Tag: activism

The Optimism of Uncertainty

distressflagwhEvery January for the past several years I’ve joined activists in front of the White House to protest the indefinite detention of 40 Muslim men at the Guantanamo Bay detention center.  This year, January 11 marked the 18th anniversary of the prison’s opening.

I took the train to Washington in January with a mixture of anxiety and dread.  Anxiety that no one would show up, because who even remembers that the Guantanamo prison is still open?  Dread because this would be yet another year where, regardless of how many people did make the effort to travel to the White House to protest, the protests would be falling on deaf ears: Donald Trump, whose support is needed to close the prison, couldn’t care less.

Still, there was something beautiful in the annual ritual.  This year I had a filmmaker and cameraman with me, and the short film they created captures that.  It shows ordinary Americans of all ages traveling from across the country to Washington, DC. Many of them fast for several days before the event, in solidarity with the men who’ve undertaken hunger strikes in the prison. They gather and sleep on the floor of a local church until the day of the anniversary, when they put on orange jumpsuits and black hoods to represent the plight of the 40 men still indefinitely detained, most without charge or trial, in the US military prison in Cuba.

This year, we marched from the White House to the Trump International Hotel.

“I don’t think there’s any futility in that,” Reverend Ron Stief, director of the National Religious Campaign against Torture, told us. “Human rights is a long game… We owe it to the detainees who remain there never to stop.”

The president may not have been listening, but the protesters were connecting with each other, while calling the attention of passersby who knew nothing at all about their cause.

“What is Guantanamo?” a young woman who’d recently come to the US from Argentina asked me as I stood among the crowd at the rally, listening to the various speakers. She’d been drawn to the protest while walking through Lafayette Park that sunny Saturday afternoon.  I explained what it was; she stayed to listen longer.

Most activists are exhausted these days, and our actions can easily feel futile.  But it’s helpful to remember we’re all playing a long game, and that there’s beauty, even joy, in just showing up for it:  to support one another, to raise our voices together, and to call everyone’s attention to something larger than ourselves.

In his essay, “The Optimism of Uncertainty,” the historian Howard Zinn wrote:

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

On Staying Hopeful

954325Last week was tough. Not just because many of us were returning to work after a holiday break, but for anyone who works in social justice advocacy, the air is thick with fear, apprehension, lingering shock and disappointment. What will this new administration bring?  So far, the signs are ominous.

I was reading through news stories about refugees and asylum seekers the other day, trying to help my organization figure out how to combat some of the misinformation that’s been spreading like wildfire through cyberspace. It didn’t take long before I was depressed and discouraged. The distortions, the nastiness, the sheer vitriol I found targeted at some of the most unfortunate and vulnerable people in the world these days was beyond disheartening. It made me feel like there’s this huge dark cloud amassing and expanding over the country, threatening a deluge of hatred and anger and violence that could wipe out many of the fundamental values and assumptions we’d come to rely on.

What I’m describing, of course, is a sense of despair, and I see it all around me these days. Many of us seem to be moving through a haze, lamenting the times, and, especially during the holidays, drinking away our sorrows with like-minded friends and neighbors, as if we could put the disappointment of 2016 behind us.

It’s a mood that’s easy to slip into, but really, a luxury we cannot afford. Yes, the idea of Donald Trump as president and Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Rex Tillerson as secretary of state seemed so absurd and beyond our imagination just a few short months ago that it’s hard to know how to respond now. But merely indulging or consoling ourselves with the latest spikes in the stock market isn’t the way to go. There’s a lot each of us can do towards shoring up the values and principles and social compacts many of us still believe in, and while some of it may be painful and tedious and frustrating, it’s still worth the effort. Tempting as it may be, we can’t just check out now.

It can be helpful to remember that progress never happens in a steady upwards trajectory. There are always discouraging dips and setbacks and stumbles along the way. And real, lasting gains can require decades or longer to take root. Think of gay marriage, an idea barely considered 20 years ago, or the fact that 100 years ago women still weren’t trusted with the right to vote. Just 50 years before that, Africans could still be seized, shipped, sold and bought as slaves in this country. We’ve come a long way.

In her 2016 book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit likens social change to the emergence of mushrooms in a forest:

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork – or underground work – often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media. It seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.

The ugly expressions of racism, sexism and xenophobia so easily found online these days can make it seem as if it’s impossible to change anyone’s mind, especially as people seem to just immerse themselves in opinions they already agree with, the ideas and beliefs bouncing around in their chosen echo chamber getting louder and uglier as they reverberate.

We do, however, operate in a larger culture, and political system, and slowly, over time, progress can and often does occur.

As Solnit puts it:

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power…

Positive change is not inevitable, though. We’re seeing some pretty ugly mushrooms sprout right now. Hope is “not a substitute for action, only a basis for it,” Solnit reminds us. “Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act.”

That’s a sentiment I’ll be holding onto. None of us alone can change the current political climate, but we all can find ways to contribute to its change. Yes, we also have to take breaks, to turn off the news, appreciate silence and take care of ourselves. But this is not the time to retreat and accept the status quo. Those dark clouds will need a strong wind to disperse them.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

On “The Habits of Highly Cynical People”

1342548285858004Rebecca Solnit has a powerful essay in the May issue of Harper’s that gets at something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

In “The Habits of Highly Cynical People,” Solnit writes about what she calls “naive cynicism” — a pervasive cultural tendency to predict the worst, as if somehow that will protect us or make us seem smarter.

“We live in a time when the news media and other purveyors of conventional wisdom like to report on the future more than the past,” writes Solnit, and “use bad data and worse analysis to pronounce with great certainty on future inevitabilities, present impossibilities, and past failures.” The problem with this mindset isn’t just that it’s not accurate, but that it “bleeds the sense of possibility and maybe the sense of responsibility out of people.”

I’ve noticed this attitude pervade so many conversations these days, as people assume political movements or other signs of collective interest and action will ultimately go nowhere, so that even if they believe in the goal, they feel no need to actually participate. It’s why so many people don’t even bother to vote. “They’re all the same, what’s the difference?” is a common refrain about political candidates. As if Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton were actually interchangeable.

This “naive cynicism,” Solnit notes, is “first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish.” But refusing to look at the details of one policy or another, or to acknowledge nuances in different positions or values, is really just refusing to engage with reality. Not because the details and differences don’t matter, but rather, because they’re complicated. And to acknowledge those complications and uncertainties makes people feel uncomfortable.

“Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards,” writes Solnit. “But denouncing anything less than perfection as morally compromising means pursuing aggrandizement of the self, not engagement with a place or system or community, as the highest priority.”

I agree with Solnit’s message wholeheartedly, but I’m troubled by her tone. Solnit’s essay suggests a certain contempt for these “naive cynics” who declare activists’ efforts a failure long before their outcome is clear, or assume victory must be immediately visible to be worth acknowledging. But while their view may be simplistic, it’s also understandable.

I have a certain sympathy with cynicism, not of the kind Solnit’s talking about, but the historical kind, the cynicism that’s skeptical of powerful institutions and entrenched traditions, not of individuals’ ability to act virtuously and to effect change. To me, that’s “mindful cynicism.” But I can see how, particularly if you’ve tried participating in collective actions that don’t yield the outcome you’re after, one can unwittingly slide into a more profound cynicism about the possibility of change at all.

It’s a form of hopelessness, really, and it’s not just self-aggrandizement, but also fear that underlies that mindset. It’s a fear of hoping for something better that may not change within the foreseeable future; it’s the fear of looking foolish for trying to change something that often looks like it’s not going to budge. It’s a very natural inclination to look for solid ground to stand on, in a world that’s ever-changing, never standing still. It feels safer to predict the worst for the world, and to focus instead on self-improvement, or at least on making our own lives more comfortable. That may seem, at least, like something over which we’d have more control.

That kind of mindset is ultimately a recipe for misery. Our self-improvement is never good enough, and neither are our material comforts. Philosophers and then psychologists have long understood that human beings need to believe in and strive for something more meaningful — something that transcends ourselves. Naive cynicism – or hopelessness, which might be a more accurate word – discards the possibility of all that. It is profoundly depressing.

At the same time, to proclaim our dominant culture naively cynical, as Solnit does, is to buy into a similar mindset that assumes a static entity. Yes, we’re surrounded by forces that encourage a cynical mindset: simplistic and extremist punditry that boosts individuals’ careers, the pronouncement of disasters and exaggeration of fears that boosts audiences and ultimately ad revenue. But to some extent, even those institutions are on the decline: the proliferation of news sources saps the influence of television stations like CNN or Fox News that peddle cynical sensationalism; and the surprising success of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign suggests a groundswell of support for renewed engagement in civic life, especially by a new generation of voters.

I agree with Solnit that “what we do begins with what we believe we can do. It begins with being open to the possibilities and interested in the complexities.” That applies to the phenomenon of naive cynicism as well. It means not writing off those who feel hopeless, but engaging with them. Which requires first understanding their fear and discomfort, and then, rather than dismissing it, helping them see that a mindlessly defensive response does not serve them — or anyone else.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Love and Activism

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A few years ago I was on a nonprofit leadership training retreat, when everyone had to go around the circle and declare their “purpose.” This was the sort of exercise I dreaded, so I scrambled to come up with something plausible I could say that wouldn’t be too embarrassing. Then I heard one of the retreat leaders announce that her purpose was “love.”

My eyes widened and it took all the energy I could muster to keep from rolling them. “Love?” I thought. “Really? And this is a professional leadership training?”

It’s easy to be cynical about the word “love.” It’s exploited to sell products and convince us we need lots of self-improvement to be worthy of it. In Hollywood movies or on TV, it’s mostly young beautiful women who find it (the movies are much more forgiving to men), prompting the rest of us to feel we should rush out and buy whatever we can be duped into thinking might allow us to make ourselves over into that image. The obsessive focus on the self that creates actually leads to the opposite of love: self-consciousness and self-loathing, as well as a cramped and defensive view of everyone else.

The popular view of nonromantic love, meanwhile, is the perfect immediate family, consisting of mother, father and several children, all happy, attractive, posing perfectly for their envy-inducing snapshot on Facebook.

I’ve since gotten to know that retreat leader better, and I don’t think she meant any of those things. I think she was talking about a far more expansive, and healthy, understanding of love, one that leads to the opposite of self-consciousness, narcissism, and envy; one that instead helps dissolve the boundaries between ourselves and the world around us, opening up greater possibilities for engagement, and for joy.

The research psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls this “positivity resonance.” Fredrickson is a professor at the University of North Carolina and a leading researcher in the study of positive emotions. Her book, Love 2.0, offers an intriguing and I think really useful look at the whole concept of love: what it means, when it occurs, and the powerful physical and psychological effects it has on us – and its potential to connect us to a much broader range of people in the world.

Not surprisingly, Fredrickson finds that love is nothing like what we see in the movies. It’s not something you fall into or have unconditionally or need to find from that one special someone you’re searching for. It doesn’t require commitment or long-term bonding or even shared values, although those things can help create conditions that encourage it. But in itself, love is an often fleeting feeling you can have when you connect with almost anyone, including a complete stranger, under the right circumstances. It has a powerful impact on our bodies and our health, and literally synchronizes people as their brain functions mirror one another’s. Studies show the experience of this sort of love actually creates a broader perspective and understanding, of ourselves, of the other person, and of everything around us. What’s more, its quantity is unlimited; it’s an emotion we can develop and increase, regardless of our current relationship or family circumstances.

Obviously, this isn’t specifically romantic love, although that’s one form of it. But the kind of love I’m talking about doesn’t depend on finding any one perfect “soulmate” somewhere out there in the universe. It’s simply, as Fredrickson defines it, “that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being, and is “perhaps the most essential emotional experience for thriving and health.”

What I like about this view is that it so clearly corresponds with actual human experience, and defies the silly cultural expectations that love be everlasting, unconditional, or limited to one person at a time. Rather, just as we experience it, love is an ever-shifting emotion that comes and goes, arises and fades away. It’s not exclusive. It’s not a unique feeling you reserve for one partner, or for immediate family or friends.

Positivity resonance is literally a “back and forth reverberation of positive energy.” Indeed, brain imaging studies done by Princeton professor Uri Hasson have shown that connection between two people actually creates synchronized changes in both people’s biochemistry. Hasson and his colleagues have shown that parts of people’s brains literally into sync during emotional moments – what Hasson calls “brain-to-brain coupling.” It’s how we understand each other.

The impact of this emotion on our bodies is astonishing. Love or positivity resonance strengthens the vagus nerve, which reaches from the brain down through the body to the abdomen, and touches most major organs along the way. The vagus nerve plays a key role in the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates the body’s stress level. A strong vagus nerve, or high vagal “tone,” as its measured, means the parasympathetic nervous system is working effectively to reduce the negative impact of stress on the body — slowing your heart rate after a frightening experience, for example. Scientists view vagal tone as a reflection of the strength of the immune system; a strong vagal tone make us more resistant to a broad range of diseases, including heart failure, stroke, arthritis, diabetes, and even some cancers.

Love also affects our bodies by increasing levels of the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin has long been known to be critical to mother-child bonding and sexual connection, but it’s also been found to increase during much more subtle emotional and social interactions. Oxytocin triggers the release of serotonin, which leads to increased feelings of happiness and reduces levels of stress. (Most anti-depressant medication similarly tries to increase the brain’s serotonin levels.)

The encouraging thing about all this is that it’s largely within our control. Increasing this sort of love is ultimately about letting yourself be open to it. Sure, there are formal practices designed to induce loving feelings, like lovingkindness meditations, or reflecting at the end of every day on the most positive interactions you had with other people, which can be very effective. (Fredrickson has studied these practices and finds that if done over time, they actually increase vagal tone.) So, too, can simply increasing awareness of the positive impact true connections can have.

Daily interactions, with colleagues at work or neighbors in the dog park, for example, can take on a new meaning. Instead of merely awkward small talk by the water-cooler or bleary-eyed encounters picking up dog poop in the morning, they become opportunities for increasing positivity resonance and better health.

Positivity resonance can support social activism as well. Instead of focusing only on achieving a particular outcome, which may be elusive, the possibility of connecting in a real way with others doing the same thing –- and experiencing the same frustrations — can give our advocacy work a whole other purpose.

This sort of “love” can help counter the burnout advocates so often feel in another way, too. Focusing on the problems of the world and seeing few easy solutions can quickly lead to pessimism, despair and depression. Focusing on positive feelings for those who you might benefit, on the other hand — what lovingkindness meditation does — can really lift the spirit.

Meditations on love and kindness or positive interactions with neighbors, colleagues or clients won’t stop wars or save the planet or directly help those suffering the consequences of those disasters. But if practiced regularly and sincerely, they can renew our sense of hope by changing how we feel towards other people, including those most harmed by the world’s problems. And that can help keep us motivated to do what we can to help.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

You Can’t Own It All

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When I go on vacation, I like to find a remote and quiet spot. In fact, much of the reason I go on vacation is to escape the sounds of sirens and jackhammers and car alarms and blaring music I confront on a daily basis in New York City.

Inevitably, though, when I get to my carefully chosen vacation destination, I’m at least a little bit disappointed. There are other people there, for one thing, and they’re usually doing things I don’t like.

Yesterday, as I sat on the deck of the rustic cabin we’d rented for a week along the coast of Maine, for example, I was suddenly shocked out of my reverie by the roar of speeding engines:  a family on jet skis, screaming and whooping as they circled round and round the quiet cove we’d spent a chunk of our savings to spend a week on.

I could feel my stomach tie into knots, and all that compassion I’ve trained to muster fly right out the window.  I wanted to kill these people.  Literally.  It wasn’t just my peace and quiet they were destroying, I was thinking.  I imagined the local harbor seals rushing off in terror, the sea birds abandoning their nests, and the jet skis leaving behind a slick of oil that would sink behind them into the ocean water. They were not only destroying my peace of mind, but they were destroying the planet. I was outraged.

There’s a curious possessiveness that comes over me when I come to a place like this. On the one hand, I feel immediately relaxed just visiting here, being so close to nature. Yet almost immediately, I start to feel like I want to own it. I check Trulia for house prices and start fantasizing about how I’d fix up this run-down rental cottage if it were mine.  Something about liking the place makes me want to possess it, to control it, to keep it for myself.  And as with any sort of grasping, that desire makes me suffer. Even if I could afford a waterfront cabin in Maine, which I can’t, it wouldn’t be enough:  I couldn’t possibly own, and control, the entire wilderness.

The jet skiers brought that point home. It’s a similar sort of grasping, a desire to own and control, that leads to the sort of destruction and disruption of precious nature that I saw the jet-skiiers engaged in. Their aim, too, was to “own” the bay, but they weren’t just imagining what it would be like; they were seizing the whole harbor and turning it into their play area. That excluded anyone else who might be there seeking more quiet enjoyment.

This all reminds me of a memorable passage in philosopher Michel Serres’ book The Natural Contract:

I’ve often remarked that, just as certain animals piss on their territory so that it stays theirs, many men mark and dirty the things they own by shitting on them, in order to keep them, or shit on other things to make them their own. This stercoraceous or excremental origin of property rights seems to me a cultural source of what we call pollution, which, far from being an accidental result of involuntary acts, reveals deep intentions and a primary motivation.

Let’s have lunch together: when the salad bowl is passed, all one of us has to do is spit in it and it’s all his, since no one else will want any more of it. He will have polluted that domain and we will consider dirty that which, being clean only to him, he now owns. No one else ventures again into the places devastated by whoever occupies them in this way. Thus the sullied world reveals the mark of humanity, the mark of its dominators, the foul stamp of their hold and their appropriation.

A living species, ours, is succeeding in excluding all the others from its niche, which is now global: how could other species eat or live in that which we cover with filth? If the soiled world is in danger, it’s the result of our exclusive appropriation of things.

Ironically, one of the only ways to protect natural land these days, it seems, is to buy it – hence The Nature Conservancy was created to buy large tracts to protect the wilderness from “development” – that is, from people defecating on it.

Most of us can’t afford to buy hundreds of acres to preserve. And so we travel ever farther – in earth-destroying automobiles and airplanes – to find that peace and quiet and natural beauty we all viscerally long for, yet which human “development” – stemming in part from our desire to possess and control — has increasingly destroyed.

Inevitably, this grasping will lead not only to the destruction of our own peace of mind, as we arrive at our destination only to find ourselves surrounded by car traffic and jet skis, but to the destruction of the planet itself.

How can this possibly change? Given the short-term thinking that controls our culture, Serres points out, our political system has failed to address this. He believes we need politicians who are not just lawyers but also scientists and philosophers, which sounds like a good idea. We certainly need politicians who are sufficiently enlightened and independent to be able to promote and motivate others to support our collective long-term interests.

I reached a similar conclusion myself the other day, in a different context. I was speaking to a class of foreign law students about human rights advocacy, particularly in the face of the endless war our country seems to have embraced. I ended with the usual lament that with our current state of politics, with politicians serving their own short-term interests, which often turn out to be the interests of defense contractors, it’s hard to imagine significant change anytime soon. Certainly international human rights law wasn’t going to accomplish it. One of the students refused to accept that downer of an answer, and asked:  So what would change things?  I thought about it, and realized that the only thing I could imagine is a new kind of politician – a long-term thinker interested in more than his or her own re-election and willing to stand up to the powerful short-term interests that control much of our society.

Of course, there are small changes that happen in small ways, and I don’t mean to diminish those. But anyone who believes in anything faces the constant challenge of appreciating what you’re doing without getting too hung up on its limitations – and angry at the people creating them. That can be hard.

I’ve managed to enjoy my time in Maine despite the obnoxious jet-skiiers  (thank god they go in at low tide) and the sound of cars in the distance whizzing by on the local highway.  I’ve had to remind myself that I, too, share that tendency to grasp, possess and control things, so focusing on how other people have done the same (albeit in what I consider a more destructive manner) is a bit absurd.  I’ve also made a point of taking time out each day to meditate, to encourage a sense of inner peace and stillness, wherever I am and whatever’s going on around me. (I’ve found the meditation app Headspace really helpful for that, by the way, and recommend it for anyone who has trouble meditating on her own.)

I still think jet skis ought to be outlawed and all our use of motor vehicles more strictly regulated.  And I’ll do everything in my power to support those sorts of policies, whether advocating for more bike lanes back in the city or voting for whatever political candidate seems to truly share my concerns.

But I know – and will continually have to remind myself – that I can’t hinge my happiness on the outcome.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting