Dear all,
I’ve spent time this week with three wonderful people in my wider circle who are having a hard time--the single mom of a toddler, facing the pain of separation and less-than-ideal child care options; a young adult caught in the grip of addiction, trying hard to break free; a 98-year old struggling to come to terms with diminished abilities. I love them all deeply. Even as I grieve over their pain, and over my inability to change their life circumstances, I’m thankful to be part of a community that is holding them up.
Just in the last couple of days the season is turning, from summer to fall. I never tire of the wonder of that change.
Love,
Pamela
Knowing more
The urge to give advice is a strong one. We all want to help, and our suggestions seem so likely to be able to fix the other person’s problems. Yet the results are rarely what we hope. Recipients of such advice are often surprisingly ungrateful. They can even be downright hostile (think teenagers). It seems that people just don’t like unsolicited advice. We don’t like others thinking they know more about how we should run our lives than we do.
On an individual level, this assumption of knowing more can be irritating. Played out on a societal scale, among whole groups of people, it becomes deeply problematic: men who think they know more than women, professionals who think they know more than working class folks, colonizers who think they know more than native people, passionate adherents to a religious belief system who think they know more than everyone else.
The results of “knowing more”, when accompanied by societal power, can be disastrous. Those on the receiving end of this attitude have been oppressed, coerced, humiliated, and silenced. At the extreme, when one group’s confidence that their knowledge/beliefs are superior enough that the humanness of the “other” is called into question, we face religious/racial/ethnic cleansing and genocide.
No one comes through this process unscathed. Those who are convinced that they know more have damaged or destroyed the feedback loops that would allow them to stay in touch with reality, leaving them separated and diminished in their humanity. As those with less societal power, taught that they know less, are silenced, not only are lives and whole cultures destroyed but wisdom that is critical for our common survival is discounted and relegated to the margin.
People who are arrogantly confident they know more and wield their power intentionally to gain advantage are easy to fault. It can be harder when we are oblivious—trying to do the right thing, but unable to see our blind spots. When we can’t see what we don’t know, what we know fills up all the space. What if we see forested land and know things about agriculture that the native people don’t know. Our intentions may be good. We may even feel an intoxicating high in having the power to help the “less fortunate” with our resources and greater understanding. But we can’t see what they know about forests. We are laying our experiences over the very different situation of others, and crippling our ability to learn from them.
What if we are painfully aware of the blind spots of our forebears, struggling to rectify the injustices that have resulted, all the time worrying about having blind spots of our own in the present? How do we find our way?
One thing we do is listen—hard. We develop the respectful relationships that allow us to learn about the experience of others—about what they know. We may then be able to ask probing questions if something seems inconsistent, rather than making assumptions. We don’t give up the best thinking we have gleaned from our own experience, but we humbly assume that the best thinking of others will be part of the picture and that we may be proved wrong. This is a hard discipline for an individual. It is even harder institutions, where “knowing better” can become rigidified and critical feedback loops be closed off, but the work is the same.
At the core of the way forward are two simple truths. First, none of us know more. If we keep our hearts and minds open to the world around us, we may accumulate insights and understanding. We may even become wise. But that’s a far different thing from knowing more. If anything, it grows our awareness of all that we don’t know.
Second, all of us know something. We know from our own experience, and—regardless of how it conflicts with the opinions, theories, systems and facts of those who dominate—what we know is true.
If we can listen with fierce intention and great humility for the truth of others, while never forgetting that our experience of truth is a critical part of the whole, together we may know enough.
Stand?
I’m offered a seat on the trolley
more often these days.
I could take offense
refuse to be consigned to elderhood
stand up for my ability to stand.
This defiance
this refusal to be labeled as unable
resonates.
Yet who am I to stand stiff-necked
against the kindness of strangers,
assert my lone fortitude
against community?
I am disarmed.
I sit
and am glad.
Dare to imagine: A new economy is possible!
Hospital solar
Like all hospital systems, Kaiser Permanente facilities are huge consumers of energy. In early 2015, Kaiser Permanente concluded two major renewable energy deals in its home state of California. Together, these two clean energy projects will produce 50 percent of all the electricity the organization uses in California (roughly enough clean energy to power 82,000 homes) and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 30 percent, allowing it to achieve its GHG-reduction goal three years ahead of schedule. Kaiser Permanente’s renewable energy model avoids emitting 215,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually.
The deal makes Kaiser Permanente one of the top users of renewable energy in the country and the largest solar energy user among healthcare providers nationwide. How does this improve health? Renewable energy reduces air pollution that contributes to asthma and chronic lung disease, while reducing the potential impacts of climate change that can spread infectious disease.25
https://democracycollaborative.org/content/can-hospitals-heal-americas-communities-0
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The ruling by a high court judge in Pakistan, on a legal challenge brought by a farmer, that Pakistan’s federal government must start implementing its climate change plans.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2015/09/20/pakistan-ordered-to-enforce-climate-law-by-lahore-court/
High school students from Jajce, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who successfully defeated a local government plan to segregate their school based on ethnic identity.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2018/07/bosnian-students-school-segregation-win-prestigious-award/
A Manhattan Supreme Court ruling that quashed Monsanto’s attempt to chill dissent by requiring the activist group Avaaz to hand over all documents, emails, and correspondence in their possession related to their fight against the weed-killer, glyphosate.
http://thegreentimes.co.za/us-court-quashes-monsantos-undemocratic-plea-to-avaaz-to-hand-over-internal-documents/
The Republic of Ireland’s decision to sell off its investments in fossil fuel companies, the world’s first country to do so.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/12/ireland-becomes-worlds-first-country-to-divest-from-fossil-fuels They join almost 900 cities, universities, and governments that have divested over $6 trillion from the fossil fuel industry.
https://otherwords.org/if-ireland-is-getting-out-of-fossil-fuels-your-town-can-too/
Resources
Money and Soul
A transcript of a keynote address I delivered at a Quaker conference in New Mexico, June 2017
https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.org
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
