Category: Talking to the Other Side

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Today, I spent two hours with my heartstrings tugged at a concert of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus—where Palestinian teens and 20-somethings from East Jerusalem sing—and compose—together with their Israeli Jewish counterparts from West Jerusalem. In June 2014 (a time of relative peace), I attended an equally moving concert in the Galilee (northern Israel) by Diwan Saz, a modern combo whose performers that night included a 10-year-old Bedouin boy (with a gorgeous voice) and a Chassidic rabbi, among others.
Those hopeful events seem far away an out of reach as we mourn the tragic and avoidable loss of over 4000 lives on both sides this month.
We have to somehow prevent even greater losses of life—and to reset!
Ultraorthodox Jews protest in London for Palestinian rights. Photo by Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ultraorthodox Jews protest in London for Palestinian rights. Photo by Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Let’s start with some points I hope everyone can agree on:
  1. Innocent people have been killed and hurt for decades, and nothing will bring them back
  2. The violence has not worked, no matter who commits it
  3. Both Arabs and Jews have claims on the land going back thousands of years
  4. They also claim common ancestry with both honoring a heritage that started with Abraham. They eat very similar foods, speak languages with many cognates, and have both had to adapt to the harsh desert that surrounds them.
  5. It is long past time to find a workable solution
From that very rudimentary framework, could we perhaps evolve to:
  1. We all are carrying deep hurts. An eye for an eye doesn’t just leave everyone blind, because it will eventually leap from eyes to other things. So an eye for an eye, ultimately, leaves no one standing. Can we accept not only that the past is filled with violence, cruelty, and the spewing of hatred/dehumanization—but that all sides would benefit from moving past this?
  2. Can we look to the world for other examples of long-standing hostility and violence transforming into something better—such as the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa and Sierra Leone and the peace process in Northern Ireland?
  3. Can we finally break the cycles of fear, hatred, and grief that seem to lock everyone into ever-deeper and more destructive cycles of violence?
  4. Can the barriers—both physical and psychological—between the two cultures be removed so that Israelis and Palestinians who are kept apart by laws and physical barricades learn to work, play, and live together; there already are several small projects that are a great start, such as:
  • Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam, a cooperative multicultural village;
  • Numerous other musical collaborations, including  Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and many lesser-known ensembles;
  • Combatants for Peace, which presents touring programs featuring one person who fought in the Israeli army and another who was involved in the Palestinian resistance, now working together for peace despite some of them experiencing injuries, imprisonment, and all of them mourning the loss of friends and family members in the conflict

It takes great courage to organize for peace when the leaders of both communities feed their population an unending diet of hatred for the other side. In the Middle East and around the world, many people have been killed for trying to make peace.

I have visited Israel and Palestine twice and have family and friends (both Palestinian and Israeli) in both  Israel and Palestine (in the West Bank). I’ve stayed in the homes and hotels of Palestinians, with a Chassidic family, in a Druze village, a Transcendental Meditation village, a kibbutz, and an Israeli settler community on the West Bank. I’ve met with a blogger in Ramallah and with leaders of several Israeli peace organizations. I’ve also participated in Middle East peace groups in the US going back to the early 1980s. The vast majority I’ve talked to over the years, no matter what their ethnic or religious heritage, just want peace. The governments are not giving it to them. Surely there are better ways to solve things than yet another war in a long and brutal series of wars!
Perhaps we can take our cue from songwriter Nerissa Nields, who answers the old labor union song “Which Side Are You On? with “The world says ‘you can figure it out. Haven’t you noticed I’m round?‘”
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By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Innovation, Mindset, People Helping People, Psychology, Science, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , ,
NASA photo tracking 2011 Superstorm Sandy
NASA photo tracking 2011 Superstorm Sandy. Attribution: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Tracking_a_Superstorm_(8970258657).png

A friend posted her fears that the extreme weather we’ve pretty much all been experiencing is only going to get worse…that coastal cities (which includes most of the world’s great centers) are going to be hammered by storms that will make Hurricane Sandy—which wreaked havoc in NYC and elsewhere—feel like a gentle rain…wildfires that consume vast acreage, depleted aquifers that cannot regenerate and can no longer supply our farming needs…

I agree with her that the current path will lead to multiple calamities. But I remain optimistic that the rapidly closing window to fix it is still open for now; we can still reverse the destruction. We know how: innovation has reached astounding levels in the last 20 or 30 years, and we humans have developed and piloted hundreds of cool technologies and processes that accomplish multiple good outcomes with zero-to-minimal harm.

But we are 50 years late in making meaningful progress and we can’t be wasting time debating whether human-caused climate change is real. Nearly unanimously, scientists who are not funded by polluters agree that humans have accelerated climate change significantly. And even if the climate change is nothing more than the earth making course corrections, we still need to address/reverse/prevent the effects if human civilization is going to continue in anything like the way we know it.

With light editing for context and to mask the identities of others who posted in the thread, this is my response:

My Response to the Gloom-and-Doom Post

One thing we can all do—homeowners, tenants, farmers, business owners—is STOP SQUANDERING CLEAN WATER! We waste far more than we actually consume, and this has serious consequences as aquifers dry up. I just read this morning in a book called The Sustainabiity Scorecard that certain prescription drug manufacturing processes generate up to 7700x the product weight in waste, most of it water. I’ve said for more than 20 years that while our descendants might forgive us for squandering oil (which has substitutes), they will NOT forgive us for squandering water, which is essential to life.

Like most pieces of climate change, we’ve known how to fix the problems for decades—but we can’t find the political will. We should be living in a circular economy by now, where waste is transformed into input. We should be powering that economy with clean and renewable power sources including not only the common ones like solar and wind but more advanced, less well-known technologies like harnessing light and natural electrochemical reactions (see Gunter Pauli, The Blue Economy 3.0). We have known how to do this since at least 2001, and we’ve known we need to do it since at least 1970. This is our last chance to get it done before the scenarios [the original poster] is worried about become everyday reality—and lead to constant civil unrest, widespread famine, and various other calamities that dwarf anything we’ve experienced. Science fiction writers like John Brunner have been describing that awful world for generations, because they could see the logical consequences of hiding our heads in the sand and pretending everything can go on as it has. 

BTW *I* am actually an optimist on this. I believe we can still fix it, but we damn well better hurry up and commit society to solving these interrelated problems just as we committed ourselves globally to de-fanging COVID (with amazing success in a very short time)—but the longer we wait, the harder the task. The window is closing while we squander the 50-60 years we’ve had to get it done.

And thus I AGREE with [another commenter]’s paragraph about mitigation. Yes, engineers and designers can fix a lot of stuff—especially if they come in not attached to particular solutions but look holistically at how integrated solutions can not only address multiple problems at once (e.g., climate, waste disposal, water and food insufficiency, human comfort) but provide lots of jobs and community revitalization at the same time. But too many engineers have been trained in the existing, failing ways of thinking. We need to think circular and lifecycle impacts (including end-of-product-life disposal or repurposing), with closed loops, zero waste, net energy consumption, or pollution, etc.—and not linear thinking that only acknowledges processes production cost. Engineering as usually practiced has a tendency to externalize things like disposal costs onto the backs of us taxpayers and our progeny.

I also agree that we need to look at pollution, waste disposal, etc. in other industries including chemicals and battery manufacturing, and I don’t see electric cars or solar panels as panaceas.

But I totally disagree with most of his other points. The overwhelming scientific consensus, at least of scientists not funded by fossil companies or others who would have to drastically alter their processes (and temporarily lower their profitability) to fix the mess they helped create, is that human-caused climate change is real, and extremely dangerous.

[Original poster] brings up fusion, as she often does. Fusion sounds great in theory, but I’ve been hearing for my whole life that it’s just around the corner, and yet we never turn that corner. We can’t sit around waiting for fusion. The most optimistic predictions still put it pretty far down the pipe as a mainstream energy source. Yes, let’s keep the research going, but meanwhile, dig ourselves out of this deep hole of our own making.

I know [the original poster] is also a fan of small-scale nuclear fission, but I am not. [In her response to my comment, she corrected me and said she is not either.] If you want to know why, visit https://clamshellalliance.com/statements/statement/ (disclosure: I provided some minor help in writing this, particularly the section on accidents). I have some expertise here: my first of ten books was on why nuclear fission is a big mistake. It was written in the aftermath of Three Mile Island (as a revision/update of a much older book by my co-authors) and I updated it again—for a Japanese publisher—after Fukushima.

Several years ago, I brainstormed a list of 111 things the average person can do to reduce carbon and water footprints. It’s not comprehensive, it’s not necessarily the most important—it’s just one person’s brainstorm from around 2009. It retails for $9.95 but I’m giving it away. Just visit https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/#Freebies and click “Painless Green” (yes, you will need to provide your email and subscribe to my monthly newsletter—but you can unsub if you don’t like it).

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Environmenl, Ethics: General, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Psychology, Sexuality and Gender, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,
El Greco's painting of Jesus chasing the money changers out of the temple. Via Wikipedia.
El Greco’s painting of Jesus chasing the money changers out of the temple. Via Wikipedia.

There is a part of me that hopes the Republican Party nominates DeSantis, because when he loses the general election by a huge margin, it will be a repudiation of the entire loathsome cloak of hatred that DT and RDS both stand for. No one will be able to make a case that it was merely a rejection of DT’s criminal activity, egomania, lack of loyalty to those who stood by him, and/or incompetence.

While RDS shares and even exceeds DT’s vile politics, and has an equally thin skin, he at least appears to be rational and is not shadowed by a long list of personal scandals and accusations of criminality for personal benefit. The crimes he is accused of, such as breaking laws and misusing Florida tax dollars in deceiving immigrants to board planes from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, have been about his policies–like those of the equally creepy governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who booby-trapped the Rio Grande to prevent an influx of immigrants, breaking maritime laws and hurting local businesses in the process.

I like to think–and maybe it’s a delusion–that the vast majority of US voters want no truck with either of these men’s open racism, homophobia/transphobia, self-defined “Christian” nationalism, xenophobia, attacks on women’s reproductive rights, love of guns more than the right not to be randomly shot, and all the rest of it.

Why do I put “Christian” in quotes? Because Christ, based on my reading of the Four Gospels, would have had no truck with their bigotry in His name. Christ’s morals were about helping the poor, the downtrodden, those disabled and ostracized because of disease. Christ threw the moneychangers and merchants–the apex capitalists of their era–out of the Temple. He blessed the peacemakers and the poor and the meek, rescued a woman about to be stoned to death for violating sexual mores, embraced people of other cultures–the Samaritans were a despised cultural group, so it was a big deal for him to talk about the Good Samaritan.

Contemporary right-wing bigots treat immigrants and refugees as subhuman, while Jesus proclaimed, “Welcome the stranger!” They demand an end to the slightest restrictions on guns, while Jesus preached nonviolence not just in offering the other cheek to an attacker who strikes your cheek, but condemning even thoughts of hating another.

If I were to flag every passage of Jesus living His life and preaching His truth in direct opposition to the intolerance, violence, and small-mindedness of these “Christians,” this post would go on for many pages. But the elevator-pitch version is simply this: If you call yourself a Christian and claim to follow the teachings of Jesus, you must be willing to accept and even celebrate values like peace, nonviolence, diversity, equality, respect for the natural environment, fair treatment of “the stranger” (immigrants, those of different races or ethnicities or gender orientation), and improving the lot of the poor and the ostracized.

And as an immigration justice, social justice, and environmental activist who has read the Gospels more than once even though I’m not a Christian, I welcome His allyship.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, language, Media Ethics, Mindset, propaganda, Psychology, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bothsidesim, as you might have guessed, is the mainstream media’s tendency to pretend that reporting objectively requires covering “both sides” with equal weight. But here are a few problems with that approach:Free scales of justice judge justice illustration

  1. Often, there are many more than two sides. Bothsidesism pushes other voices and more nuanced analysis to the margins, just as the two-party system that drives most US politics. Not everything can be separated into either/or, black/white, environmentally friendly/environmentally harmful. A great example would be US Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s, where Justices would frequently write concurring opinions that raised issues and perspectives outside the “official” opinion (this is less true of the current court, which disposes of many cases in the “shadow docket“).
  2. When there are just two sides, one side may be well-reasoned and make a compelling case, while the other puts forth “alternative facts“–in other words, lies–to build a case based on demagoguery or deceit. (The link goes to an NBC clip of then presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway, 2 minutes in, introducing the term in an interview early in the term of the 45th US president–and the interviewer, Chuck Todd, calling her out immediately.)
  3. Bothsidesim turns any contest of ideas into a “horse race” where the issues get swept aside in favor of who appears to be the better debater.

The current “debate” over DT’s federal indictment in the document-hiding case shows what happens when bothsidesim runs amok–and this is NOT about Republican vs. Democrat.  While some media fall all over themselves to cry, “both sides did this,” quoting hyperpartisan pols like Ted Cruz, there is a lot of similarity between the approaches of Republican former VP Mike Pence and Democratic former VP (now president) Joe Biden, and basically none between either of them and DT.

What differentiates the cases of Pence and  Biden from DT’s is simple: The two former VPs immediately notified government agencies and cooperated fully, while DT reportedly was personally involved in hiding documents and telling the government there were no more. It took Pence’s team just three days to turn over the documents; Biden’s response was even quicker, and the documents were delivered one day after discovery.

DT falsely claimed all the documents had already been turned in and stalled so long that the government sent in the FBI to retrieve them. Also, DT’s document trove reportedly includes important military secrets, and DT showed these to people who were not authorized to see them–potentially putting our country and its military at risk.

It’s interesting that some of the most sycophantic yes-men of the DT years–not just Pence but also former Attorney General William Barr and former National Security Advisor John Bolton–have broken with DT over his handling of the matter.

The astute historian Heather Cox Richardson provides an equally current example thousands of miles outside the US. She quotes Timothy Snyder, a Yale scholar of authoritarianism on the recent Russian attack on Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka Dam:

Snyder warned journalists not to “bothsides” the story by offering equal time to both sides. “What Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests a false equality,” he wrote. “The story doesn’t start at the moment the dam explodes. For the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive.” “Objectivity does not mean treating an event as a coin flip between two public statements,” he said. “It demands thinking about the objects and the settings that readers require for understanding amidst uncertainty.”

Let’s hope that becomes the mantra for journalists everywhere.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , ,

Today, along with feeling gratitude for those millions of people over the US’s history who served in the military to defend democratic ideals, I’m feeling troubled that so much of the world still sees war as a way to solve problems.

War only creates problems. It doesn’t solve them. But when someone else starts an aggressive war, are there other choices?

The war in Ukraine has been going on for about 15 months, since Putin’s invasion. Some people say it’s been going on since 2014, when he annexed the Crimea. Putin certainly had other choices–but once he invaded, did Ukraine?

Yesterday, I came across two very different perspectives that both feel to me like they have validity, even though they contradict each other.

First, Marianne Williamson, who has a long history of opposing military intervention and imperialism, sees Russia as the imperialist here, and feels keeping Ukraine from being swallowed is absolutely crucial:

A withdrawal of US support from Ukraine at this point would not lead to peace; it would lead to the most horrifying climax of the war.  Russia would simply deliver its final brutal blow to Ukraine, pummeling it to the point where it would no longer exist as a separate nation…

Regardless how we got here, our only choice at this point is to either support Ukraine or to not. While the United States should do everything possible to support a negotiated settlement, our goal should also be a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine still has a chance to exist.

But she recognizes the need to address the root causes:

The best way to solve conflicts is to prevent them from occurring to begin with, and if I had had the choice, I would have made very different foreign policy decisions related to Russia over the last 40 years. We must set an entirely new and different trajectory of military involvement in the world, one in which we are not the world’s policeman but rather the world’s collaborator in creating a world in which war is no more.

And it’s important to remember those decisions she hints about. I hear so many people express bewilderment that Putin attacked, without a cause that they see and understand. But the reality is that while war is absolutely the wrong way to solve them, Putin does have legitimate reasons for concern, particularly regarding the question of whether Ukraine should join several other former Soviet republics as a NATO member.

Well to the left of Williamson (the most progressive candidate in both the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections, so far) is Stephen Zunes. Earlier this week, Zunes participated in a team debate at Oxford. On the opposing team was ultra-right-wing former US Ambassador to the UN and National Security Advisor John Bolton. While Bolton’s team went on about the need to defend democracy by force in order to make it clear that aggression has consequences,

Zunes however further cautioned against intervention. “Before we start talking about fighting dictatorships, we should stop propping up dictators”, he advised, highlighting the fact that 57% of the world’s dictatorships receive arms from the US. Instead, he appealed to the success of nonviolent methods.

And in fact, nonviolent methods were very prominent in the Ukrainian early resistance.

Meanwhile, one of the other team members arguing against militarized intervention pointed out that the US’s claim that it’s a democracy is a lot weaker than it was:

Closing the debate, Peter Galbraith argued that we must use the effectiveness test when determining whether to fight for democracy. “Yes, there are times we should fight and we have fought successfully,” he proclaimed, but “the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate why it is not feasible to fight for democracy outside the West.” He criticised the Reagan administration’s embracing of Pinochet, under which Bolton served at the time.

Galbraith further argued that both an independent judiciary and political parties accepting election results are essential features of a successful democracy – neither of which the US possesses. He claimed that the Supreme Court has “become more partisan, more extreme right wing, more an instrument of the Republican Party” since 2000. This is referencing George W Bush’s electoral victory in Florida, where a divisive landmark Supreme Court ruling stopped the recount of votes. If the count hadn’t been stopped, Bush’s opponent Al Gore could potentially have won…

Galbraith concluded: “Rather than looking for authoritarian dragons to slay far from home, America should be fighting to save our democracy at home.”

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business Ethics, Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Innovation, Peace and War, poverty, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Chris Brogan borrowed an idea from James Altucher: “Write a list of ten things every day. They can be 10 anythings. Ten terrible dates. Ten places to visit. Ten desserts I want to eat this year. Whatever.”

I won’t commit to making a list daily, but I was inspired to create these two after reading Chris’s post (which includes several samples of his own lists).

 

World Issues
  1. Help figure out how the 30-40% of food that’s wasted can instead be rechanneled to feed those who are starving–and help that get implemented (perhaps this is a place I can target my speaking; see Personal Goal #2, below)
  2. Help amplify the voices of those better qualified than I am to show countries how to solve disputes without going to war
  3. Help build more bridges between/among Left and Right/”woke” and “non-woke”/Muslims and Jews and Christians, etc.
  4. Corollary #1 to #3: Explore and amplify alternatives to counterproductive communication styles: calling-in instead of calling out, respect and listening while searching for common ground instead of shaming
  5. Corollary #2 to #3: Help people to understand that they are not stuck–that just because they have been caught in bad patterns doesn’t mean they are trapped there forever
  6. Continue to demonstrate that baking environmental and social justice directly into companies’ products, services, and mindsets can be highly profitable–find ways for this idea to gain much more traction in the mainstream business world (without having to join that world)
  7. Expose more companies to principles such as biomimicry, multiple function, and circular economy so that they can better understand the financial benefits of deep reimagining, deep re-invention, and regenerativity
  8. Show companies that solving these big problems while increasing profitability requires a mixture of Great Leaps and Kaizen, different in different situations–and that they can do both at once
  9. Corollary to #5: Bring the holistic and systemic analysis that helps determine the right solutions in the right situations, and recommend implementation strategies
  10. Help change mindsets from despair to active, participatory hope: helping everyone I meet understand that he/she/they have the power to effect meaningful change, in their own lives AND in the wider world. Show how ordinary people (usually working with others) have created movements that changed history.
Personal Issues
  1. Probe, discover, and overcome whatever internal barriers are still preventing me from achieving at a higher level–both in terms of impact and revenue–made good progress on this but clearly still have work to do
  2. Book more speaking gigs that pay a fee, whether virtual or live-stage or hybrid–especially international speaking that allows me to explore more parts of the world
  3. Land two or three new long-term consulting clients in the profitable social/environmental justice part of my business
  4. Find steady, decently-paying markets for articles or other types of content, as I had before
  5. Create the right offer for more readers/viewers/listeners to engage with me and come into my orbit
  6. Implement more of the enormous amount of good advice I’ve been given over the past few years
  7. Pick one of the several projects I’ve been tossing around, start it and run it: launch the retreat, the course, the pay-to-participate mastermind/mentoring group OR (not and) the resume-method licensing program
  8. Address issues of fatigue and focus, including lack of motivation, lack of follow-through, and more
  9. Keep up with the torrent of email, LI and FB messages, etc. and figure out a way to spot and respond to the important ones
  10. Continue to be a force in my grandson’s life, even if his parents move out of the area

 

And what are yours?

Please feel welcome to comment with some of your own goal lists. You don’t need ten things. Even one or two. And yes, you can share a whole list of ten if you want to. Just keep in mind that comments will be moderated and abusive or spammy ones will be removed.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, language, Sexuality and Gender, Shel's Personal Life, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Someone on Quora asked, “How do you tell someone their name is wrong?”

A kindergarten classroom similar to what I experienced in 1961. Via Wikimedia Commons, credited to Yogurt yeah. Full attribution: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kindergarten_class_early_1970s.jpg
A kindergarten classroom similar to what I experienced in 1961. Via Wikimedia Commons, credited to Yogurt yeah. Full attribution: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kindergarten_class_early_1970s.jpg

That question brought up a painful long-ago memory. I responded, “Two weeks into kindergarten, I was transferred to a new school. On my arrival day, the teacher said, “I hope you spell your name S-h-e-l-d-o-n, because that’s how we spell it here.” Even at not-yet-five-years-old, I was outraged. I thought but did not say, “Who the #*^%& are you to tell ME how to spell MY name?”

I don’t think that at four years old I even knew a good cuss word to put in the string of symbols but I did know she was messed up. It was an assault on my identity, even though it was not an identity I’d chosen or even liked; in high school, I shortened my name to Shel. But in kindergarten, that was a long way in the future. 

It happened that her spelling was correct—but if it had not been, I’d have gone home and complained to my parents. A few years later, I would have politely told the teacher that her spelling wasn’t the right one, and that I did know how to spell my name. She did get the spelling right—but I tuned that teacher out to the point where it is the ONLY memory I had of her because she had established herself in my head as an ‘authority figure’ of zero importance to me. I went through the motions of kindergarten. I may have wasted a whole year of schooling because she discredited herself to me on my first day.

In today’s world, where the same root name can have a dozen wildly variant spellings, we should not only honor the names people use (whether given or chosen), but also their choice of pronouns. As the parent of a grown child who identifies as nonbinary, I can assure you that they see every intentional use of the pronouns they rejected as a similar assault on their personhood. Five years since the pronoun change, I still goof up once in a while–but they know it’s unintentional and that I’m doing my best to overcome 25 years of programming that associated them with pronouns that were biologically determined.

My kid even wrote a song about the experience of being misgendered repeatedly by a stranger–a waiter in a restaurant. Their website is Flight or Visibility.

And if you’re one of those people that pride yourself on fighting the “culture wars” to preserve heteronormative CIS-gendered lifestyles as the only choice, I’ve got a few questions for you:

  1. Why is the way some other people are wired threatening to you?
  2. Why do you need to stop other people from living the life that feels not just natural to them but their destiny?
  3. How would you feel if it was your personal lifestyle being attacked by people in the centers of power?
  4. Why do you choose actions that invalidate their personhood as mine was invalidated by that kindergarten teacher and my kid’s by that waiter? Does it make you feel superior to put other people down?
  5. If this were not natural, why have non-hetero and gender-queer people of all sorts existed throughout history, even in openly scornful or even repressive societies? Even into the late 1960s, there was basically no support for queer people of any sort, and in many parts of the world, it’s still an anathema that can lead to long prison terms. Yet people persist. They are willing to take on the burdens because they cannot deny who they are. Unlike the homophobes, they are not trying to “recruit” or “convert” others, just trying to live their lives. Why do you try to deny them?
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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Innovation, Mindset, Politics, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , ,
Jacinda Ardern of NZ in mourner's hijab, following the mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque. Credited to "Appaloosa" on Fliker
Jacinda Ardern of NZ in mourner’s hijab, following the mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque.

It’s sad that New Zealand’s amazing Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is stepping down. I’ve been an admirer since she first came across my radar during her campaign to lead that country–and I remain one. She has been a competent, non-bloviating voice of reason and compassion, as well as an excellent role model who proves that at not-yet-40–she took office at 37 and is now 42–a progressive woman can be an effective shepherd of government, even during a term that encompassed multiple global and at least two national crises.

She is my favorite of the current crop of world leaders, in fact.

When I went looking for the photo to accompany this blog, I found this text. Like the photo, it is attributed only to “Appaloosa,” who appears to be a photographer in French Canada and was unlikely to have taken the picture. It sums up my feelings perfectly:

In the aftermath the Christchurch, NZ mosque shootings, the world witnessed what a real leader looks like in New Zealand’s Prime Minister #jacindaardern.

72 hours after the tragedy occurred, Prime Minister Ardern mourned at a vigil in full hijab attire, and promised the nation would not only cover the costs of 51 funerals, but would look after the families and their expenses for as long as it took.

This, after announcing the New Zealand government would ban assault rifles.

It takes courage to lead a country at any time. When you also have to navigate a global pandemic, a world economic mess, a massacre and a natural disaster in your home country, and a rising tide of totalitarian, racist so-called populists, it’s no  wonder she feels her “tank is empty.” It also takes courage to know when it’s time to stop. My hat is off to her and I wish her the best in her next phase.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, language, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

We’ve all heard toxic, disempowering, dream-stomping clichés like

  • “You can’t fight City Hall”
  • “We’ve always done it this other way”
  • “That’s impossible”
  • “You’ll always be a failure”
“We call B.S.!”
That’s the appropriate response, made famous by X Gonzales, at the time an 18-year-old survivor of the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just three days earlier. That same year, they co-organized (and spoke at) a huge national march on Washington and helped to shepherd through the first meaningful gun safety law in gun-loving Florida in this century.
And we all have to “call B.S.” when anyone tries to destroy our self-esteem, our calling, and our power.

18-year-old X Gonzales gives the "Call B.S." speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigleaftropicals/40463975301, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66778488
18-year-old X Gonzales (center) gives the “Call B.S.” speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia.

Like Gonzales, we must embrace our ability to make change and join with others, nonviolently, to achieve that change.
For some, including me, becoming an activist is a way to do that. For others, the path takes different forms, such as being a parent or teacher or health care professional—or, for that matter, an accountant, manufacturer, or prison administrator—and carrying out those duties in ways that build up others, help them achieve those dreams, and help THEM build up others—to build a community, and a planet, based on the worth of every individual. Because to focus only on building yourself up is narcissism, even sociopathic.
This post was inspired by a private note admiring my activism but saying the writer got too depressed to do this kind of work. Here’s s my response, exactly as I wrote it, except I broke it up into more paragraphs and added more specific locations:
I’m sure you make the world better in other ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist–it’s a path where 90 percent or more of your efforts seem to be for naught (though often, change IS happening but not visible in the moment).
Because I focus on the positive, I’m able to find the strength to continue. I keep in mind that when I was born in December, 1956, half of the US was still officially segregated and racism still ruled most of the rest. Women and people of color had very few career opportunities. White women were mostly teachers and nurses while people of color were channeled into laborer, domestic, sanitation worker.
Male-on-female domestic violence and casual sexual harassment were considered normal and acceptable. People were still getting fired or even imprisoned for being in a same-sex or interracial relationship. There was close to zero awareness of pollution, climate change and making our ecosystems more resilient. Decent food was very difficult to find. And the last well-known nonviolent revolution had been in India almost a decade earlier.
Except that OFFICIAL segregation had ended, most of that was still true on October 15, 1969, when one casual comment within a speech at the first Vietnam peace demonstration I ever attended set me on a lifetime path of activism. Yet, in 53 years–a nanosecond in geologic time or even in human history–all of that has shifted. So things ARE getting better because of activism.
The other thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that MY OWN ACTIONS have made a difference several times.
Here are my top three: 1) I founded Save the Mountain, the group that kept a particularly offensive luxury housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range [Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA] a mile and a half from my house. Even experts within the environmental movement locally had given up hope. I went in with the attitude that we would win–but even I thought it would take us five years. We did it in just 13 months–because all of us worked on different pieces where we had expertise, and because we had mass support from area residents.
2) I was one of the 1414 people arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook [New Hampshire, USA] nuclear power plant in 1977. By the time the last of us was released two weeks later, a national safe energy movement had been born, most of it adopting the nonviolent resistance techniques and consensus decision making that we used in Clamshell Alliance here in New England. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the lasting shifts in the culture that movement created: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/. And while we ultimately lost the battle to keep Seabrook from being built, we basically put a halt to the development of new nukes (unfortunately, we have to fight that battle again–but keeping these unsafe and unnecessary monsters off the drawing boards and out of the power grids for nearly 40 years is a pretty good outcome. And this time, I have great confidence that we will win.)
3) My work in local electoral politics [Hampshire County, Massachusetts] has helped to bring about a lasting progressive majority and a series of four progressive mayors in a row in Northampton, and this April took back the Hadley Select Board again after losing to a Trumpian majority in 2021 when we couldn’t find anyone willing to run. I think we’ve taken control of the board three times. Two for sure.
Again, I recognize that my path of activism isn’t for everyone. Neither is my parallel path of working within the business community to spread the message that solving our biggest problems, like hunger, poverty, racism, othering, and even catastrophic climate change and war, can be a profit path for business.
But each and every one of us can find our personal way to make a difference, to brighten the light for all of us, and to help bring into being the planet we want to pass on to subsequent generations.
If this post inspires you, please post a comment about what you’re already doing, or what you will start doing.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, General Commentary, Innovation, language, Mindset, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Screenshot: Opening lines of the poem, "Sometimes the Wolf Cries Girl": Sometimes the hero stumbles/ and falls right off the page./Sometimes the princess…
Opening lines of the poem, “Sometimes the Wolf Cries Girl”

Recently, I posted this poem on Facebook:

A cynical friend responded, “Sometimes…none of this is true.” And I replied,

But all of it is, sometimes. Sometimes is the anchor word here, that allows us to play with our perceptions. All of it is true once in a while, but all of it is not true often enough that the inability to go there feels normative to you. As someone who has spent some big chunks of my life on the margins for various reasons, I can assure you that the narrow, normative, conformist version of reality isn’t real for a big percentage of the population—but who’s in and who’s out might vary over time.

My “margins” experience is both direct and indirect. Directly, I’ve been treated as marginal—”othered”—for living in poverty in my younger years…for not being into sports, hypermasculinity, or TV celebrity culture…for being Jewish…for being bisexual…for being a Northerner in Georgia and an Easterner in Southwest Ohio…And I’ve confronted ageism against both the young and the old—which started when I was very young and has continued now that people are beginning to think of me as old.

But I’ve also worked with a lot of groups that were marginalized in ways outside of my own direct experience of it. In college in the 1970s—long before same-sex couples were socially acceptable—I ran the campus Gay Center and started two more in cities where I had college co-op jobs and went to my first same-sex wedding in 1978 or ’79. I did community organizing around the environment and safe energy all the way back to 1971, when I was a 14-year-old high school junior—and that consciousness didn’t really become mainstream until THIS century.  I worked as a paid organizer for an elders’ rights organization at 22 and 23. I had my consciousness raised about a whole bunch of disability rights and minority rights issues during the six years in the 1990s when I served on my city’s official disability access committee (helping public spaces like theaters and restaurants meet accessibility codes) and simultaneously on the District Attorney’s Civil Rights Advisory Board (sensitizing lawyers, cops, and criminal justice workers to the needs of marginalized communities). I worked for 15 years in that city and 24 years in the neighboring small town where I live now on opening up the electoral process and city/town government to disenfranchised voices. And for more than three years, I’ve been deeply involved with immigration/refugee justice work, including an extended visit to the US-Mexico border where we visited a huge refugee camp daily and heard the stories of some of the most marginalized people in the world. 

This diversity of experience may seem very random—but certain common threads hold it all together into a larger whole that feels coherent and meaningful to me. A few examples:

  • All of this work is about empowering people who have felt powerless
  • All of it embraces the same construct that the poet presents: that just because something is a certain way doesn’t at all mean it’s impossible to change it (I even did a TEDx talk on this called “‘Impossible’ Is A Dare” (it’s 15 minutes long, riffs on a quote by Muhammad Ali that I misattributed at the time, and discusses how socially and environmentally conscious businesses can change the world—to watch, click the link and then click again on “event videos”)
  • All of it works on the theory that change happens faster and more fully when it becomes a movement—while acknowledging that acting alone can still make a significant difference. (I’m very proud of my one-person, three-day demonstration against the US bombing of Libya that drew middle fingers and jeers on the first day, but supportive honks and waves on the third day, as well as many individual conversations with people who thought differently, sometimes reaching common ground and always de-demonizing each other—but I’m even prouder of the broad-based movement I founded that saved an endangered local mountain.)
  • It all recognizes that change happens both internally, inside your own heart and brain, and externally, as the actions of one person or a movement ripple out into the wider world–and as these movements find common ground and begin to work together, discovering their intersectionality: their common struggle.
  • As these movements begin to combine like an amoeba merging with its neighbor, it becomes easier to achieve drastic restructuring of society as people begin to look at solutions to our biggest problems as interrelated, holistic, and systemic.

So yes, we have the power to change ourselves and the world. As the poem says in its final lines,

just because it’s what we’ve been told
doesn’t make it true.

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