I’ve come to accept that winning campaigns won’t be enough, that it’s probably too late to salvage society as we’ve come to know it, and that our revolution calls for a radical paradigm shift. A terrifying, yet profoundly liberating realization. Because at our doorstep lies the opportunity of complete transformation – in how we treat and relate to one another, in how we treat the Earth we walk on and in how we live together.
The very foundation of building a sustainable community is maintaining & nurturing relationships, which is both the most rewarding and the most challenging element. How do we overcome our inexperience and vulnerabilities to make collective decisions? How do we tap into infinite sources of unconditional love and patience to work well together? How do we reconcile our differences to truly stand for one another?
When I was first invited into this community it took me some time of mingling and getting my hands dirty to understand the uncompromising stance of staying away from the typical NGO structure. Then it hit me – we weren’t simply trying to win campaigns; we were crafting a new model for our vision of Beloved Community. Through an organic trial-and-error process, with all of the delicate conversations and all the conflicts it entails, here was a group committed to figuring it out along the way– through song and art, through joy and resolve.
Is that to say that we have all the answers or even the perfect model for others to replicate? No, we don’t. What we do have is a patchwork family, that’s taken on self-transformation as eagerly as structural transformation; shifting our own personal paradigms and with that lens crafting a vision for a better tomorrow. And that takes a willingness to fail, coupled with the commitment to continue standing with one another. It takes confronting the often ignored -isms of sexism, racism and ageism, to name a few. It takes the courage to jump off the cliff, time and time again. It takes holding one another accountable for tasks we volunteered to take on. It takes challenging ourselves to think outside the box, to discover the most empowering and inclusive structures. It takes hearing our elders and drawing lessons from the past. It takes patience to listen to one another, in spite of our shortcomings. And it takes creativity to envision and create the healthy and just world we long for.
In her stunning book The Next American Revolution, 93-year-old Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs says: “Community is the most important thing that has been destroyed by dominant culture.” The time has come for us to set our egos aside and to work genuinely with one another – to create local self-reliant communities of resistance, fueled by love, respect and integrity. I invite you to join us, in improvising, in holding each other along the way.
Leave a Reply