Brad Blanton:(continued)
I don't know if you remember or not but we met in Boulder a few years back at the Alliance for Democracy conference. (Ronnie Dugger and I have known each other for almost 50 years now! Going back to 1959 when I was in the civil rights movement in Texas and he was the new editor of the Texas Observer) You did an outstanding job with The Great Turning. I spoke with Derrick Jensen just this last Sunday night and talked to him about reading your book. His book, End Game, vols one and two, if you have not already read them, I recommend to you as well. He is an outstanding writer and a fellow borderline violent revolutionary, playing grabass with writing more today, or blowing up a damn dam to save the rivers and all the living creatures that are being killed by no longer necessary hydroelectric dams.
The Barack Obama campaign and the next emergent and emergency step of social evolution has had the path cleared for it by your fine work and I appreciate the hell out of you for it. Have you read Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest?
A number of us are trying to put together a new kind of portal on the Internet to relate all of us to each other and to the public at large. I will contact you later about that when we have more details worked out. The great challenge before us is to integrate the knowedge of us so-called experts with the wisdom of co-intelligent deliberation that humans from all walks of life are capable of. (We will be using The Tao of Democracy by Tom Atlee, and The World Cafe, which I know you already know about.) I will be attending the National Coalition for Deliberation and Dialogue in Austin this coming October. Look it over and see if you are interested, and we might present something together there if you are.
Nice to hear from you. Thanks Thomas! Brad Blanton
P.S. I include this link about my curriculum in case you want to see how I have used your work. ( View Here)
David Korten:
Brad: Thanks for the prompt response and this addendum on your curriculum. I'm honored that you have given such a central place to The Great Turning and delighted to be in contact.
You are right on regarding the need for radical honesty to expose the lies in the cultural stories that frame our lives. Radical honesty is central to the work at hand. In the two years since the book came out I've come to see the work of changing our cultural stories as even more central than the book itself suggests.
I'm attaching a talk I just delivered at the Seattle Green Festival that reflects some of my most current thinking on the message.
I must admit to being a bit surprised by the language you use in describing yourself and your work in your January Ezine. I can certainly understand your anger, but wonder whether this language is the best way to reach the broad audience you need to reach with your message. In the end, if we are to liberate ourselves from the oppression of Empire we need to create a sense of human possibility. Part of this work is to expose the reality that the psychologically disabled who rule through the institutions of Empire are not representative of the species and cannot be allowed to define our sense of human possibility. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. David
Derrick Jensen:
All:
This is Derrick Jensen. I'm guessing you know of my work.
A couple of things.
First, David, I'm extremely disturbed that you are trying to tell Brad how to do his already-fine work (because no matter how much you attempt to use "nonviolent communication" in doing it, that's really what you are doing: trying to get him to tone down his anger in his work, work that in fact appeared in HIS OWN ezine). I don't see me or anyone else here telling you how to write your books. I don't see me or anyone else here telling you that your website isn't angry enough. I don't see any of us "wondering" if you could communicate better if only you expressed anger. Your behavior toward Brad is both troubling and disrespectful.
Second, what's wrong with anger? The world is being killed. This culture and those who run it are psychopaths. I get so sick of people discouraging others from expressing anger. And further, we've never needed to "create a sense of human possibility." It's always been there. It's called the Tolowa, the Yurok, the Hoopa, the Cherokee, the Shawnee, the Seneca, the Hopi, the Pequot, the Seminole, the Arawak, and so many others. You know this. And what does this culture do to them? It kills them. You know that, too. How dare you discourage Brad or anyone else from expressing anger. If you, David, want to not express anger in your own work, fine, that's your choice. But it's incredibly disrespectful for you to attempt to discourage Brad from expressing it.
The methane burps have started. (Editors note from Brad: These pockets of methane gas, stored under the ocean, and now threatening to come to the surface due to global warming are a threat to the entire atmosphere of earth, and could turn this planet into one like Venus, uninhabitable for life.)
Read that again.
The methane burps have started.
And do you know the response by the fucking psychopaths in power? It's to try to use this as a new source of energy to further this culture that is killing the planet. Not only that, it is to try to MINE the methane: intentionally pull it up from the bottom of the ocean.
There is 6 to 10 times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the ocean. If forests were similarly polluted, there would be 90 feet of styrofoam covering every inch of forest. 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. Carbon emissions are RISING. Deforestation rates are RISING. Extinction rates are RISING. EVERY indicator is going the wrong direction. The REAL, PHYSICAL world is being murdered. You know this.
And you caution against expressing anger?
First, it's just plain nasty to tell our allies how they should or should not communicate in public. I've never told you, David, that your books should be different than they are, that they should be more radical or militant, or that they should be more angry, or, to use your language, I've never told you that I "wonder whether this language is the best way" and so on. That's incredibly disrespectful, and as a longtime activist and author of a dozen or so extremely-well-received books, I would never tell another longtime activist and author of extremely-well-received books how to communicate. You are doing your work, and it's NOT MY PLACE TO TELL YOU HOW TO DO YOUR WORK. I presume you have thought long and hard about the tone you wish your work to take, and I am going to show you that respect. To tell you (or in this case rather insinuate, which is even worse, because it adds a layer of deniability) how to do your work is not only disrespectful, but none of my business. At no place in this note am I suggesting you change the tone of your writing. I am however, telling you that what you wrote to Brad is unacceptable and disrespectful. Similarly to the respect I show you and your work by not telling you how to do it, IT IS NOT YOUR PLACE TO TELL BRAD HOW TO DO HIS WORK. He's a big boy, and he is doing great work without your help, and he doesn't need you to tell him how to do it. Frankly you owe Brad an apology.
Second, anger is a fine and righteous emotion. What would be the threshold where you would not discourage Brad or anyone else from expressing anger at the dominant culture's murder of the planet? Would it be 91 percent of the large fish in the ocean being gone? 92 percent? 95 percent? Would you discourage Brad or anyone else from expressing anger when all the large fish are gone? How about when the oceans are completely murdered? How about when methane burps turn this planet into Venus? Would you have tried to discourage Tecumseh from expressing anger at those who were stealing their land, committing genocide against them? Would you have discouraged members of the resistance against the Nazis from expressing anger? The Nazis were only murdering Europe. This culture is murdering the planet. You know this.
I'm not even asking you to express anger, but how many species have to go extinct before you will not attempt to discourage Brad from expressing anger? All of them? How much life on this planet has to be destroyed (and how many indigenous populations that ALREADY SHOW US HUMAN POSSIBILITY) must be exterminated before he can express anger without you "wondering whether this language is the best way" and so on.
Three, you're simply wrong about anger not reaching people. Have you ever heard of Rage Against the Machine? If not, look them up. Their influence dwarfs both yours and mine.
I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with you as to whether your work is more or less influential than my own (arguments could be made either way, but they're entirely beside the point, so let's assume for a moment that you and I are equals here), but my work is undeniably angry: I am known in part for the anger of my work (and I should say, by the way, that those who know me even in the slightest know that I am not an angry person by nature: it is simply that, believe it or not, the murder of the planet makes me angry), and my talks, where I speak openly and explicitly about the necessity of bringing down civilization before it kills the planet, routinely draw 400 to 800 or more people, who routinely come from 6 and 8 and 10 hours away to hear the talks. I had 300 people show up at a Christian school in Ottawa, KS, a few days ago, people who were so happy that finally someone isn't telling them not to feel rage and sorrow at the murder of the world. So many people are so grateful that here is someone validating their feelings, validating that IT IS OKAY TO FEEL AND, EVEN BETTER, EXPRESS, RAGE AGAINST THIS CULTURE THAT IS _KILLING THE PLANET_. The point is not whether you or I draw more people. In fact the point isn't popularity or influence at all. The point is stopping this culture from killing the planet. I'm just making clear that anger does reach a certain population, and it's not up to you to tell Brad or anyone else (whom you respect) how to deliver their message.
I'm saying nothing bad against your work, David. Clearly you are doing your own work against this culture in ways that are important. But you have absolutely no right to suggest that Brad or anyone else tone down their rage. The world is being murdered. You have your own way of addressing this, and I have my own way, and Tecumseh had his own way, and Geronimo had his own way, and Jack Forbes has his own way, and Terry Tempest Williams has her own way, and Ward Churchill has his own way, and Frances Moore Lappe has her own way, and I have my own way, and Martin Luther King had his own way, and Malcolm X had his own way, and Gandhi had his own way, and Kartar Singh Saraba had his own way, and other Sikhs with guns (who were absolutely central to driving the British from India, but who are, no big surprise, for the most part ignored in favor of Gandhi by white Americans) had their own way, and petitioners have their own way, and members of the ELF have their own way, and candle-holders have their own way, and treesitters have their own way, and attorneys have their own way. If you take in only one thing from this note, please let it be this: we need all of these ways, and all of these ways must be respected. If you want others to respect your approach, and if you want to work with these others, you MUST respect their approaches. The respect must go both directions. If you don't respect others who express more anger than you, then obviously people who do feel and express anger at the planet cannot work with you. I can't speak for Brad, but I cannot and will not work with those who do not respect those who show anger at the murder of the planet.
All best, Derrick
Brad Blanton:
Dear David and Derrick-I appreciate both of you very much for this conversation. Though my anger is reactive and a response I am not entirely in charge of, I do consciously choose to express it as directly and impactfully as possible. I also do it, for much the same reason I get arrested in demonstrations every couple of years, to maintain my Goddammed sanity. I sound angry because I am angry, though everyone who knows me knows I am usually a pretty happy and contactful person most of the time. I do yell at people who yell at their kids, threaten people who threaten their kids in front of me and I cuss out presumptive right wingers to their face, and I often write angrily-and that I do to encourage others to have enough faith in their capacity to work things out, to work through things, to go ahead and tell the truth about how angry they are and what they are angry about.
I also think that one of the reasons you are a great writer and speaker, David, and so many of us want to read you, is that like Derrick and I, you got fed up with the people who are abusing and trying to kill our mother earth, our brothers and sisters and our fellow creatures. And as Derrick says, it takes all kinds. I am the kind who is willing to be violent, but who seldom is. One of the reasons I seldom am violent is that my bluff works tremendously because fellow formerly abused folks recognize a brother and know just how serious I am when I threaten them-that I am totally willing to die trying to kill them when they see me shaking and crying and speaking very descriptive language about what is about to happen to them if they don't stop the particular behavior I am requesting that they stop.
As Derrick so articulately explains, non-violence is contextual, and the big picture you talk about, David, as you know, includes not only naming the bad stories but stopping some of them or some of the people advocating them. My language clearly expresses that I am fed up with fucking true believers, win lose or draw, fuck fight or run. And I have given up tolerance for Lent.
I love Annie's story of stuff, and like you David, have watched it over and over. And I am personally working to change that story in my own life and the going is tough, because we are all so brainwashed that even when we know better, or know the story is deadly and unfair, we keep doing it by spending and earning money, living on the grid, and on and on and on. That pisses me off too.
Here is an excerpt from my autobiography which I am working on now, (Some New Kind of Trailer Trash). It is about when we were being the non violent civil rights movement and it reinforces Derrick's note with some instances...
B.T. Bonner is on a hunger strike on the drag, just below the University Theatre. He has been there on the sidewalk with his sign for three days now. We bring him water and take shifts to keep an eye on him. I am on duty and there are several others of us from the Y standing and talking about a half a block away. Three frat rats with a cheeseburger appear in front of him. One takes a big bite out of the burger and says, "Ummm. Umm. Want a bite?" and holds it out in front of B.T. I launch myself in their direction full speed ahead, yelling at the top of my lungs, "Give me that hamburger you cocksuckers and I'll stick so far up your fuckin' ass you will choke on it!" I am ready to kill. They all three run. Three of my non violent compatriots tackle me but also hold me up so I don't fall on the ground while I keep yelling and fighting to get loose and kick some ass. Somewhere in there, with all of them telling me, "We're non-violent. We're non-violent," it occurs to me, O yeah, we're supposed to be non-violent."
You can take the asshole out of the jungle, but taking the jungle out of the asshole is another more difficult, painful and long lasting project. I am sorry for most of my violence, but not all of it. I actually had a lot of fun with running off those three frat rats. And over the course of my life I still have protected myself and my kids in ways I am not ashamed of, that sometimes involved violence and sometimes just the excellent bluff of being completely willing to die in the process of taking someone on.
All of us survivors recognized the signals of shaking and crying and shortness of breath that threaten the outbreak of attempted total annihilation at any second, and we will back down from each other most times when we get those signals if we can. We know there is hell to give and hell to pay and hours and hours of pain and suffering in store for one or the other and more likely both when that happens, and can sometimes hold back when we need to but sometimes we don't and you can't really ever know for sure your own self. It is a dysfunctional way to live but not entirely because it works sometimes. Like the food addict, we have to eat, we can't give up eating, yet we are hard pressed to control how much, how fast and how unselectively we eat.
There is for me this trigger. In a split second I access a fury like a drug hitting me hard. I change suddenly from whatever mood or state of being preceded the trigger to the state of fury. I seldom have to actually act on it, and therefore can maintain a semblance of control. I am glad I have it because without folks like me in the wings, to support Ghandi and King and Jesus with willingness to die, and in personal confrontation, perhaps even to kill, love is not enough.
(Excerpt from Richard Flanagan's novel The Unknown Terrorist )
"Nietzsche began to fear that what drove the world forward was all that was destructive and evil about it. In his writings he tried to reconcile himself to such a terrible world.
"But one day he saw a cart horse being beaten brutally by its driver. He rushed out and put his arms around the horse's neck, and would not let go. Promptly diagnosed as mad, he was locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life.
"Nietzsche had even less explanation than Jesus for love and its various manifestations: empathy, kindness, hugging a horse's neck to stop it being beaten. In the end Nietzsche's philosophy could not even explain Nietzsche, a man who sacrificed his life for a horse."
(More from my upcoming autobiography)
It's about 11:00 at night and Booker T Bonner and I are standing outside the Nighthawk Restaurant. I am tired. I have been up a day and a night, but I don't have to go to work at 11 PM tonight and I am grateful for it. We are standing outside in the rain, and we are talking, and we are a little depressed. We have been sitting in at this restaurant periodically for months now. We have put forth a lot of effort but they just let us occupy the booths and don't do shit about kicking us out anymore and we just sit there. We are both tired. One of us, I don't remember which one of us, says, "Let's go talk to this guy." We go around back and knock on the kitchen door. The owner, a big man, comes to the back door, recognizes us, and says, "What do you want?" I say, "We want to know, when are you gonna integrate this God damned restaurant!" He looks at us and says, "I'm a damned mean Swede, and nobody tells me what to do." When he said that I ceased being tired and became full of energy. B.T. said, "Well, I'm a damned mean nigger and I am not leaving you alone until you integrate." He barely gets to finish because I can't wait to jump right in there and say, "I'm a mean God damned redneck, and if you don't integrate this motherfucker in 24 hours I am coming back here to beat the shit out of you!" I was breathing hard and moving up close to him. Apparently I looked like I meant it because he went inside and closed the door in my face. B.T. and I looked at each other, and we walked away. I went home and slept. The next day, we went in and sat down and he served us. And from that day forward, the Nighthawk restaurant was desegregated. I don't think it was because he was afraid of us. I think it was just because no one had ever communicated to him clearly before, in terms he understood and which he identified with. One formerly abused kid saluted another, and they recognized each other.
This is only one of many instances in the civil rights movement in which we somehow got across the point that we were serious and didn't mean to ever let up on all the hell we could create until the God damned justice we wanted was accomplished. When we stopped being polite he understood we were serious people, just like him, then he served us food when we came into his restaurant. He didn't really care that all the other restaurant owners wanted him to keep segregated. He was a damned mean Swede, and nobody told him what to do. And when we went in there and sat down and ate, a black man and a white man together, nobody said shit, except when we paid the bill we said "thank you" like we meant it and he said, "You're welcome," like he did too.
This background threatening attitude and experience of being willing to die in order to destroy is a central part of who I am, just as it is a central part of Dick Cheney and George Bush and the Neo Con Men (their band). Even saying that makes me nauseous. Being like them is the last God damned thing I ever want to be. If there is anyone I would just love to beat the shit out of it is those two bastards and Karl Rove. I would be happy to take them all on at once and give Cheney a shotgun to boot, and I would kick all three of their asses up between their fucking shoulder blades before they could do jack shit. (There the little fucker goes again. I am 67 years old and I still can't keep them fantasy personalities under control for shit.)
We did change the cultural story then, from segregation to de-segregation. It took all kinds to do it. I am not always the kind kind, but I do my part to help change the story. In the case of bullshit war on innocents for profit, what we have done hasn't been enough, though. And particularly all those years in the anti-Vietnam war movement did nothing whatsoever to even slow the pace of the militarization and corporatization for war in America. Both of you can consider me your angry ally, and I am one of the kinds we all need.
David Korten:
Brad: It was not my intention to tell you what to do, rather it was simply to ask whether you find this particular degree and manner of expressing your anger to be effective in reaching the people you want to reach. Obviously you do. Thank you for taking the time to provide this extensive answer. I hope my question will not dampen your enthusiasm for promoting and using The Great Turning.
With best regards. David
Brad Blanton:
Doesn't dampen my enthusiasm for your excellent work one bit David! I march in a parade of pissed off people and I am ever so often at the front. And if you need an assist for direct unequivocal expression or a hit man give us a holler. Heh heh.
I don't want to discourage pissed off people from being pissed off or to inhibit any more than necessary my own expression of it. I think that is fundamentally true that people like Cheney and Bush and a number of their cohorts, displace their anger to self righteousness and then angrily act out their punishments to the lower folks on the social hierarchy-according to rules that Derrick is particularly good at explaining, and that you understood from your own experience as an "economic hit man" yourself. More power to you my friend.
End of Dialogue
O.K. that's all. I liked that dialogue and I thought you all would, and it is continuing.
We have Radical Honesty Festival in June and we have a Radical Honesty trainer’s training right after it. If you want to refresh your memory of what we are offering, take a look here:
http://www.radicalhonesty.com/article/ezine_2008-01.php
I hope some of you who haven't made up your minds about the trainer's training, or have not decided do the level two, three day workshop in September sign up for the course now because it starts next week. Next week we are starting a regular give and take via email, phone and Skype leading up to each training. Please let us know if you want to do this.
We have to individually get over the lying we have learned from mama and papa and the agents of civilization. Those lies hide our deeper nature, which we must face and use now to survive. Then we have to destroy the world economy and system of warfare based on that lying and we have to build a new system for deep democracy that honors nature and our core selves as beings who notice first, think consciously, share and act.
If you want to do something about both your personal growth and the downfall of humanity because of civilized lying, you can heal yourself of "civilization illness" and educate yourself to understand the framework that determines what is actually going on, from the personal to the political, that is killing the world. We have a selection of books and a course that will empower you to accomplish that.
O.K. Homies. That's it. We have Taber, Ave, Anne, Raven, Jerry and possibly a couple of others of the trainer body coming to the trainer's training in June and we have 7 enrollments in the trainers training so far. We have nine people from the Oakland and Boston groups enrolled in Level Two in September. If you want on one of them let us know. Love and kisses, Brad
Back to Main Page of May Ezine
|
