new weapons for the budget year 2017 that begins in October. As noted in his floor speech, he is pleading for at least some Congressional debate over the wisdom and consequences of going down this road.

If ever in our lifetime we are to stop the madness of nuclear annihilation we had better contact on Senators to support the Markey amendment in hopes that we might stave off not only the construction of new weapons of mass destruction, but to redeploy the huge waste of money that could be directed to addressing the challenges of climate and inequality. We need to act soon as the Senate will be taking up this spending bill very soon.

If this short blog doesn't move you from the comfort of your chair, please view Sen. Markey's message to his fellow senators last week. We're all in this together.

Be Kind. Be Connected. Be Unafraid

It has been a month without a post. Between a vacation without information technology and without a visit from the Muse, ideas simply sauntered through the consciousness without pausing. This entry does indicate that information technology is at hand, but whether the Muse has visited can be best be determined by the reader.

The post title, "Be Kind. Be Connected. Be Unafraid." comes from a novel read on the vacation, The Dandelion Insurrection by Rivera Sun.

The phrase becomes the rallying cry of the insurrection that takes place in what would seem to be the not too distant future - a time when climate change and income inequality have grown even more visible and troublesome than they are today. It's a dark period, but the optimism of the everyday people who become forces for change drives the story.

 Rivera Sun, who has authored several other novels, is a good writer.

 

The website Good Reads gives this a 4.4 out 5.0 score from its 33 raters. I'd make it 34.

It's surely a book meant to inspire the reader to "Be the Change You Want to See" as Gandhi is often quoted uttering. Indeed, like Gandhi there is a strong visible current of commitment to nonviolence from the lead characters. But of course, not all the characters who want to see change share that commitment. Yet unlike most novels, Sun actually wants the reader to be moved, to get involved. She, for example, includes an appendix  from nonviolence scholar Gene Sharps "198 Methods for Nonviolent Action".

I heard from the characters of this novel a similar call to that being heard recently from Bernie Sanders in his continued emphasis less on his election as President but more for the importance of citizens becoming engaged, regardless of whom is elected. We also hear a parallel theme coming from Pope Francis, especially in his recent encyclical on climate change and poverty, Laudato Si, which I also read on this vacation. If I wasn't such a skeptic I could easily believe that Francis read Dandelion Insurrection and it inspired the encyclical.

       "113. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere. This is not to reject the possibilities which technology continues to offer us. But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.

112. Yet we can once more broaden our vision. We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?"

Is this from the encyclical or the novel?

Years ago, I heard Tony Cortese, founder of Second Nature talk about the essential connection of Head, Hands, and Heart as we try to design a sustainable future for all. Second Nature was working on trying to infuse sustainability thinking, reflection and action into higher education. The dominant force in higher education as you might guess is on the HEAD. The hands and the heart are scuttled to the side so they don't bias pure objectivity. Pope Francis and Rivera Sun are clearly calling for the unification of Head, Hands, and Heart and you hear it in the motto, "Be Kind. Be Connected, and Be Unafraid." I think it's the last of these that is most needed in this time. Pope Francis and Rivera Sun encourage us to "Be the Change We Want to See in the World." 

The urgency grows by the day. Perhaps we begin with Rivera Sun's first suggestion - "Be Kind - If you do nothing else, bring kindness to the forefront of your daily life." A better world is possible and these two works help us appreciate that possibility.

Silence is Acquiescence

In Studs Terkel's last book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, he's once again collected many moving first person accounts from a wide range of people. They are all moving reflections well worth sitting with should you get a chance.




I was particularly taken the other morning by the words of Rabbi Robert Marx.

        Silence is not inaction. It is doing something: silence is acquiescence. When you acquiesce to injustice, you are contributing to it. The hardest thing in the world is to help people find the courage. In that process, finding it yourself is not always an easy task. You have to say that I'm willing to be inconvenienced, I'm willing to march in that parade, I'm willing to sign that petition. I am willing to go down to a prison and visit somebody who has been wrongfully imprisoned. I am willing to have rocks thrown at me, as has happened.(p.135)

I recognize my own silence on many issues. My own fears arise of receiving, not rocks, but vitriol, from those who don't see the world the way my experience has painted it. One of those current issues for which I have been too quiet is the realization that Black Lives Matter. Of course, I understand that intellectually. But the recent media coverage of almost daily examples of injustice and violence perpetrated on citizens, whose skin color makes them a target for abuse at so many levels has me distraught. I certainly can't walk in the shoes of a person of color. But my empathy and recognition of injustice should have brought me out of my chair much sooner. The abuses are endemic and ongoing.

It seems to me now, that we folks who have benefited from the privilege of whiteness in this society must not be silent anymore. I understand better now the reason why Cascade Engineering has made a concerted effort to be an anti-racist company, without being forced by some new law to do so. I see why colleagues in our local peace community have come to focus increasingly on domestic peace and injustice issues, after so many years of looking overseas for human rights, demilitarization, and refugee safety.

It is not an 'either/or' choice, but rather a 'both/and' one. I suspect the creator of the poster below has made this more clear than I could.

Marian Wright Edelman, long time leader of the Children Defense Fund  makes the case as for ending our silence as good as anyone in her message Friday .
 


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