I want simply to introduce two of my heros. Both, not accidentally, are women. I grew up with strong, thoughtful, compassionate women, survivors and straight shooters all, and all had a great sense of humor: my mother Anna Roosevelt, my grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt, and my older sister, Ellie Seagraves. (All, by the way, bore the same family name, still being passed from generation to generation in the Roosevelt family — Anna Eleanor. They were, and remain, my intimate heros.
But one has heros in the wider world as well. My grandmother Eleanor bridged the two for me. Here, in their own words, are two women I have never met, but I have been deeply influenced by their writing and their character, which shines through in their writing. They are Joanna Macy and Rebecca Solnit. Please meet them.
Joanna Macy
Joanna still travels the earth, if less often and closer to home. Her wisdom still shines. She still makes me weep, laugh, hope, love and work. Here are some of her current and stunning comments:
For peace, justice, and life on Earth, fresh ways of seeing arise, and ancient ways return....I share....in service to the revolution of our time: the "Great Turning" from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.
The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way todestroying the world — we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.
The key: overcoming denial
We need to recognize that denial itself is the greatest danger we face. We have the technology to make sweeping and fairly effective changes. But not much can be done until we’re ready to acknowledge the situation we’re in, to let it sink in.
That kind of acknowledgement isn’t easy. Our fear of despair functions to filter out painful information, and furthermore it’s not in the interest of our economic system, as it is presently structured, for us to get alarmed. It’s in the perceived self-interest of the state, the corporations, and the media which serve them for us to imagine that everything is just fine and that we are happy – or that we’re just about to be happy if we buy this product or that product. So to break through this protective screen we’ve erected, it’s very helpful to see it as a spell, like in the old fairy tales.
It’s like the spell that grips the courtiers in the castle of the Fisher King in the legend of the Holy Grail: They’re in the middle of the Wasteland where nothing grows anymore, and both the land and the rulers have lost their powers of regeneration. But they’re mesmerized, so they maintain the status quo. They all move around on automatic, like smiling robots. We are under a comparable spell, and we can break out of it the way the Fisher King and his courtiers did. Thanks to Parsifal’s caring questions – "What aileth thee?" – they encountered what they already knew beneath the denial and the repressed despair, and that smack of reality woke them up. That direct connection – the great erotic connection of telling the truth – was like the kiss that woke up Sleeping Beauty.
So we break the spell by loving ourselves and each other enough to tell the truth. Our own experience, as inhabitants of an endangered planet, gives us the authority and the authenticity to tell the truth about what we see and feel and know is happening to our world. That profound inner movement of acknowledgement brings a great release of intelligence and creativity, because repressing what we know is a tremendous energy drain. It’s not so much a question of incorporating new information – sitting down at the desk and learning a new lesson – but rather relaxing our defenses and saying, "Okay, yeah, I know this is going on." There is a level on which this awareness is already present.
Obviously, we still need to transmit critically important information, but let’s do it in a way that respects the fact that on some deep level, people know they are living on an endangered planet. And indeed, it is that inner knowledge which produces what we mistakenly take for apathy or indifference. The work that I have been doing over the last ten years convinces me that so-called "public apathy" does not stem from indifference or callousness or even ignorance so much as from fear of pain. And that pain itself stems from an innate capacity to suffer with our world.
We make the mistake of thinking that we are essentially separate and fragile, and that if we acknowledge this terrifying information we’ll break. It’s a mistake that is fostered by our culture and our political-economic system. So we need to respect ourselves and realize how tough we are – tough enough to be fully present to our world and not break.
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit is a marvel of perspicacious generosity and determined hope. A Californian like Joanna, I would be very surprised if they are not good friends. Here she is, in her own words. See how they echo Joanna's intelligence and graceful, passionate expression, how their fundamental values are very similar. She writes prolifically, and travels widely. I draw almost arbitrarily from a very recent essay on TomDispatch. She calls it "The Rain on my Parade: A Letter to my Dismal Allies":
Dear Allies,
Forgive me if briefly I take my eyes away from the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal and it is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love, and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.
O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a
Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.
The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they’re hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things.
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So here I want to lay out an insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it and maybe even work with it.
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When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that’s not a good reason to continue to pound down anything in the vicinity. Consider what needs to be raised up as well. Consider our powers, our victories, our possibilities; ask yourself just what you’re contributing, what kind of story you’re telling, and what kind you want to be telling.
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We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.
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Nine years ago I began writing about hope, and I eventually began to refer to my project as “snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left." All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don’t matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable. If you’re privileged you can then go home and watch bad TV or reinforce your grumpiness with equally grumpy friends.
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There are really only two questions for activists: What do you want to achieve? And who do you want to be? And those two questions are deeply entwined. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
That is the small ongoing victory on which great victories can be built, and you do want victories, don’t you? Make sure you’re clear on the answer to that, and think about what they would look like.
Love,
Rebecca
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In the voices of Rebecca Solnit and Joanna Macy -— two generations of women activists — I hear the voices of my sister, my mother and my grandmother, and I feel pride and gratitude for them all.