Our duty despite the evidence

Last night I went to a peace meeting and at some point in the discussion I raised my hand and was eventually called on. I started to talk about the use of media in promoting nonviolent struggle and how that helped recruit more sympathizers and helped lead to some victories. I was interrupted by a woman who has been an activist for as long as I have--decades--and she went into a long harangue about our failings, our lack of victories and achievements and that she had no hope and that organizing anything was not worth it. Since she had interrupted me, I continued to try to finish my thought for my final sentence, but she kept talking over me and someone said, "Listen to her, Tom." I did. Her statement turned that meeting around. When someone else tried to say something, she responded. When a group self-facilitates that poorly, so that amongst 25 or so in attendance one person is allowed to respond in turn to everyone, that meeting is victim of a self-fulfilling prophesy and is indeed not worth the time. When she responded to yet another person and the group allowed her to dominate it, I felt called to the kitchen to do dishes, which was a much better use of my energy.

Why would anyone hope and continue to organize when things were hard? Isn't that the time to sensibly give up? I think Cesar Chavez thought about that and made his clear and lifelong decision.

We are suffering. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause.

Chavez went on to say:

We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the Law of the Land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hunger on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.

Indeed, when the poorest of the poor, the most downtrodden with the least reason to hope, when those people decide, en masse, to get a job done, they succeed far more often than they fail. I'm glad Cesar Chavez didn't look around him at the overwhelming racism, poverty, injustice and decide not to organize.

I think of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) who keep struggling year after year against the obscene injustice of the religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan, whether they are Taliban or whomever. These women have been attacked physically, morally, emotionally, financially, and as mothers, wives and daughters. They have nothing. No money, no schools, no jobs, no social safety net and no power that is discernible or traditionally understood. Yet they never give up. Never. They oppose US and NATO occupation just as deeply as they oppose the violence and brutality of the fundamentalist Islamists who rule when the invading foreigners don't. They have no reason to hope. I'm sure the woman from last night's meeting would tell them to stop. I'm sure they would tell her to please be quiet and let the planning proceed. And I have enormous hope that RAWA will prevail against all odds.

Hope is our duty, despite the evidence, despite the string of hard results and losses. Hope, sometimes, is the only thing we have left.

To be a Negro in America is to hope against hope.
--Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

Anyone who is working for a better world has hope. Anyone who has no hope should stay home or at least stay silent and allow those who have ideas and intentions to figure out what to do next. The sociologists who study social conflict and movements have pointed out again and again that the best way to recruit is to give hope, what they called raised expectations. We who come out in hope and dreams are not little children who need patronizing--or matronizing--protection from our own futile ideas of what might be possible. We need help, we need support, and we need everyone's contributions to the brainstorms that lead to new plans for change. Without everyone's creativity, we are poorer and slower to win.

Something to lose

My father's best friend was Al Opsahl (third from left, standing), a hockey player and commercial jetliner designer. My father and I and Al and his son David went camping together from when I was just four years old. They would set out from Seattle, where Al worked for Boeing, and we came from Minneapolis. We'd meet in the Rocky Mountains someplace.

So these camping trips were every few years starting in 1955 and on until the late 1980s. Al died in 1990, the best way anyone can, doing what he loved, playing in a Masters hockey tournament in Santa Rosa, California. Died with his skates on. My Dad cried.

But the salience to nonviolence is that Al and I were hiking one day in the Cascades around the cabin he built on Lake Chelan and we were discussing civil resistance. He shook his head, recalling the Civil Rights era and the riots. He said the way to keep civil order was to make sure people had enough so that rioting would not be a choice that many would make. "Give everyone something to lose," was his sum-up.

I've thought a lot about that. Al was not an activist, just a very good man and a quiet leader. Indeed, my Dad was in awe of him his whole life. They skated together as little boys and Al was the captain of the Southwest Minneapolis high school team (they won the championship). My Dad went into the Navy and fought in the Philippines, and Al was rejected because his arm had been broken as a boy and healed poorly. My Dad said that Al tried to even just volunteer to drive ambulance or anything, and, even though he was a premier athlete, they turned him down. He then became the captain of the U of Minnesota hockey team and then captain of the US 1948 Olympic hockey team. My Dad said everyone looked to Al for leadership and never for dominance, as he was quite quiet but when he spoke it was authoritative. I just enjoyed his wry Norwegian sense of humor and easy affect. So his words were few, but I've taken them to heart over the years as I've tried to understand nonviolence.

Understanding poverty, injustice, and brutality are factors in understanding why people rise up. But one key, relating to what Al said, was part of what Saul Alinsky taught, which is to create raised expectations. In other words, Al was partially right. They need to have something to lose, but Alinsky was more specific. Make people hope and they will more likely act. Fatalism is not so much a philosophy as a result of being beaten down with no hope in sight. Defeatism and apathy are the norm for long-suffering people who cannot see the glimmer of possibility. Lou Kriesberg writes about this in Constructive Conflict. The same population, suffering no more or less than they have been for a long time, will suddenly rise up. The difference is that they perceive a chance for something better and the risks seem smaller than the desperate need once they understand there is hope for change.

This is not magic and yet it's part of the magic of nonviolence, and such conditions can snowball once more people get hope because they believe they have been part of a partial victory. Good leadership fuels that hopeful sense and asks as much as possible from people while at the same time openly discussing risks and potential gain.

Skating and snowballs--good long winter thoughts on the power of nonviolence as latent and waiting. Americans have a lot to lose, but our military budget has wrecked our economy so badly that the losses are beginning to manifest for more. Now, how to help us gain that hope, that realization that we can staunch the losses without undue risk of losing what we have left. That is our challenge here in the US. I think we have a far better chance than a snowball in hell. The other lesson that I took from Al Opsahl and my Dad is one that Alinsky and Kriesberg clearly learned in their own ways too: a good camper always leaves the campsite in better shape than he or she found it. This applies to everything in life, certainly including conflict.