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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

family

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Living wisdom

An elderly dark-skinned Black man with closely cropped white hair sits in a church looking directly into the camera. He wears a light colored suit with a darker patterned tie and a white or light-colored shirt. His facial expression holds a slight smile. His mouth is closed. He is wearing rounded glasses. In the background, blurry, are other people, women and a young girl.
Robert N. Kennedy, Jamaica. Photo credit: Mark Francis

There are people around the world for whom a century isn’t an abstract quantity: it’s the life they’ve lived, plus some.

My grandfather, whose birthday is August 11, is one of those people. Robert N. Kennedy will spend Thursday celebrating his 102nd year with relatives and friends, trading memories, and reflecting on all he’s seen, done, and learned. There will be laughter. Perhaps tears. Definitely prayers.

One of his many grandsons took the photo above between church services two years ago in Jamaica, and it captures him in a context that has shaped every one of his last eight decades.

When I think about how much memory, experience, and skill a person can amass in a hundred years, I also inevitably think about the absences created when that lived wisdom no longer speaks for itself.

When the people who hold experience in their bodies step down or pass away, we don’t lose complete access to them. Instead, we access their experiences through our memories and our interpretations of letters or videos or other artifacts from their lives. Direct relationships become indirect. Conversations become hearsay.

Organizations can live centuries long too if they plan their use of resources well, adapt to mitigate crisis, and rise to meet the challenges they face during periods of substantive change. Organizations can also experience the blessings of people with decades of local-context; they have experience and know how things actually work, not merely how they should.

My grandmother was our family’s storykeeper: she had a brain for details and tracing connections that might have served her well had she been born in a more recent time or a more talent-nurturing place. Before she died, family members interviewed her and my grandfather about their childhoods and early adulthood, about specific people who’d had an impact on them, and about lessons they’d learned since.

I fondly remember hovering around the kitchen counter while Grandma or her aide cooked. I kept safely out of range for doing extra chores, but I also stayed close enough to see her talk to me about her siblings. Which cousins-once-removed belonged to whom? Which great uncle used to whistle while he worked? We can’t do more of this anymore (she passed away in 2011). So many of her stories are lost to the world.

But the stories she and her husband have told us over the years? Those we keep.

Like families, organizations also have storykeepers, formal or informal. Storykeepers help small groups to retain the thread of identity and impact that runs through not just a given generation but also through those who precede it, and those who’re coming later. The thread of a good story is what helps us avoid the same pothole in the same place time and time again.

We need the long perspectives of time to learn well and take constructive action. And we need those who carry their wisdom in their bodies so it’s with them and of service to others wherever they might go.

Happy birthday, Grandpa.

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Family Memories

An AIDS memorial quilt displayed annually by Seventh-day Adventist Kinship International to represent the lives, professions, hobbies, and passions of members who died in the 1980s and 1990s. Pink fabric reads "GOD'S LOVE AND GRACE SHALL SEE US THRU." Quilted animal shapes, shapes, objects, and names adorn the quilt. There is a large yellow sun-ray shape in the top left corner. The background is dark blue.
One of Seventh-day Adventist Kinship International’s original AIDS memorial quilts.

The 1980s-1990s phase of the AIDS epidemic in the United States gutted an entire generation that included Seventh-day Adventists. For many survivors, that period is a deeply traumatic memory: they lost friends and loved ones; many nursed friends through severe illnesses; and all of them faced a repelling, rejecting, and—to say the least—avoidant denomination.

Church wasn’t “family” for them, so they were family for each other.

I reread Luke 10 today, thanks to Herb Montgomery, and noticed this statement for the first time:

When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you.” —Jesus, Luke 10:5-6

I don’t often hear that a blessing or peace is something someone brings with them rather than something they find at a destination, something that others give them. In our culture, it’s the host who shares the grace, the host who shares the blessing, not the visitor, not the person receiving welcome.

So often when we talk about who is welcome or received, especially in churches, the congregation or pastor or elders are usually described as bless-ers. They have legal and sacramental authority, they often own the property, they can expel people or invite them into membership: we imagine the power to “bless” resides with them.

That’s not the dynamic at work in this verse.

In this verse, it’s the itinerant community that blesses. The power to bring peace moves with them, and reluctant or rejecting hosts can resist it.

This is encouragement for people who don’t have conventional power yet may not realize that they aren’t without all power. Families may be icy tundras and congregations may be just as cold. But we have the ability to offer the mainstream “peace” and wholeness, and they have the ability to repel both.

The first generation of LGBTQ people memorialized a community that the mainstream would rather forget, they took peace with them into their congregations, and that peace very often returned to them without first “resting” at church.

These experiences were incredibly painful for them, and yet, the blessings of community, mutual care, kindness, group mobilization, and collective strength emerged from them to bless the wider world.

Congregations like California’s Glendale City Church continue to benefit from the peace of that generation: members affected by that era’s domestic AIDS crisis as patients or as caregivers shared their stories and gifts among themselves and with other church members. They allowed each other to care, pray, and support, and still do.

I imagine that this shouldn’t be so much an exception. But it was in the time of Jesus, and it’s not much different among the religious today. What could be different is how we respond to the pattern and whether we build community despite the Good Folks™ and the fear and stasis that keeps Others in every generation out.

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Research: LGBTQ Adventists, 18-35yo

The bible/cross/three-frond flame icon from the Seventh-day Adventist logo sits in white on a black field. White light streams in from the left of the icon and breaks into a rainbow spectrum on the right. Illustration by Jared Wright/Spectrum Media.
Illustration credit: Jared Wright/Spectrum Media

Last spring, LGBTQ Andrews University students planned a bake sale to raise funds for a regional LGBTQ youth housing/anti-homelessness project. Thanks to off-campus attention, the students raised thousands of dollars from hundreds of donors around the US.

Over a year later, Andrews University researchers are still contributing to this conversation in their own professional way.

Curtis Vanderwaal, chair of Andrews University’s social work department, and David Sedlacek, professor of family ministry and discipleship, have co-developed a survey-based study to gather qualitative data on LGBTQ Adventist youth and young adults’ experiences with relatives, peers, and their church.

What’s it like for this demographic as they learn about their gender and sexuality and/or disclose it to others? What feedback do they receive from their families or friends? What roles do their congregations or community leaders play in their story?

The survey invites responses from LGBTQ people from an Adventist background who are currently between 18 and 35 years old. Active church membership is not required.

It isn’t a quick survey. Questions include items on family acceptance and rejection, and other topics that might be challenging.

But this study gives people in this demographic an opportunity to share their experiences frankly and contribute to the community record. The researchers are following standard research and data collection protocols with the survey design and with the way they’ll store and process submitted responses.

Expect to hear their reports on this study by the end of the summer.

A note from one of the researchers, Curtis Vanderwaal:

This research study is examining the impact of growing up Seventh-day Adventist and LGBT+, particularly focusing on the role that families played as LGBT+ adolescents explored and expressed their sexuality and identity. We are requesting that ONLY persons who grew up Seventh-day Adventist, identify as LGBT+ and are between 18 – 35 years old complete this survey.  Participants DO NOT need to be current members or attend the SDA church.

This survey should take approximately ­­20-25 minutes.  We know this is a long survey, but we believe the wide range of issues we included are important in understanding the Adventist LGBT+ experience. Your participation will be completely anonymous.

After completing the survey, PLEASE use email, Facebook and other forms of social media to distribute this message and link to LGBT+ friends and family members who grew up Seventh-day Adventist and are between 18-35 years old. We believe this survey is the first of its kind in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. You can complete the survey at the following link:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LGBTAdventist

—Curt

If you meet the criteria for this survey, consider participating. If you know people who meet the criteria, share it with them. 

Thank you!

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Divesting in order to re-invest

When we move beyond our aspirational tales about fictive kinship and we-are-family, we gain the space to examine exactly what solidarity means.” —One of us“

When kinship hasn’t also meant solidarity, I’ve felt such a sense of betrayal. It just feels wrong when people I know I have a deep, existential relationship with use their energy to work against my thriving.

The culture of “unfollow, unfriend, and block” tells me that I should demonstrate self-respect by cutting people off. I see that as a possible emergency solution, but not a routine one.

If “we’re one,” cutting others off is like performing a live dissection and more torture than healing. I haven’t learned how to do it well. And I’m not sure that I wish to. I do think we should learn to close relational chapters well, but I don’t think that means carving others out of my life.

So what are my options? (Continuing mistreatment isn’t in the budget.)

"Can't trust everyone you break bread with. Ask Jesus."I’ve been re-reading the gospel accounts of Jesus; after all, if anyone could speak to inner circle folks becoming life- and joy-threatening liabilities, he’d be the one.

In Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 8, Jesus has just called his named disciples and is teaching the public. He has already stressed the Sabbath police, attracted regional crowds, and taught the parable of the sower—which is a parable about being generally accessible yet only selectively received.

Matthew and Luke are vague about Jesus’s family’s intentions, but Mark explicitly says that they’ve come to “take charge of him.” They’ve come to do an intervention, and someone tells him they’ve arrived.

“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers,” he replies, a little more brusque than a Jamaican parent would have allowed. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35).

Given the care with which Jesus engages his mother in his last life chapter, it makes no sense to see this saying as a cold block. It makes a lot more sense to see Jesus destabilizing the sacred definitions of kinship: divesting himself of his relatives so that he can re-invest in them in a new way.

Jesus lays down his parent and siblings so that he can form new kinship relationships that respect what he’s committed to. That new family system includes everyone aligned with his lifework, including his parents and siblings once they can gather themselves and drop the belief that he’s a walking demon-vessel.

It’s not much to ask, really, that your kin stop viewing you through the lens of their suspicion that you’re carrying water for Satan. It’s hard to do a road-trip (and life is one big road trip) with a suspicion that big in the middle seat.

How I’ve heard this saying taught is as permission to dissect a family into believer and unbeliever; into trustworthy and dangerous-and-waiting-to-draw-you-into-moral-deception. 

I don’t see it that way. I see it as encouraging me, us, to reconsider the logic of our relationships, to value our deepest callings and integrity enough to invite those we love to participate with us, to accept their limitations enough to leave them in their lane if that’s what they prefer, and to revise the way we engage them, but not abandon them entirely. After all, our families, our kin, aren’t the only people we serve.

I draw comfort from our glimpses of Jesus’s parent close by at the end of his life, and of his relative James giving his energy to the early church.

We don’t know how long it took them to go from “He is out of his mind” to full-bodied commitment. But they made that journey. And only because Jesus was willing to allow the original relationships to dissolve so that new relationships could form.

I’m learning from the Master.

"Things fall apart. Let them. Because that's not the end of the story." —@mackenzian

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When Popular Analogies Steer Us Off-course

On Friday morning I eavesdropped on the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Annual Council meeting at the denomination’s headquarters in central Maryland. Several voices will live-report on the 8-day meetings via the Twitter hashtag #GCAC14: follow along over the next week.

Mark Finley is an Adventist statesman, an internationally known Adventist speaker and elder. For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, Finley was the gentle face of the televangelism series It Is Written. He currently serves the worldwide church as its evangelism vice president, and he spoke to the Annual Council Friday morning on using the stories in Acts 1-15 as conflict-resolution models, as examples for how to address intractable contemporary church debates.

His full remarks are already available via the General Conference Archives. Bear in mind that Finley is a member of the denomination’s theology of ordination study committee and has written that 1st Century believers received the Holy Spirit “without respect to either gender or ordination.”

Using Analogies to Guide Decision-Making

The denomination’s official account and Spectrum Magazine staff shared some of Finley’s key points, including these:

Analyzing the Analogy

Take a closer look at this rhetoric:

Context
1st Century CE: The Acts community of Christians
21st Century CE: The Seventh-day Adventist Church faith community—administered by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, an association located in Silver Spring, MD. The association is legally represented by the General Conference Corporation of Seventh-day Adventists, incorporated in Washington, D.C.

Decision-makers
1st Century CE: The apostles hand-picked by Jesus Christ and those who knew him
21st Century CE: The administrators and leaders of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Deeply Contentious Problems
1st Century CE: Include selecting Judas’ replacement, Matthias; developing a just process for serving indigent widows; and deciding whether to receive non-Jewish believers
21st Century CE: Include whether to permit women to serve alongside men as ordained elders or pastors

Resolution Method
1st Century CE: The apostles and Acts community resolve disputes via prayer, casting lots, and submission to the apostles’ decision
21st Century CE: The Seventh-day Adventist Church and its members should resolve disputes via prayer, church delegate votes, and lay member submission to thusly-decided administrative policy

1st Century : 21st Century : : the Acts community : the Seventh-day Adventist faith community

This analogical premise requires us to accept a very narrow view of the last two millennia, but it’s a common move for Adventists. As a restorationist tradition, the denomination believes that its gift to the world has two parts: (a) uncovering teachings once held by the first few generations of believers but lost through time; and (b) drawing out a remnant of faithful ones “from any and all corners to the purposes of God.” As such, Adventism represents itself as the end-times repository of Bible truth, and this has consequences for members’ attachment to the group. Former GC president Jan Paulsen once told youth that if he were to leave the denomination he would “risk [his] whole spiritual life and salvation” by doing so. Not all Adventists agreed with this point, but many did.

So Finley is well within mainstream Adventism in looking to the early church for a guide to conflict resolution in our time. We can leap from the 1st Century CE to the present day because the Adventist church’s 151-year history is less continuous with the rest of the Christian story and more a counterpoint to it: Time and Spirit all but warp-drove from the unveiling visions in Revelation to the denomination’s formation in 1863! Our network of assumptions and analogies works to mask both the commonalities and the diversity across 38,000 Christian denominations. At the same time, it suggests that the Acts authority mantle now falls not on the shoulders of the entire Christian community but on the policy committees of one group, ours.

According to the argument Finley presented on Friday, there are just a few roles available in this play and they have already been assigned. Non-administrative church members may be out of the loop when it comes to “points of disagreement” even if we’re otherwise trusting and supportive. And we cannot count on being included in discussions or decision-making about these issues either.

Per Finley, an ordinary member’s role in discussions about ministerial ordination, membership restrictions, and any other church-wide controversy is to pray, submit to the denomination’s decision, accept the General Conference’s conclusions, and “move on” thereafter. The only lines we have to say are “Yea” and “Amen.”

How did we get here?

Finley’s analogies and suggestions about unity are not controversial if we accept that common business logic should bind how family members interact.

Debates on Adventist community websites like Adventist Today and Spectrum Magazine often invoke corporate disloyalty, suggest people who disagree with a given interpretation or policy should “just leave,” or argue that the church is right to bind its pastors, teachers, or vocal members by the closed-circle corporate preservation standards Coca Cola or Apple might use to weed out Pepsi advocates or Samsung sympathizers.

“The church has a brand,” some say, “and it’s only good stewardship to protect it. Further more, it has the right to.”

From Organization to Organism

Because this post will not be a book, I’ll offer just 7 short comments on why using corporation analogies as a positive guide for the “church family” steers us off-course:

  1. Though participating in a denominational group is largely voluntary (at least for those who join as adults and aren’t born and raised in the denominational culture), members of this faith community are not best compared to businesses’ employees. Employees trade skills and services for money and other forms of compensation. Church members freely contribute skills and services without compensation, and also donate both time and money to support their group.
  2. The relationship between church administrators and church members doesn’t map onto the relationship between employers and employees, except in denominational institutions where there actually are employment contracts, responsibilities, and rights. In these contexts, both employee and employer have rights and responsibilities that are buttressed by employment law. The transactional mutuality of the employer-employee relationship doesn’t transfer over to church-as-business, and quid pro quo isn’t a suitable matrix for relationships among members of a faith association. While churches can and do list any number of responsibilities that members are expected to fulfill, U.S. law offers individual church members no rights in relation to their church except for the right to leave.
  3. “God’s family” is one of Christianity’s primary analogies, and has been from the community’s start. In businesses, supervisors and staff can be fired for failure to perform, disagreement with the boss, and noncompliance. There’s no logical expectation of life-long relationship. In families, while parents can divorce and children can emancipate themselves from abusive or dangerous elders, mothers can’t usually fire sons or daughters fire fathers.
  4. Family members are genetically and/or emotionally bonded for life: legal emancipation doesn’t break these bonds. Families do have the option of living in acrimony or deliberate indifference with other. They can also choose to grow through the process of discerning how to work and live together without seeking dominance over each other through social role.
  5. The Adventist church appeals to the Bible in its conversations about hierarchy and role, and the scriptures define the community of believers as a body and not a corporation, as an organism, not an organization. Yet so much denominational energy goes to maintaining hard organizational boundaries, to determining who shouldn’t be permitted to stay and who really ought to go. We use support for “church organization” as a shibboleth (see Finley’s 5th “biblical essential”), yet persist in undermining the mutual trust necessary for the health of the church organism. Appealing to corporate and legal traditions to parse and rank organic variations, discipline members, and govern acceptable norms for debate suggest we prefer the fixed rules of ledgers and manuals to the ever-morphing order of flesh and blood.
  6. It makes no sense to expect to reap healthy, functional relationships of family and friendship from the doulos and kyrios patterns we’ve sown. Every tree still bears the fruit of its kind. Whereas Jesus described and taught his disciples as “servants” at the start of their relationship (e.g. Matthew 10), he spent his last discourse explaining that they were siblings and friends. He changed the matrix for their relationship and we are yet to grasp the implications of that change.
  7. Instead of building our interactions around family and friendship, we operate as if sanctions for disagreement can heal rifts, as if one group’s decisions must bind others absent a proven relationship of trust, and as if the closed discussions of a few can in any way guarantee “the unity of the faith.” This is not wise.

“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”—John 15:15

“There is a fellowship of the spirit, fathoms deeper than differences of opinion. It is the fellowship of those who love the Way of the Ages.”—Lewis Fisher

“I care about the Adventist church. I want it to be healthy and, most importantly, faithful to Christ. The only way that I can imagine that possibility is if Adventists can get over their obsession with Adventism, and decide to become a church whose chief question to itself isn’t its confessional identity, but its faithfulness to the One in whom it confesses faith.” —Matt Burdette

A Story from Recent History

The Association of Adventist Women recently honored Merikay McLeod (Silver) as their Woman of the Year. In the late 1970s, McLeod (pronounced Muh-Cloud) settled an EEOC claim out of court with the GC-owned Pacific Press, and, after several more years, the denomination agreed to compensate female workers who’d been denied equal pay for equal work.

McLeod shares the short version of her story with Spectrum editor Bonnie Dwyer in this 10-minute edited interview.

Note: The video is only auto-captioned and caption accuracy is about 65%.

“The Equal Opportunities Commission sued Pacific Press and the court directed Pacific Press to deposit $600,000 into a bank account and distribute it to the women they employed but paid less than men for similar work.

In this case, the state showed more pity for the poor, the divorced, and the widowed than did the church.” —Association of Adventist Women

Ouch.

It’s probably easier for administrators to reframe the church family as a corporation and encourage us to structure our expectations and engagement patterns of it accordingly. After all, there’s no single universal family model: family looks different around the world and among groups within each culture. Family structures are also evolving in each culture in new ways.

Family is no guarantee of healthy relationship, however: “family culture” was the excuse Pacific Press staff gave McLeod for her and others’ low salaries. It also claimed “intra-family disputes” as the reason civil courts and agencies shouldn’t be allowed to intervene on behalf of underpaid female employees. So family isn’t always a sanctuary, but it does suggest a quality of parity, safety, and communion that we’re yet to manifest.

Analogies and metaphors have cognitive, material, and relational consequence: our core analogies structure our thinking, our relationship to others, and how we manage common space and resources. We can’t afford to be cavalier about them.
(To get this point from scientists, start with the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. To get it from humanists, start with the work of Toni Morrison.)

So if we were to prioritize the metaphors of family and organism across this faith community, it’d be appropriate to be careful and thoughtful—Finley-style—about understanding the kind of family we are, what nature we have as an organism, and how to nurture our interdependence and ability to adapt. For now, though, the organization still dominates both our community and our conversation and determines the tight, restrictive way many of our leaders lead.

“As one person or as a small group of insulated advisers to a leader, you don’t have access to all the information you need, and you also, unintentionally perhaps, put in the minds of people ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll figure this one out.’ I haven’t met a senior leadership team that actually knows what it’s doing anymore. And I’m speaking about national governments as well as large corporations or very large NGOs.

“I would love leaders to realize that as they narrow their focus and only work with a few trusted advisers—which is the arc that almost all leaders take when they’re in crisis—realize that that [approach] decreases your capacity, and the very people you need who would be a wonderful resource of imagination and creativity and working 24/7, are The People.

“And when you take it back to your office with a few groups of advisors, the signal you’re sending people is ‘We’ll figure this out, and then we’ll tell you what to do.’ And people are becoming more and more dependent as that dynamic gains more traction.” —Dr. Meg Wheatley (with Let Go and Lead)

That being so, it doesn’t benefit us to treat the question of our shared identity as a second-tier priority. Who we are at our core and, hence, what will grow from us as olives grow from their vine must not be deferred while we push doggedly ahead with “mission.” At this stage in the human story, I can’t imagine anything less inspiring than a global purpose that accommodates or justifies sustained discrimination against any vulnerable or marginalized group of people. Discrimination undermines the credibility of institutional religions and the moral universe they present to the world as ideal.

I agree with Mark Finley and Reinder Bruinsma on this point: we’ll get so much more done building up from what connects us and what good we can create together then we now do heel-digging into our differences.

So imagine that Mephistopheles himself offers us an accomplished mission if we’d only leave some family members to fend for themselves while we carry on for the cause. Can you also imagine we’d have the vision to recognize that proposal’s hollow heart? The cause we’re called to isn’t viable without a strong, applied commitment to the value of the whole human person, and I believe this commitment is something Adventism could advance quite coherently if we chose to. I’m in no way motivated to engage or participate by the thought of becoming one of many cogs in one of many organizations, but working with my siblings as peers under God does motivate me: it’s not a self-definition consolation prize. Yes, “God can take care of Himself,” and I say it’s our mission to take care of each other.

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On #NMOS14, Ferguson, and Rooting for a New World

National Moment of Silence 2014 Banner via Facebook and @feministajones
Image via the National Moment of Silence 2014 Facebook Page and @feministajones

This post took me three weeks to prepare. There’s so much to say, and the word-containers I’m drawing together feel far too narrow and too shallow to hold that “so much.” The community of Ferguson, MO, has been in grief since August 9, and that grief, first re-presented as aggression, then analyzed from afar, and dismissed by the detached at every turn, exploded into international spectacle within a week.

From mid-August:

A few days after I began following this situation, a Jamaican friend texted me a two-minute video of two constabulary officers beating a market seller with batons and shooting their pistols into the air to ward off the crowd. I asked my friend whether the clip had already made the local news. He told me it was too common an event to make the news. “Maybe it’s time to redesign civic policing,” I told Twitter. “This is not its finest hour.”  My frustration built quickly and I didn’t see an outlet for it. So much of the epistemology of power—expressed by police forces and institutional gatekeepers worldwide—requires sustained denial of the realities of disempowered people. It requires the denial of stories. The rejection of relationship. The building of policies and customs with so narrowly defined an Ideal Human. All of the above is power without legitimacy.

"British research on policing crowds confirms the strategic need for proactive relationship building by police." —Idaho police chief Michael F. Masterson, in the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin (via Twitter) [http://1.usa.gov/1lkpS7W]
Idaho police chief Michael F. Masterson, in the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin (via Twitter)

As common as it is for Jamaican police to bully the public, it’s just as common for us not to listen to our own experts when they recommend deep change. Ferguson, MO, didn’t become what it is by accident. And the rest of our world isn’t what it is by accident either. Dartmouth’s Paul Batalden often says “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” So if we don’t like our results, we have to change our design. We’ve designed a civic system based on studied ignorance, weak listening cultures, & ahistorical context framing. We keep spinning back around to the same social crises again and again—but of course. Our system isn’t learning because we don’t design it for learning. No one can learn by blocking new information. We can’t learn without listening to others beyond ourselves or experiences beyond our own. Nor can we learn without a sense of time or space, a location in space-time that situates us in relation to other people, other eras, other worlds. Instead we’ve built a system that mocks or resists research and specialists, that elevates the echo chamber, and that pretends every crisis is brand new. I do not believe this status quo is the best we can do.

Two children hold "Hands Up Don't Shoot" protest signs in Ferguson, MO
(via @VIVARonRon on Twitter, 8/14/2014)

Despite this design, a Midwestern community has responded to the pattern that gave them a dead son, and many of us outside the city have responded to a broader system that doesn’t seem to mind recapitulating this same story line every 28 hours. The protesters in Ferguson haven’t trafficked in ignorance; they’ve consistently and relentlessly reported ahead of the professional media from the start. The community isn’t stopping its ears and yelling “LaLaLaLaLa!” It’s engaged supporters and critics in real time, received outsiders willing to tell fair stories, and adapted as things have changed. The community refers to similar situations from recent history, domestic and international, but does not collapse them into its own. It knows its own context. And it’s building a new frame supported by new activists freshly engaged because the old frame has proven incapable of bearing the community and its children. Ferguson’s residents and youth, along with all the residents and youth in solidarity with them in the US and around the world, are among America’s finest system re-designers. They’re not going to let the systemic power structure slip back to ordinary. We can’t.  

On the evening of August 14, I drove to Baltimore to stand in solidarity with Michael Brown’s family, the Ferguson, MO, community, and other victims of violent policing nationwide including Eric Garner, John Crawford, Armand Bennett, Ezell Ford, and Dante Parker. There were about 90 vigils around the country scheduled for 7 p.m. that night thanks to Feminista Jones and the #NMOS14 community on Facebook.

So I went to this local vigil to be in silence with other people who, like me, were tired and sad. I hoped that in the silence we were able to create, and in the sound we made when we spoke with one voice, we could remember that we’re not alone, that we have power as The People that we don’t exercise enough, that when one of us is cut down, it isn’t someone else’s problem, it’s ours. We have a better world to build together.

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As soon as I got into town, I noticed a higher and more visible police presence than I’ve ever seen, even during baseball games and other mass events. The police recorded everything from the sidelines; a lot of marchers took their photos and recorded them in return. A helicopter hovered throughout, and we saw snipers watching from the tops of city commercial buildings.

While I felt incredibly surveilled by the authorities, I was also grateful for the mix of people who participated and stayed engaged during the evening. I heard about a number of people who’ve died in the custody of Baltimore City police recently—these were stories I hadn’t heard before—and we told those stories until our convocation ended outside the commissioner’s building.

Overall those present with us were passionate but not aggressive. And the police, despite their surveillance posture, did assist us in moving around the streets near the Harbor without getting entangled with B’more traffic. About 200 people marched, and others joined along the way, all without bystander heckling or grumbling.

Part of what overwhelmed me as I walked was fatigue from the waning of a long, stubborn summer, from not being around many other people who were moved to act rather than simply posture or criticize, having few physical spaces to vent and build energy with, and not knowing the local landscape enough to see which groups were already working and could use my support. The news never offers this level of connection or insight into change:  rather it serves up and profits from a focus on problem-problem-problem and blood-blood-blood.

The morning after the march, I shared with my mother where I’d gone and why I cared. She listened quietly at first, but then invoked the “last days” of apocalyptic scripture: what else but the worsening of the human condition should we expect, she asked. She also reminded me of her experience in England with anti-black policing, racial protests, and riots during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I’m sure she meant to encourage me, but the prospect of repeating this narrative to my own baby cousins in 40 years doesn’t encourage me in the slightest. I don’t want them to be on the same hamster wheel that we’ve been on in the last few decades.

I want a different world for them.

A few days later I read a story about a woman in San Jose, CA, who died holding a cordless drill.

“Police and witnesses described the dramatic scene Thursday morning that ended with the fatal shooting of a mentally ill woman in front of her duplex on busy Blossom Hill Road, two blocks east of Oakridge Mall in South San Jose…”

“Police said the 911 call required a quick and strong response.

“‘We had a call, somebody with an Uzi threatening to kill family members,’ San Jose police spokesman Officer Albert Morales said. ‘It was a very serious situation, a very dangerous situation for our officers.'”

No one else was home with the woman. She was alone.

All the officers had were words, the words in the 911 call. And those words reframed completely what they might have seen in front of them. The “very dangerous situation” they believed they were part of was made so a priori by those words. And thus a drill became a gun and help became harm.

Words can so restructure reality that you will not see what is in front of you. If I find that frightening it is because of the quality of words that much of the world is shaped by. If I find it exciting it’s because I read and write words that could create a wholly different world. I only wonder if a wholly different world is the option that we’ll choose.

This post was not about a policeman or a teenager. It wasn’t even about an Uzi or a cordless drill. All of these are details that make no difference if fear has already degraded our ability to perceive accurately and investigate properly.

I don’t want to live in fear. I want to root for a new world, and I’m willing to help build it.

When I spoke to my mother that morning, I told her I believe that fatalism is corrosive. And I told her that I believe the discipline of caring regardless of outcome is good for us.

She nodded—a rare concession—and she told me she loved me.