This morning on KQED's "Forum" one of my mentors and life teachers, bell hooks, told the story of asking one of her mentors—Thich Nhat Hanh—about letting go of her anger and rage. Thich Nhat Hanh's response was to say, "Hold onto your anger. Use it as compost in your garden." As an activist, these words hit home. For they point to an urgent and central theme that holds great potential for activist communities.
As activists, how do we learn to balance the anger at injustice that often sparks our action, with a place of compassion which also finds the humanity in the individual oppressor? How do we engage our rage enough to use it as compost without letting it consume our souls? Is it possible to be truly thankful to the oppressor for stirring our passion, while still moving to a world in which oppression and cruelty are unacceptable?
There is an urgency to these questions at the moment, because the culture of money that has replaced our values of soul and spirit with mathematical money formulas is reaching a critical point. A point at which the arrogance of the globalism financial system is no longer being ignored by the disenfranchised and exploited. The potential towards violence—anger as consuming—is very real as evidenced by the youthful and quite angry vandalism in Seattle. Though this expression of anger via property destruction was a minority activity among the activists present, among the police and governmental forces, it was not. As a majority, the police practiced violence from consuming anger.
Though our tactics as activists are centered on principles of non-violence, it is still astonishing to me how many people are willing to perceive corporate CEOs as consciously evil. How many activists carry a "hate" toward corporations as if they were people rather than a systematic organizing principle. With this simplification as a context, it becomes easy to turn our action into simple confrontation.
If we as an activist community, or an affinity of activist communities, are to be truly effective in the long term, perhaps a leverage point is working to transform our paradigm of angry iconoclasm to magical compassion.
In a workshop recently buddhist scholar Robert Thurman responded to a question with an example. What happens when an enlightened being is struck by a drunk driver running a red light. How does compassion and forgiveness function? The answer, of course, is that while forgiving and holding compassion for all humanity, the Buddha responsibly takes down the driver's license and insurance and reports him to the police. The challenge for the effective activist is to hold compassion, humor and love toward our adversaries (and ourselves) while still holding them accountable for the actions which inflict suffering on the planet and its peoples. We don't all get to a compassionate world until we all get there together. But we don't all get there together if we let forgiveness turn into simply inaction.
The challenge, however, requires more than personal growth or community development. It is also systematic. For we live in an era where our economic life support system demands our individual attention in a way that leaves very little time to engage in the processes of grief and loving engagement. Those processes that make us soulful humans. At the first annual Open World Conference of Independent Trade Unionists last weekend in San Francisco, a locked out steel worker told of what he has learned from a 17 month strike against the Maxxam corporation. After describing watching his retirement dwindle away, and his daughter's education fund erode and his general financial picture become hopeless he told of the transformation in his priorities. For now he was getting to know his family again, whom before he never got to see because he was working. He found the value of his community of union brothers as well as common ties with the environmental community fighting Maxxam's devestation of California's ancient redwood forests. But it took having the time to spend to find the place for this true circle of love to emerge. We, as a culture, owe it to ourselves to transform our activity to allow time for love and grief.
I haven't yet read my mentor's new book, but I know it touches on an urgent and highly leveraged theme for the activist and others working toward social, economic and environmental justice. I hope it will catalyze magical transformation.
(copyright 17 February 2000, by Carter Brooks)