look further.

"we are living in impossible times. if it were fiction it would be critiqued as hyperbolic. if it were nightmares we would never sleep. we are living in times created by our own species. I can't remember the last time my tears weren't man-made.

it feels like everything is broken. we must, each of us, fix our attention on the nearest wound, conjure within us the smallest parts of ourselves that are still whole, and be healers. heal with words and prayer and energy, heal with money, clean water, time and action. 

there's enough destruction. there's enough nothingness swallowing the living world. don't add to it. there's enough. 

our visions are ropes through the devastation. look further ahead, like our ancestors did, look further. extend, hold on, pull, evolve."

                - Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy, 2018 

Embrace distinct histories

"When the groups most affected by these issues insist on acknowledgment of their intrinsic difference, it should not be viewed as divisive. Embracing the distinct histories and identities of groups in a democracy enhances the complexity and capacity of the whole."

                    - Stacey Abrams, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018

Conspiracy

Conspiracies obscure the future. When we focus on conspiracies, we think about what happened. Conspiracy-thinking anchors our hopes about how discovery of the conspiracy will magically lead to change, rather than the things that create real change. The only way to counter a message of the imaginary past is to imagine a glorious future. People who resist authoritarian power often say that things were great before the authoritarian rose to power, and that we need to go back to how things were. Of course the resistance needs to focus on what to salvage, but someone needs to think about the future says Gessen. One of the reasons a complex world becomes so frightening is that people can no longer imagine the future. Citing Erich Fromm's Escape From Freedom, Gessen talks about how rootless people become when they can no longer imagine their future. 

To defy conspiracy thinking, we need to engage with reality, says Gessen. Accept new information as something that exists in context, and just what you're learning today. Conspiracies pull us into our online universe of ever-spiraling conspiracy theorizing. 

- N. Mathias, July 21, 2017, summarizing and reflecting on Masha Gessen's talk. 

an obligation to imagine

We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

 - Neil Gaiman, Guardian, June 2017

reverence or remembrance

At this moment, while leadership in our country has opened the doors to much more hate, and at the same time, when memorials and tributes to historic leaders of hate are being taken down, these words and this distinction between reverence vs remembrance is important:

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth....These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for....
We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain. 

-- NOLA Mayor Mitch Landrieu, on removing the prominent Robert E Lee statue (May 2017)

today: the first day a river is declared human

"The Whanganui River, New Zealand's third-longest, will be represented by one member from the Maori tribes, known as iwi, and one from the Crown.

"The recognition allows it to be represented in court proceedings."

 From the BBC.

The Responsibility of Intellects

With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

- Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellects (1967) 

condescencion + opportunity

As we continue forward, we must remember what we already have in terms of privilege and where we stand in society, in comparison with our fellow citizens of the world.

This is not the French Revolution. Effective protest does not require anyone having their head cut off. But it does require recognizing that this zero-arrest protest wasn’t something a largely white and female crowd earned. It was given to us, whether we asked for it our not, because of our frailty. Because we are something to be protected, not a serious threat. Because our safety has been the engine of our oppression and the oppression of others. We owe it to ourselves, and to those others, to use this gift wisely. If the police stay their hand with you, white women, it is not a compliment. It is condescension. But it is also an opportunity. How will you use it?

 - Jess Zimmerman remarking on the Women's March, January 20, 2017

Radical hope!

But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What I’m trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. “What makes this hope radical,” Lear writes, “is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as “imaginative excellence.” Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence. And I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future. 

- Junot Diaz, The New Yorker, Dec 2016

Time is Now

Yes.  

Now is the time to counter lies with facts, repeatedly and unflaggingly, while also proclaiming the greater truths: of our equal humanity, of decency, of compassion. Every precious ideal must be reiterated, every obvious argument made, because an ugly idea left unchallenged begins to turn the color of normal. It does not have to be like this.

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New Yorker, December 2016 

Progress?

Otto, a Bay Area startup that was recently acquired by Uber, wants to automate trucking—and recently wrapped up a hundred-and-twenty-mile driverless delivery of fifty thousand cans of beer between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. From a technological standpoint it was a jaw-dropping achievement, accompanied by predictions of improved highway safety. From the point of view of a truck driver with a mortgage and a kid in college, it was a devastating “oh, shit” moment. That one technical breakthrough puts nearly two million long-haul trucking jobs at risk. Truck driving is one of the few decent-paying jobs that doesn’t require a college diploma. Eliminating the need for truck drivers doesn’t just affect those millions of drivers; it has a ripple effect on ancillary services like gas stations, motels, and retail outlets; an entire economic ecosystem could break down.

... 

As Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, told MIT Technology Review,“Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.” It is, he said, “the great paradox of our era.” - Om Malik, The New Yorker, November 2016 

in this moment and all future moments

How did he speak with his two daughters about the election results, about the post-election reports of racial incidents? “What I say to them is that people are complicated,” Obama told me. “Societies and cultures are really complicated. . . . This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding. And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish. And it doesn’t stop. . . . You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.”

- David Remnick writes about Obama's response to the 2016 election results 

as commencement nears

I'm about to graduate with my Master's Degree in Urban Planning from MIT. Someone recently recommended J.K. Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard a few years back. Here is a snippet that touched me on how our internal states can affect external worlds:

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.  

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

 - J K Rowling  (full speech available here)

from mr grover's facebook page to here

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"
And the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is; "Maybe I'm a king." 

-from A Story That Could Be True, by William Stafford

MLK JR / April 1967

On this day with the freshness of the Black Lives Matter movement all around us, the concern over injury and loss suffered as a result of words and cartoons with the recent Charlie Hebdo tragedy and while I am sitting in the middle of Uttar Pradesh, India with its own injustices at hand, the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. continue to apply. This is one piece I have never read -- when he speaks about the injustice inherent in the Vietnam War and the USA's role in the war. 

Below are snippets. The full piece is powerful; find it here. 

It is with such activity that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

- - - - -

 A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. 

 - - - - -

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

- - - - - 

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

do I cage you.

do I cage you bird by asking you to stay?
you said no. but maybe yes.
and then you said yes.
yes, again.
do I cage you bird by merely desiring you to stay?

do I cage you bird by having a different cadence, rhythm than you?
my sleeping hours and waking hours
your sleeping hours and waking hours
they differ.
does that cage you, bird?

do you love me bird, even with my cage?

I don't want to cage you, bird
but tell me.
so I don't.
what is freedom for you, bird?
so I know.

your magnificent wings must not be caged.
especially not by me.

one year later

we must expand our understanding of terrorism. this is in memory of the boston marathon bombing and the events immediately following in april 2013. terror was felt on the streets of boston; may it never be repeated. 

may we also see terror as multi-facted and better understand that terror, for some people, is an everyday experience. that everyday experience with terror is something no one should be exposed to. 




there is terror
in war
in racism
in abuse
in conflict

in fear

no human should live in terror
outside
or
inside
their home.

one step forward for nebraska

the past two days the first PFLAG conference was held in Nebraska. 

this is big. 

like a walk on the moon. 

nebraska has bounds to go to learn to be more open.

one of my favorite people helped make it happen. 

more than 80 people attended.

they found kindred spirits and similar stories.

they found hope. 

congratulations to all who helped make it happen. 

at the roots

around the edges
we find prejudice rooted 
in the foundation of our world

it's there. yes, it's there. 
its strength inflicted upon all that tries to grow in its presence

we must.
cut it down. 
chop it down. 
root it out. 
we must. 

it has been here for so long
we stopped questioning 
its cause

are the weeds seen
as normal? 

we must root it out
for what is always true, may be viewed as what is normal
for what is always true, may be viewed as what should be normal

we must make a new normal.

learn and share

A simple list by John Hagel / the Labor Day Manifesto. The two points that stuck out for me: 

Prioritize learning over efficiency. We are focused on trajectories that lead us toward excellence and progress. We know that to reach our highest potential, we must never compromise growth for short term efficiencies, and we support others on their own learning paths. Mistakes, while the enemy of efficiency, are the fuel for learning. 

Share freely. As we find better ways to share and exchange knowledge, each new discovery we make individually has the potential to benefit everyone collectively. We see each person’s enormous potential to contribute to our global knowledge base, and we are committed to moving from a zero sum mentality to one of collaboration and increasing returns.