It feels like everything is in flames and we are faced with a classic fight or flight choice. We can jump into the fray to resist the actions of the Trump administration and its collaborators or we can shut the scary noise out and just try to live our lives. That’s a false choice in at least two important ways.1
Personal Pathways and Sacred Community
The first falsity is that we must all fight everything all the time.
It feels that way. I remember feeling deeply guilty in early 2017 that I wasn’t attending protests and calling senators. A wise friend gave me a great gift in that moment. He responded to my admission of guilt by saying that it would be a tragedy if I spent my time attending protests and calling senators, that we need people who do that because it is their work, but that I had different work to do, work that was uniquely mine. He also helped me name and begin to explore that work. More on that in a bit.
The point is that each of us has a unique contribution to make to resisting injustice and bringing a just world into being. It might be calling representatives or hitting the streets, but it might also be something else. We don’t have to fight everything, just the things that are ours. We must find those because it is a tragedy to take up the seemingly obvious if it means failing to discover those contributions that only we can make.
And we don’t have to fight all the time. It’s important to rest and take care of ourselves. Every article about activism says this and yet it’s still hard to step back from the urgency of the moment to do it. In This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley beautifully articulates why it is so important that we do it anyway: “Rest is not the reward of our liberation, nor something we lay hold of once we are free. It is the path that delivers us there.”
She also points us to a critical support: community.
A couple years ago I read Valarie Kaur’s See No Stranger, in which she poses four questions out of the Sikh tradition. The questions help us get at the resources we bring to our fight for justice: the weapons, the protections, even the joys. But it was the fourth question that haunted me: “Who is your sacred community?” In Kaur’s telling, the sacred community has a dual role. When it is our time to fight, the community is there to back us. But when it is our time to step back and rest, its role is to encircle and protect us while we recover.
I did not have even the beginning of an answer to that question then. I had plenty of good relationships, but they didn’t form any kind of cohesive community. That same wise friend surprised me by suggesting a local Baptist church that I would never have considered. I tried it and have been going ever since, while continuing to hold on to the question: is this my sacred community?
It is in the horrors of the last few months, natural and political, that the answer has been coming clear, two answers in fact.
First, in the immediate aftermath of Helene some of those existing individual relationships coalesced and transformed into a community, one that will fight together, but also pay attention to who needs rest, who needs to be encircled.
And the church I’ve been attending has revealed itself to be one that’s not afraid to choose sides. Last month the senior pastor did a 4-week evening teaching series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, which Bonhoeffer wrote while leading an “emergency seminary” for pastors unwilling to follow the institutional German church’s capitulation to the Nazis. The core message is that in times of crisis a faithful church must embrace its role both as a haven for preparation and rest and as a community of resistance, echoing the two roles of sacred community that Valarie Kaur named.
So, rather than trying to fight all the things all the time, we each need to find our own path and our own people. And we must also take time to rest because we are in this for the long haul. Even if resistance is wildly successful over the next few years, we are dealing with fissures in our country that go back to its founding, as well as the results of a campaign by the right that has been going on for over 70 years. We face not just a multi-year challenge, but a multi-generational one.
A Third Choice
The second falsity is the idea that our only choices are to fight or to flee. In fact, there is a third.
A few years ago I attended a talk by Dr. Dwight Mullen, retired political science professor and creator of the State of Black Asheville project. Dr. Mullen recounted his experience in Nigeria in the 1980s when he was working toward his Ph.D. Nigeria had won independence from the British colonial power in 1960, but what he saw when he was there was a system that mirrored the colonial one in almost every respect, only with Black oppressors swapped in for white ones. Similar examples here and around the world abound.
So, while it is important to resist and reject an unjust system, it is just as important to understand that it is a system, with a deep and complex set of supports that permeate society. Overthrowing it without building a new system with corresponding new supports leads inevitably to a recycled version of old injustices.
Both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this. While Gandhi wrote more extensively about resistance, he also made clear the need to go beyond it, to undertake what he called constructive program. Constructive program is about building new structures that support a just society in the same way that the current structures support an unjust one.
Gandhi often asserted that, between resistance and constructive program, the latter was the more vital. I see that echoed in King’s later decisions to oppose the Vietnam war with a call for “a radical revolution of values” and to organize the Poor People’s Campaign and march on Washington. They reflect a similar conviction that achieving justice requires building on a new foundation.
In other words, it’s not enough to reject the present or the past. We need to embrace a better future. That is more than accepting or rejecting. It is something new that we must forge.
That the constructive work is where I need to be is what I realized back in 2017. It aligns better with my skills and temperament and, indeed, the way I have approached my work throughout my career. In the IT and data worlds I have always been best as an architect designing for tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities rather than an operations guy dealing with today’s crises. One is not better than the other. Frankly, I’m in awe of great IT operations people – I’d have 3 heart attacks daily doing what they do – and I am similarly in awe of the people who lead effective actions in a political crisis. But neither of those is my work.
My work is on the constructive side. It’s still architecture and design work, just with social rather than technical infrastructure. Recall Daniel Hunter’s helpful frame for finding one’s path, with four quadrants: protect people, disrupt and disobey, defend civic institutions, and build alternatives. The fourth is essentially what I wrote about shortly after the election: “building community power through alternative institutions.” It’s where I expect my work to center, even though I am certain I’ll act at times in each of the other three.
This wasn’t the article I planned to write next. In thinking about something else, I stumbled again on the tension between resistance and constructive program and thought it useful to take a moment to talk about it here.
I think it also helps me point to where I think this newsletter is going.
For me the work of designing and building systems can only be done through an ever deeper understanding of how things actually work now, so my writing will likely be a mix of stories, observations, reflections on strategy, and explorations of what others have to say about how things work and how to build resilient and just new systems. The goal throughout is to discover and share how we can build new social and physical infrastructure and how we can change how we operate within it so as to truly allow everyone in our community to thrive.
Links & Thoughts
We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It. We here in western North Carolina have had reason recently to better appreciate the importance of physical and socio-economic infrastructure. This is an introductory article to a series of articles on how critical systems work and how important it is that we collectively understand them better. Unfortunately the Trump administration is in the process of giving us a painful lesson in this as well.
Strategic Foresight Toolkit for Resilient Public Policy. As we think about how to respond to the present moment it’s important not just to understand how systems work today, but also to anticipate changes due to disruptive trends. This resource from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) offers a toolkit for considering 25 global disruptive trends. While intended for use by governments, it strikes me as potentially valuable even for those of us focused on local efforts.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.
Obviously it’s also false in the sense that, if fascism wins, even those with the privilege today to hide will inevitably find themselves under threat later.
Thank you for this Eric, I think this is a necessary conversation at this time - your piece was thoughtful, clever and helpful