Friends Gathering
Two and a half years ago, I wrote a piece about Michael Lerner’s newest book Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform The World. I had gone to hear him speak at Town Hall, he was on a tour to promote the book. Walking home that night I realized that hiding under my growing cynicism about politics remained a seed or two of hope.
Lerner was calling for a ‘Love&Justice’ movement that would help create “a society that constantly nurtures our ethical and spiritual capacities to care for each other and the planet and that facilitates our ability to give meaning to our lives that transcends material satisfactions.”
He said a lot of things that struck a deep chord, like needing an alternative to endless material growth, public policies that ‘operationalize’ transparency and mutuality, and a new way to play the game of politics that didn’t follow the same tired rules of ‘winner takes all’ and ‘the ends justify the means.’ His assessment regarding the current game of politics very much matched my own.
I’d been working in and around politics for 30 years and I could see the way that game was played was inherently destructive and dehumanizing. Whether I was working for an elected official I believed in or for a public agency as a leadership consultant, knowing how to play the game is essential. The number one rule is to manage (control) perception by always crafting the message to one’s advantage. Which means there is an abundance of ‘hiding the ball’ and straight-up manipulation.
Isn’t that what we’re all doing at some level? Managing other people’s perceptions of us in a thousand different ways? One relevant question might be ‘to what end?’ Yes, we are doing this much of the time. Just noticing that we are doing it changes its impact. There’s a lot more to say here but I digress, thus my use of italics. Back to the story.
These ‘artful’ messaging tactics trickle down like stagnant water from busted pipes to all levels of government. No matter what level of government you play within, the game corrupts. It separates us from a more holistic truth because it depends on leaving out inconvenient truths. And no matter your political ideology in this game—red, blue or rainbow—everyone is complicit. You play it cause it’s the game. Otherwise, you don’t play and then you certainly don’t win.
Another quick sidebar. Even people who’ve never worked in government feel its duplicity and incoherence. Polling shows levels of public trust in institutions, specifically governmental institutions, have been steadily declining for 40 years, and even more rapidly just in the last few. Trust in Congress is the lowest it’s ever been with just 7% of Americans having high levels of confidence in this icon of representative democracy.
So yes, I’d grown weary of the game of politics. I’d been playing it for a long time with the hope that I could persuade enough people inside government that by bringing more authenticity and transparency to the table, and by focusing less on ‘winning’ and more on ‘learning,’ we could turn the ship around.
Learning. One of the most expansive and exhilarating aspects of the human experience. If nature’s 4 billion years of creativity has shown us anything it’s that the greatest good for the greatest number (species, cultures, ideas) depends on learning (fun for all). But the political system only works because everyone continues to play its primary game of winning (fun for some), and the people inside the system depend on both the system, and its game, for their survival.
That’s why Lerner’s message back then felt so compelling – it was heralding a new way forward. Perhaps, I thought at the time, if I convene my fellow activists, artists and allies to discuss these ideas, I might compost all this toxic cynicism of mine and unearth my long-silent passion for birthing things that brought more love and light into the world.
Thus my attempt to summarize Lerner’s book with an invitation to gather at my home in Seattle to see where these new ideas might take us. So I invited all 500 people on my mailing list, trusting that just the right handful would show up.
Twenty-seven people made it out that drizzly night in January 2020. We sat in a large circle, shoulder to shoulder and talked about what scared us most and when we felt most human. We ended the night singing “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash -- full throttle in unison. The evening blew some wind under my sails and opened a peep hole into a new world that I couldn’t quite see but revealed a few cairns along an unfamiliar trail.
Six weeks later, a virus beset us. The torrent of it toppled every cairn and that peep hole closed up good and tight. Since then, I have been mostly silent, save a few despairing missives that read like calls by a lone wolf howling into a fierce wind. Was it the wind that drowned out her call? The truth that she’d strayed too far from the pack? Or just a wolf’s need for wandering solo in the wilderness, like some of us found a way to do. Whatever the reason, my world grew very quiet and my longing to create something new in politics went underground.
So here we are, 30 months later trying to stand upright on a world tilted sharply upon a new axis. During those many months, my work in government continued, though without the spark of hope I’d gone searching for at Town Hall back in 2020.
Work contracts retreated for a time, but by that first summer, the magic that is online video conferencing promised a world of connection whilst also staying safe and I applied myself to the ongoing task of trying to transform leadership cultures within a two-dimensional realm.
I’d often describe my mission to change the culture of government as a labor of Sisyphus trying to push a massive boulder uphill. But now, divorced from any actual human contact, this mission was severely handicapped.
Without the benefit of physical proximity, which enhances our ability to see our co-workers as fellow humans who also love, worry and weep, trust became harder and harder to build. Misinterpretations mounted. Factions multiplied. Conflict intensified. The chemistry of fear, as it was doing everywhere, took over.
And cynicism found a purchase in me again, suffocating my decades-long dream of participating in a government that functioned well on behalf of its citizenry. There were a few pivotal incidents that turned my cynicism dial past the voltage it was designed for.
The first incident was when I learned about senior public agency leadership negotiating substantial raises for themselves outside of the scheduled compensation process, leaving less money for the rest of the staff. It felt particularly out of integrity because of their stated value of being so committed to equity and supporting frontline staff who had to work in-person during those first 18 months while executive leadership had the ability to work entirely from home.
The second tripped fuse happened eight months after the first official covid lockdown. I was working for a public health agency at the time. I reached out to one of the directors who had been in the middle of the agency’s covid response to find out what was going on behind the scenes. She couldn’t say much but she did say she was ‘shocked by how political the covid response was.’
Given we’d just come off four years of non-stop hand-wringing about Trump and his Republican allies, progressive politicians were making every effort to distance themselves from all things related to his administration, a choice that essentially required outright dismissal of different perspectives and certainly any dissenting voices.
Yet it’s precisely during a time of crisis, such as the one we were in, when we need different perspectives in the room to improve our ‘sensemaking'. A global pandemic might be likened to the elephant of the fable in which six blind men are feeling the different parts of the animal and reporting ‘what it is’ in entirely different ways. To actually understand the elephant, we need a very large team of humans, all with only partial views of the situation, who listen and collaborate with each other to learn what is going on and decide together what to do about it. Unfortunately, when decisions become predominately political, the focus is on winning—one team’s ‘rightness’ over another’s—not on learning.
Finally, an almost imperceptible straw that broke the camel’s back, was a conversation with another public agency director in June of this year who was struggling with persistent conflicts within his leadership team. As he explained more about the situation, a number of obvious challenges stood out, including the unwieldy size of his 11-member team. But more startling than anything else was the nonchalance with which he mentioned that his team hadn’t come together in-person ‘since covid’ and they were on track to remain virtual going forward.
That’s when I knew without a shadow of a doubt that government was probably cooked. The best decisions happen within teams. Teams require a foundation of trust. Trust between humans can’t be sustained exclusively online.
Ok, I grant you, I do not know just how an institution as deep and wide a Leviathan as government will falter and come unglued. Nor do I have any sense of how much longer we can expect government to uphold the many functions we’ve placed in its charge. What I do know, from what I’ve participated in across a decent span of time, is that we’ve become overly dependent on an maladapted, inefficient system led by mostly well-intentioned people who need to play a game that incentivizes manipulation, controlling the message at all costs, and requires an allegiance to the ideology of extractive capitalism, a set of beliefs that are political suicide to challenge and have, thus far, consumed everything in its wake.
Given my love of creativity and the ridiculous, I find myself asking how in the world could I have stayed so long in such a constrained system? Besides my obvious need to make a living, why did I keep trying?
Thirty months after calling community together to talk about how we might infuse more ‘Love&Justice’ into a broken political system, I’ve arrived at a pretty simple answer--what kept me playing the game far past the buzzer, even when my hope for change was out of reach, was a love for and a belief in the human beings inside the system, not the system itself. It was my fellow humans, in all their frustrating, paradoxical, but also creative and ridiculous, complexity that I was most drawn to.
While my heart always saw the potential for individual change, my mind had chosen to focus primarily on system change. Unfortunately, my attempts to revitalize government seem akin to Victor Frankenstein’s quest to impart life to non-living matter and they were costing me my health and my sanity. Given the absurdity of such a quest, it seems fully time for me and the system to part ways.
But the people? No, I’m not letting the people go, for the people matter. I remain ever committed to my fellow humans as we seek to become better, more bountiful versions of ourselves. Because I believe it’s enlivened humans—humans expressing all of who we are without expecting anything more of the current political system—who have the unique capacity to imagine, to conjure, to dream a very different world built on the most humane expression of ourselves. And since the system is just a reflection of our collective consciousness, then it will change when enough of us believe and perceive anew.
So if I were to try again, go back in time, and fetch the essence of my invitation to gather as a community to talk about what’s possible--no longer within the constraints of our aging institutions, but within ourselves--what could I say to inspire you to come?
I’d say, come back and gather again, whoever you are. Let’s talk about what we learned these last two and a half years.
I’d also ask, who are we now? Who are we becoming? And how can we turn our attention away from the dystopian inferno that hijacks our amygdalae and narrows our field of perception to the narrowest slits and towards that mostly empty but fertile stage, carrying a few costume trunks and a pile of musical instruments, waiting for us, method actors all, to invent our next theatrical expression called reality?
Are we courageous enough to create outside of the seemingly destructive assumptions of limitless growth and technology ‘uber alles’ that this current world is built upon? And, even more important still, are we willing to take ourselves less seriously, and find the confidence to laugh and to delight again in life, no matter what it appears to throw at us?
Back in 2020, Michael Lerner said on the night of his talk, “we will never know what is possible until we struggle for what is desirable.” Today I’d say, “we will never know what’s possible until we remember what we truly desire.”
As more of us yield to our desires for a new world, connect to others with similar aspirations, and talk, sing and dance them into existence more often, the old world just may give up the ghost. Not overnight and not altogether. But I can’t see a single downside to trying to bring more delight into the world.
So while it may be a ways off, and summer is still in full swing, do mark your calendars and join us on Saturday, September 10th for a Gathering Part 2 -- open house style -- to remember the feeling of being in physical proximity, to remember our hearts’ desires and see what kind of creative mischief ensues.
Where: My home, 522 19th Avenue, between Jefferson and Cherry. On Metro Transit lines 3 and 4.
When: Saturday, September 10th, 5-8pm-ish.
Food: Light food and drink will be on the scene. I encourage everyone to bring some of your own to add to the merriment.
Music: Live music will be happening outside after 7pm.
RSVP: email @ lisa@creativegroundhq.com or text @ 206-910-4458