REASONS FOR THIS BLOG
I am frustrated by the tone and the substance of the conversations that dominate progressive media and progressive organizations. This blog is my effort to start a different kind of conversation. I want to talk about hope, not despair; victory, not defeat; action, as well as thought; heroes, not villains; and what people have in common, rather than what drives them apart.
The fact that progressive media and organizations are so focused on despair, defeat, and differences (along with lack of organizational and leadership development – but that’s another discussion) keep us from being effective in what we do, and from building a movement big and strong enough to create real change. In short, they are:
1. All Bad News, All The Time
2. All Problems, No Solutions
3. All White Urban Boomers
4. Demonizing The Opposition
Here’s my proposed antidotes to the problems listed above (details below).
1. A daily entry about something that’s going right in the world
2. Solutions that are being suggested or tried for key problems
3. Issues of the non-rich, non-white, non-urban, youth, and seniors, as well as the lives of my own boomer generation
4. No personal attacks on members of the opposition (internal or external)
A great inspiration for this blog was an article by Jean Hardisty and Deepak Bhargava which appeared in the Nation magazine in November 2005 called Wrong About The Right. I believe it’s the most cogent and important political analysis in existence.
ALL BAD NEWS, ALL THE TIME
Progressive and mainstream media alike feature an unrelenting, all but exclusive, focus on bad news and disappointing leaders. It’s not merely depressing. It’s not just a sharply limited view of reality. It doesn’t only reinforce the idea that more entertainment and human interest stories, and less hard news, is what people want.
The biggest problem I have with the bad-news bears is that they reinforce the status quo. They make people feel powerless and hopeless. They discourage people from trying to make things better or standing up to the powers that be. When a recent Green Party survey asked members what the biggest obstacle was to building their groups locally, what they cited most wasn’t a negative perception of the party. It wasn’t lack of money or time. It was APATHY: the belief among potential recruits that nothing they could do would matter anyway. I’m not trying to minimize or ignore any of the terrible things going on in the world. I’m sure I yell at the radio and TV as much as anyone. However, there are endless sources of that information; you don’t need me for it. What I want to talk about here is how people are responding to what’s going on, and how they’re making a difference.
EHRENREICH: “I HATE HOPE”
A recent essay in Harper’s Magazine was the ultimate example of the bad-news focus: Pathologies of Hope, by Barbara Ehrenreich. The article says that what she calls the “cult of positivity” is terribly misguided and potentially life-threatening. It begins, “I hate hope,” and goes on to scoff at the “self-help gurus” marketing “snake oil.”
She sneers at the idea of writing a “gratitude journal” and opines that these marketers of positive thinking are encouraging people to “imagine that all the obstacles you face are projections of some lingering negativity.” She quotes a psychologist, Martin Seligman, as saying that the purview of positive psychology is nations that “are wealthy and not in civil turmoil and not at war,” perhaps not realizing that he had thus excluded the majority of the world’s people.
She quotes her “teen hero Camus” as saying one must draw strength from “the refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”
When I read Ehrenreich’s essay, what came to my mind was a story in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon (an essential book for anyone interested in the subject of depression). In the course of Solomon’s research, he came upon a woman who had suffered greatly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This woman, Phaly Nuon, has set up a center to help women suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in Phnom Penh. It’s hard to imagine anyone who has suffered more or seen worse things than she. Yet rather than becoming, as Ehrenreich declares herself, “hope-free,” Nuon developed a system that helps these women get past the horror and build new lives. The power of positive thinking is in no way limited to the First World. And with all due respect to Camus, I can’t imagine anyone drawing strength from a refusal to hope.
HOPE MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
Hope is not only what makes us move; it actually improves our performance.
Many psychological studies and theorists have demonstrated that “hopefulness is a necessary condition for action.” (Ezra Stotland, The Psychology of Hope) Stotland quotes a somewhat gruesome rat study on this subject. A group of wild rats seemed to depend heavily on their whiskers for functioning in the world. A researcher clipped their whiskers and then dunked them in water. They soon gave up swimming and drowned. If, however, he immersed them briefly a few times and then took them out, they learned that they could still swim with less whiskers, and they started swimming again. Lab rats, who weren’t so psychologically dependent on their whiskers, never had a problem swimming.
In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman illustrates the effect of hope on performance. He looks at a Kansas study of freshman college students, and shows that “hope was a better predictor of their first-semester grades than their scores on the SAT. Students with high hope set themselves higher goals and know how to work hard to attain them. When you compare students of equivalent intellectual aptitude on their academic achievements, what sets them apart is hope.” Any good teacher could tell you the same thing.
So, hope is essential, and there are lots of reasons to have it, which we’ll be talking about.
ALL PROBLEMS, NO SOLUTIONS
Why focus on solutions? One reason is that success breeds success. Stotland will tell you that “an individual’s expectations of success are a direct function of his previous levels of success of other tasks of a similar type.” Also, “success in attaining a previous goal leads to raising or at least maintaining the level” of aspiration. When we hear about others succeeding, it can make us more hopeful of success ourselves. So that’s one reason to focus on victories and solutions: to inspire and encourage people to keep on keeping on, and keep raising the bar.
Another reason is the fact that the left suffers from a terrific vision deficit. We’re against the war, against the tax cuts, against the SUV’s. What would we put in their place? That’s what people want to know. People want to know what our values are. They want to know whether we’ re the kind of people who can come up with innovative and effective solutions to problems. Coming up with the answers is a lot tougher, but ultimately more satisfying, than complaining.
We need all the good ideas we can get right now. We can’t be bound by what’s been done before or by what those in power consider “possible” or “realistic.” We need what Hardisty and Bhargava call “fearless politics.” Why? Because it works, as they go on to say: “By boldly taking stands that are far outside the mainstream, the right has managed to pull the mainstream to the right. For progressives, timidity, ambiguity, and constant compromise have not proved successful strategies.”
IT’S NOT MADE BY GREAT MEN[1]
A third reason is that we suffer from a leadership deficit as well as a vision deficit. The focus on corrupt and incompetent leaders keeps us from trusting, supporting and developing the good leaders among us, and from developing a concept of what real leadership might look like. Hardisty and Bhargava note that the successful civil rights movement had many leaders who believed in “the centrality of developing ordinary people as agents of change, rather than in charismatic leadership or coalitions of elites.” We must celebrate emerging and little-known leaders, especially at the local level, as they are the new generation of leadership. There ARE heroes out there as well as villains. They need a little airtime.
One of the formative experiences of my life was when I visited Nicaragua in 1984, five years after the Sandinista revolution. I learned then that winning power is the end of one struggle and the beginning of another: after you win, you have to know how to govern. We need to be ready for that.
ALL WHITE URBAN BOOMERS
Like I said, we need all the good ideas we can get right now. We need a society that works for everyone, and we need everyone involved in building it. I was appalled, but not surprised, when I went to an event in the fall of 2006 that purported to be a discussion of “class war” and the economic situation in America. Everyone on the stage was a white urban baby boomer. The word “poverty” went unsaid, and there was no mention of any poor or working-class people either. The assumption seemed to be that everyone who matters is white, and either rich or middle-class. As Hardisty and Bhargava say, “When people of color look for allies, there is no reason to assume they will support the larger progressive movement when their issues receive only lipservice and they are not widely represented in the movement’s leadership and decision-making structures.” There is no reason to assume that youth, seniors, or those in rural areas and outside the Coasts – similarly ignored and marginalized by the left – will get on the bus either. I am absolutely committed to painting a different picture here.
DEMONIZING THE OPPOSITION
Today we heard that Cindy Sheehan has quit the peace movement. She is apparently exhausted, demoralized, and bitterly disappointed by the relentless attacks on her from the left as well as the right. She seemed in her statement especially disheartened by those who felt she was out of line for criticizing Democrats. There is a general ugliness about the way people conduct themselves in political discussions – especially on the Internet – which is totally counterproductive. We have lost many good people besides Cindy from the movement because of it. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it won’t be, in this corner of the world at any rate.
Thanks for visiting my blog, and if you are so moved, please send a comment and/or a story about what’s working in your world.
Karen Young
May 2007
P.S. I do not receive any compensation from any group or individual for items appearing in this blog. Should that change, it will be fully disclosed.
[1] The title of a song by the seminal punk band Gang of Four, about how history is not made by “great men” and history books don’t necessarily tell the whole story.
