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mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

resistance

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A few thoughts on rest

A night scene: movement, bright, colored, streaky lights
Photo credit: Tom Eversley

I’m leading a conversation this Saturday morning at the CityLights community. Find us near Union Square, New York City, from about 11 a.m. to about 2 p.m.

Post-Easter, the group’s starting a new talk series on the Sabbath and time. I’ve been reading a little Walter Brueggemann on rest and resistance lately, and I can’t wait to see how the folks in the room respond to it.

‘Self-care’ is one of the buzzwords of our time. We’re told we have the right to experience it, but very little about contemporary life—especially in the urbs and suburbs—supports the regular practice of individual or collective rest.

This Sabbath, Keisha invites us to look at Sabbath not in terms of creation (Exodus) but in terms of liberation (Deuteronomy). We’ll learn from the wisdom of theologians, activists, and other spiritual teachers, consider some of the forces that stand between us and rest, and share some of the tools and practices we’ve each learned to help us resist a culture of ‘endless production.'”

I’m not saying that you should come and join us if you already have plans elsewhere. I’m just saying that if you do, there will be hugs!

Some of you receive these posts every day; others, in a digest every Tuesday morning. However you get them, thank you for reading.

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The virtue you don’t want tested

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can. —Frida Kahlo

Endurance. Perseverance. Persistence. Inner strength.

Each of these virtues draws praise in an era that worships the rugged individual who conquers circumstance with dogged will and fortune (but mostly dogged will).

Three months after the US presidential inauguration, the shine of “resistance” has dulled. So has the popular hope that we can abbreviate the next four to eight years; that we might not have to keep feeling the chaos, the uncertainty, the confusion, the ambiguity; that we might not have to keep watching headlines like the ones we’ve seen this week.

It may be true that “we can endure much more than we think we can.”

It certainly isn’t true for everyone.

And it’s an idea that, even under the aegis of common penal rhetoric like “no pain, no gain,” we don’t really want to test.

I have limits, and I’m sure Kahlo’s right that I’m more limited by what I think my limits are than by what they actually are.

But I don’t want to know how much we can endure, not when I watch what my siblings in Syria and Egypt and Myanmar and Michigan and South Dakota are enduring already.

Perhaps the reassurance that we can endure trauma motivates some people to hold their courage through it all. I’m hoping instead that it doesn’t give the rest of us cover to stand aside and merely look.

We need one another to do more than that. Much, much more.

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It’s hard out here for a stumbling block

A person is not worth retaining if they cause others to leave. —Catt Small

It seems like every couple of months, female employees across industries are trading stories about organizational culture and “fit.” Far too often, these stories boil down to them not fitting at all.

At Uber: A serial harasser has a Human Resources department that protects him despite years of complaints from peers and junior employees.

At a much smaller copywriting shop: clients know intuitively to second-guess their female consultant’s feedback but not question her male coworkers; her supervisor sees no problem except for her.

Catt Small recently laid out the elements of organizational culture on the Automattic blog for staff members and managers who want their offices to be better than average: to be environments that employees run to rather than run from.

Of these contexts, Small writes, “A person is not worth retaining if they cause others to leave.”

But it seems to take an awful lot of people dragging themselves out of these environments before managers seem to be willing to recognize a problem.

I’ve participated in congregations where local leaders have very strong personalities and the community learns to tolerate visitor and member attrition as long as Bro. or Sis. So-And-So is appeased. These congregations certainly don’t operate on Small’s principle that one who causes others to leave is more a liability than a gift.

I’ve begun thinking about the quality of community for a speaking appointment this fall. Naturally that means thinking about ways community fails as well as ways that it can work. What of the person who functions as stumbling block?

I want to know what we can learn from them, and the best possible ways to engage or not engage. I want to know how to do so not just for the collective’s well-being, but also for theirs: I struggle to believe that playing the role of stumbling block does a soul much good, even if we eventually treat their handiwork as muscle-building resistance and grow anyhow.

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Changing under duress

A large boat steams through a choppy white sea. The sky is gray with low clouds.
Photo credit: Jean-Pierre Brungs

Most of us will finally change under two exaggerated conditions: either we cannot stand or tolerate the situation, issue, or circumstance any longer, so we will change; or we want to experience something that has such a passion for us that we will go for it, no matter what it takes. Both of these are extreme motivational processes. Change masters instead face and understand change as a natural daily process that creates constant openings for growth, learning, and psycho-spiritual development.” —Angeles Arrien

Some things become terrifying the more closely you study them. For me, Arrien’s observation about people, change, and exaggerated triggers is one of them.

Arrien was a cultural anthropologist who noticed that the common trigger for change is “under duress.”

Should people around us or over the horizon and far away bear more of the consequences of our reluctance than we do ourselves, we can be just self-absorbed enough to wait until those consequences sneak closer to us or people like us.

When the storm surges hit our cities, or drug addiction meets our children, then we’ll do something. But not before.

This is one of the core problems that Umair Muhammad addresses in Confronting Injustice. The strategies that work for resolving this problem at the interpersonal level, say between close relatives or in-laws, don’t work for a shared, global, and complex problem like climate change.

For a person I have a challenging dynamic with, I can easily say to myself, “If people around me are on a different path than me; if they choose to invest in coal production or start a street pills business, that’s up to them. I’m only responsible for my expectations and actions; I’m not responsible for what they choose.”

That’s rhetoric that a 12-step family support group might offer someone at their wit’s end because of a relative in straits.

But with climate change, there’s no viable way to retreat into the castle of the saved/woke and leave the damned/problematic on the far side of the moat. Our circle of concern and responsibility can’t be human-sized; it has to be Earth-sized with implications for all of us, or it won’t protect any of us.

Muhammad argues that we’ll need greater cooperation to plan and execute our responses to climate change than we’ve marshaled for anything else in human history, including the Second World War.

We’ll need that cooperation even more than we did during the war because, as Muhammad notes, the impulse to reduce consumption across industries and so reduce economic productivity entirely contradicts industrialized nations’ cultural stories about having more, doing more, and getting more in the venerable name of Profit Margin.

I think Muhammad’s right about what justice will cost, and I’m doing my best to imagine that the cooperation we need is in fact possible, despite all signs to the contrary in the US and international political systems.

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Resistance and humane planning

Make humane plans. To sustain resistance for longer than a protest, you'll need to do pacing as well as planning. Learn from the geese. Include breaks. —@mackenzian

In a way, I’ve felt besieged for a few years now, not in the intense ways others in major cities have. But still, in the way that one who pays attention can’t help but notice creeping crawling unease, I’ve felt besieged.

I’ve joked with others who grew up fundamentalist about the opening of Revelation’s seals, but I know that November 8 wasn’t the day the skies opened and Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death rode out to do their special work.

And yet—

  •  “[No. 45]  intends to pay for the coming US-Mexico wall with a 20 percent tax on all imports coming from Mexico.” (NY Post)
  • “The White House intends to temporarily shut down travel from a wide swath of countries to the United States and implement dramatic restrictions on immigration and refugee admission,” including suspending the visa waiver system, expanding biometric records for non-citizens, and halving the number of refugees the US will receive. (Huffington Post)
  • “Agencies shall… ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.” (January 25 Executive Order on “public safety”)
  • “[No. 45’s] administration mandating EPA scientific studies, data undergo review by political staff before public release,” contra the agency’s internal scientific integrity policy (AP)
  • “The new EPA administration has asked that all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately,” and agency staff were banned from publishing new web content or communicating with the public on social media or blogs (ProPublica, Huffington Post)

All that’s just Week 1.

It’s a lot, and it’s only just started.

If you’ve been paying attention for a while, and are feeling fatigued? That’s reasonable. If you’ve just started paying attention, and are feeling a little overwhelm? Also reasonable.

As I said this week during my conversation with the good folks of Pub Theology, it’s important to set boundaries around social engagement: we can’t go to all the protests and still have a life, and there are costs to being hyper-alert and always responsive.

It’s ok to rest. No, it’s good to rest. 

My strategy is this:

  • Pick one issue, not all the issues.
  • Pick one peer group, not all the peer groups.
  • Pick one practical action to do with the peer group, not all the actions.
  • Do the action. Evaluate the action.
  • Eat salad and soup. Shower.
  • Take regular breaks from actions and being hyper-informed.
  • Do not neglect art and beauty.

A week ago I was wondering whether I needed to lay down my daily writing. This week, I’m sure I shouldn’t. For now, this is my one practical action. It forces me to slow down, to make something pretty or process something hard, and to reach out to others who I learn from or share with.

It’s a small quiet “No” that I can say through action every day, whether I join other social collective work or fall back from the front to recover.

This weekend, I’m switching off the horror. I know it’ll be there when I return on Monday. I’m going to write and transcribe and rest.

Join me.

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Normalization is normal after all

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel! —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Two words I’ve heard plenty of in the last few months: resistance and normalization.

Advocates advise the public to resist the agenda of the new administration. Commentators worry that the administration’s unusual tactics (and more overt expressions of the same old tactics) might reset the typical center and become the US’ new normal.

But humans are nothing if we’re not adaptable. We can adjust to almost anything, and usually do. I came across Dostoyevsky’s line about the adaptable scoundrel today. According to Umair Muhammad, this society reveres “freedom of choice” but rarely encourages people to question the range of choices available. We typically won’t request biscuits if offered banana or an apple. Instead, we usually adjust to the terms provided—in that case, fruit.

US politics demonstrates this because it is currently structured as a debate between two options. Rather than seriously questioning why televised debates only include those two options and seeking to change that custom, we instead focus years of our time on which representatives of those two options should participate. One party offers a policy proposal; the other rebuts with its own ideological alternative; and there’s no room in the public square for options outside that range. We’ve normalized those binaries.

Having been conditioned with a certain set of expectations, individuals may be quite happy with meeting them. —Umair Muhammad, Confronting Injustice

Our unjust and consumptive society is an edifice that needs restructuring, but millions of dissatisfied people marching in major cities aren’t the proof. Our adaptability means that we’ll adapt to evil as well as to good: society would still need restructuring even if all those people were content with the status quo.

The conditions that society continually produces—the poverty, the violence, the hoarded resources—these are what prove it needs restructuring.

What we can count on is that if there are humans around, we will normalize the conditions available. We will normalize this next administration, and inasmuch as any of us lose our capacity to be surprised about what the new government does, we’ll know that we’ve finally adjusted.

But if we can’t avoid adjusting altogether, we can still do some good. Through independent media and beyond the A vs. B cable news issue format, we can keep working to keep the options broad: exploring kinship structures and not just marriages; life-long cooperative communities, not just a year or two of civil or military service after college; broad-based programs of education, training, and labor, not just unpaid internships and unemployment benefits.

The best thing we can ask at this time, then, is not “Is this normal?” but “Are there more options?”

Because the answer to that is always “Yes.”