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In Amy Goodman’s opening remarks at the Michigan Policy Summit, she told the story of some students in New York and their fight against censorship.

These drama students had developed a play that enacted soldiers’ words about the the war in Iraq. They learned their lines, built the sets, but their principal told them they could not perform it at school.

Why not? “The play is too controversial when it deals with war.”

Of course, artists make lousy slaves, so when the New York theater community heard about this censorship, they rallied to the students’ support. The students got to present on a major New York stage, and the play got more exposure than they ever would have at their high school.

Why did this strike me so much?

Because right now my organization is organizing to support the National Religious Action Campaign Against Torture “Banners Across America” campaign to invite houses of worship to display banners that simply say, “Torture is wrong.”

One local pastor declined, saying “we don’t want to hang controversial banners on the Church.”

When students are denied opportunities to provoke discussion of the most important social issue of today and when pastors are afraid to declare “torture is wrong,” because it is too controversial, we live in dire times. We live in a time when we need to fight for the soul of America.

I don’t mean that the way that Billy Graham means that, calling for a religious conversion.

Rather, I mean a fight for our conscience. A fight for our values. A fight for open discussion.

We need a fight to live in a nation when it is a matter of course that students discuss social issues.

We need to fight for a world in which saying “torture is wrong” is controversial, and that we don’t even have to worbanner because the belief that torture is wrong runs so deep and is so uncontroversial that even the thought of U.S. sponsorship of torture is inconceivable.

For some things, there should be no controversy.

I just finished A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically. I picked it up expecting to be entertained, and I was.

What’s not to like about a modern-day germ-phobic secular Jew from New York with obsessive-compulsive disorder trying to follow the Bible as literally as possible for a year? He even stones an adulterer (but since the Bible doesn’t specify, he uses a very small stone).

What I didn’t expect was to relate to his spiritual experience.

At the end, A.J. says:

I’m no a reverent agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It’s possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn’t take away from its power or importance.

I fully agree with Jacobs’ experience here. I do not know for sure if there is a God or not, but I do know I have experienced the sacred.

What’s more, I have also found the Quakerism, Christianity, and the Bible to be tools to help me understand Truth and to experience the Sacred.

And that is enough for me

Another issue ICPJ needs to address is how much we should focus.

I learned from splitting wood that you need to put your effort into one thing at a time if you’re going to succeed.

Right now we’re putting our effort into seven things.

Do we have enough focus to split any of them open?

It’s a thorny issue. I’m not sure our Hunger volunteers would all join up on our health care campaign if we decided to narrow our focus. We’d likely loose some people.

On the other hand, I’m not sure if one-seventh effort will ever be enough to get our Latin America Task Force to get Rep. Dingell to stop supporting the SOA.

So do we narrow our focus, or do support efforts toward justice no matter how diffuse we may be?

Do we split one piece of wood? Or do we let 100 flowers bloom?

When I grew up, we heated our home with wood heat. That meant I spent a lot of time with my dad hauling, splitting, and stacking wood.

Now, the thing about splitting wood is you have to do it one piece at a time. You set up a chunk of wood, swing the splitting maul, and put all your force into splitting one piece of wood.

One piece of wood.

But what does splitting wood have to do with organizing?

1. Swing for all your worth: You don’t get anywhere with half-measures. If you’re gonna swing that maul, swing like you mean it. Likewise, if you’re gonna work on an issue, be prepared to put you back into it and your heart into it and make it worth it.
2. Keep at it: Sometimes you didn’t split the wood on your first swing. Sometimes you missed the seam that would split the log. Sometimes you just plain missed. The thing to do was to pick up the maul and swing again. Likewise, we won’t win every campaign on the first try. We need to be ready to give it another go.
3. But know when to quit: Some chunks of wood were so nobby and twisted they just wouldn’t split. Those were the ones to set aside. Use them for bonfires. See if more drying time softened them up. Don’t spend all day trying to split the impossible log when there’s a whole pile that will split waiting for you. In community organizing, we need to know when to say enough, it’s time to work on another issue or another campaign.
4. And most important, you can only split one log at at time. It doesn’t work if you try to tap 10 pieces of wood ten times.The Onceler’s “super axe hacker” that “chops down four truffula trees in one smacker” may work for Dr. Seuss, but I never had that luxury. Likewise, when we’re working on issues, we need to be able to put enough umph into each of them that can split them open. Otherwise, we’re just going through the motions.

One of the big questions facing ICPJ is how to deal with generation change between 60s and 70s-era activists and younger activists (more on that later).

That’s  why, effective immediately, I’m observing a zero-tolerance policy for generation bashing in activist circles.

No longer will I silently sit by as people dismiss younger generations for not living up to some mythic standard of 60s anti-draft organizing or bemoan the “quiescence” of today’s students.

Nor will I tolerate people upbraiding older generations for being out of touch or selling out (though I hear much less of this).

If I hear such generation bashing, my plan is to call the person on it. If they don’t stop, I’ll give them a simple choice: stop the bashing to continue the meeting without me (hmm, a similar policy could work well for sexist, racist, homophobic, or classist comments; though I rarely get these is activist settings).

Why the hard line?

1. I’m sick of the bashing (and I’m sick right not too, so probably especially grumpy);
2. the bashing ignores generational differences such as the placating effect of increased affluence, post-Watergate  cynicism, the lack of a draft, and technology change;
3. the bashing ignores other forms of involvement, such as through-the-roof levels of volunteerism among younger generations; and
4. it’s just plain bad organizing. You don’t recruit new followers by demeaning them.

Now back to our previously-scheduled organizing.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying The Tent of Abraham, which looks at the story of Abraham through Jewish, Christian, and Muslim perspectives and explores how it can be a tale of peacemaking.

One thing that struck me is the discussions of the world’s diversity in the book.

For example, Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center explores how the story of the tower of Babel is a story of rejecting a centralized imperial globalism (as Sumeria was trying to create at the time) in favor of diverse grassroots communities each with their own tongue and customs.

(The folks at We Are Everywhere would love this interpretation).

Likewise, the Qur’an celebrates human diversity. It says:

‘O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another.’ (49:13a)

And of course the Baha’i faith has beautiful writings about the value of diversity.

If the flowers of a garden were all of one color, the effect would be monotonous to the eye; but if the colors are variegated, it is most pleasing and wonderful. The difference in adornment of color and capacity of reflection among the flowers gives the garden its beauty and charm. Therefore, although we are of different individualities, different in ideas and of various fragrances, let us strive like flowers of the same divine garden to live together in harmony. (‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 24)

There is a tendency in this world to promote our way as the one and true way, to declare our people as the only good people, and our thoughts as the only credible thoughts.

These passages and interpretations remind us that the glory of creation is that there are many peoples, many perspectives, and many things to enjoy.

And this is a good thing.

Politcally, then, when policies or prejudices exclude some people or leave some groups out, then we are all diminished. To use the Baha’i example, we have lost flowers from our garden.

That’s why efforts to dismantle racism, to actively recruit diverse candidates, and to make sure that everyone has access to opportunity are so important.

We are all created by God, with all of our blessed diversity. We are all God’s people. We all share God’s earth.
And to make sure that all God’s people have access to all the bounty God’s earth is to do God’s work of justice.

One of the things that I like about the book We Are Everywhere is that it is willing to present different, even contradictory, perspectives.

This is especially clear when thinking about the relationship between activists and “the mainstream.”

In “The Sweatshop and the Ivory Tower,” Kristian Williams writes,

If I had been in charge – also, I suspect, if the GSC [Georgetown Solidarity Committee] had been comprised of more radical types – things would have one a great deal differently. We would not have bothered with leaflets at the basketball games. We would not have sung the fight song at our rallies, or put Jack the Georgetown Bulldog on our posters and picket signs. We would not have organized prayer meetings. And we would not have won.  [emphasis added]

Kristian respects the mainstream of Georgetown enough to realize that they had to take the steps to reach that mainstream. They were essential to victory. She goes on to write:

I spent a year at Georgetown, and this is the biggest thing I learned: you win by organizing, and you organize by approaching people on terms they can accept. You do not win because of your radical rhetoric. You do not win by writing off potential allies, or insisting on ideological purity. You do not win by denigrating popular culture or ignoring the decent impulses of your peers. You do not win because you have the ‘right line’ or are able to quote Gramsci. You do not win through heroics or martyrdom. You win by organizing, and you organize by approaching people on terms they can accept. [emphasis added]

In “Fighting to Win,” Jeff Shantz takes a very different approach:

Recognizing that we have no interests or values in common with the economic and political elite, we don’t try to reach them on any level. Instead we attack them directly where it hurts: in their bank accounts.

This isn’t going to get far in reaching the middle-class Americans and Canadians who, by global standards, are part of the economic elite.

Moreover, for me as a Quaker who recognized “that of God in everyone,” I find Jeff’s dismissal of the humanity and reachability of “the elites” to be quite troublesome. For me, in that worldview lie the seeds of dehumanization, violence, and repression.

While I disagree Jeff Shantz about how to approach “the opposition,” I do respect Jeff’s focus on what it takes to win:

We don’t do protests anymore. OCAP [Ontario Coalition Against Poverty] learned a long time ago that marches and rallies to protest, register our dissent, or to shame governments that have no shame are almost completely useless. . . . Our members just don’t have the time and means to come out for purely symbolic actions.

I see this tension. Sometimes rallies are meaningful, such as the Georgetown prayer meeting, but sometimes they are just taken because the organizers don’t take the time or the imagination to think about how to truly move toward their goal.

So let’s take the time to work, to organize, and to reach people where they are to bring them into the struggle for justice and peace.

p.s.  Another thig I appreciate about We Are Everywhere is that the entire book is available online!

I’ve just finished reading the Pastoral Letter from Friends Church in Kenya (FCK), a response from the Quaker Church in Kenya to the recent violence.

It’s brilliant. And I say that as someone who is deeply ambivalent about the value of “words on paper” to create social chance.

The letter reaches to Quaker tradition and Biblical texts to call for actions based on truth, peace, economic justice, and reverence for life. It lays out a proposal for addressing the impasse in Kenya that respects civil society, all ethnic groups, and fair process.

Spiritually-rooted activists here in the US can learn much from their example. And in the meantime, we can pray for peace and reconciliation in Kenya.

As we begin 2008, I’ve been doing some goal setting using the Magnet Goals method developed by Marc Pitman.

I have no doubt that this process can lead to positive changes. My question is: is it also a way to practice discontentment?

As I go through the process, I don’t see myself counting my blessings. I see myself looking for every way that my life is somehow less than idea or lacking. I look for things to be unsatisfied with so I can change them.

Is this a good thing?

I used to be content with a cup of Folgers to wake me up. That gave me pleasure. Now, I hold my nose at Folgers and drink premium coffee. I’m not sure my snobbishness is progress.

Right now I’m very content with my life. I hope this goal setting process doesn’t make me see my life now the way I used to see Folgers.

In Begging  for Change Robert Egger talks about the need to build “tangible links.” For example, in the kitchen training program at D.C. Central Kitchen, the students build links both with the people who eat the meals they serve and with the other volunteers who help at the kitchen. That way the students are connected to a web of giving and receiving.

Storyteller that he is, Egger talks about one of the early students in the DC Central Kitchen training program. Reggie was a heroin addict, clean for 3 months, enrolled in the program. He had a tough road ahead of him, and it wasn’t clear he would be able to escape his past and his addiction.

One week a group of doctors came in to volunteer, and Egger told Reggie to show them around. He could see the tension around him. Reggie, with his low education and history of addiction, was clearly thinking “you want me to work with them.” And the doctors were thinking the same thing.

But Egger stuck to his instructions and walked away, leaving Reggie to orient this group of high-power professionals.

Twenty minutes later Roger stopped back to check in. What he saw was inspiring. The roles had been reversed. Reggie, the barely-hanging-on addict was teaching these doctors how to julienne carrots. Here was an area where he knew something they didn’t, and he could speak with authority on it. He had something to give, something to teach. And that gave Reggie a level of self-respect that he wouldn’t have if he was cutting carrots alone.

That’s the power of tangible links.

This concept of “tangible links” goes to the heart of the solidarity model of organizing. What lessons can we learn from our allies in the global south? How can we build real people-to-people ties that will lead to enduring change?

It also ties in with one of the lessons in Cialdini’s “Influence.”  He talks about how to overcome group animosity, it’s not enough to have contact between groups. You need cooperation between the groups to achieve a shared goal.

When Reggie teaches the doctors how to julienne carrots, he is moving beyond just having “contact” between doctors and students to having true cooperation between the two groups. That’s where growth and change happen.