(Key to the Highway, Eric Clapton, 1991 courtesy of YouTuber rajiobaka)
In practicing solidarity, some strange things happen!
Well I am not even going to try to generalize because I can’t.
So I’ll do this first person singular. It’s all about MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Hee.
I haven’t read Martin Luther King or Ghandi so I am pretty ignorant of the training involved to gain a state of mind where you know how to resist and how to yield. How to confront violence with awareness and respond to it in a way that is not violent even when physical.
Physical violence. That seems astonishing, the ability to stand there without choosing either fear or anger when someone is trying to physically harm you … I can hardly imagine that but I know this is a state of mind that can be attained because too many of my brothers and sisters have attained it and written about it and such.
But anyway, I am not near there, so I won’t write about confronting physical violence. My typical response to physical violence is as a graduate of the Three Stooges School of Self-Defense and not very practical in large groups!
I’ll speak to a far more shallow aspect that millions of Americans have been experiencing for a long time now, arguments, in conversation with friends, family, etc., that have been aggressive in a very hurtful way — if you get hurt it hurts and if you are the hurter, that hurts, too!
Meh.
Too much aggression is destructive. Too much passivity — well we’ve seen the results of that in the form of “holding your powder.”
My guess is the correct standpoint should be in the middle, between those two.
Aggression and passivity are not psychological enemies, I think, but forces, energies that can be shaped but neither created nor destroyed.
And that’s all the physics I will steal to make a rhetorical metaphor.
The books are there, the lessons are there to be learned for civil disobedience, the state of mind it takes to act in that way in solidarity, and yet not turn destructive.
I guess I’m really referring to cultural disobedience here … a term I have just coined!
Shaping our culture, knowing how to confront those who would try to take us back to a time when torture was casually accepted, back to that dank, dark, nationwide ghetto of fear.
It’s a state of mind I’m talking about here. How does it feel. Yeah.
Happy Friday to all and I hope everyone is well.
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… I love me some weekend.
(YouTube courtesy of AbejaMariposaJr)
I’ve got the passive down pat, but need to work on the aggressive. Balance is everything.
And I love your new term “cultural disobedience”. 🙂
…long ago. Much slower version. Paul Butterfield? Michael Bloomfield maybe? Don’t know.
Hold the
Hold the
All we ask is that you let us
serve it YOUR way!
🙂
to sing it to me when I was a toddler. This is the version. I love this guy he is so beautiful and graceful. he’s liquid. Somehow he reminds me of Little Richard.
As for aggression, I swing wildly between passivity and violence, not physical but emotionally which comes out my mouth. I am having problems with my loved ones as the last eight years have brought out my nasty, along with my intolerance and fuck you stance. So many bridges to mend where to begin? Or should I? Was this just how things are or an aberration of a culture who turns to the dark? I too have been musing on the ability and possibility of confronting violence within and without with some other approach.
Grassroot working helped last year as you really can’t talk to people and shout them down and expect to persuade them to change their take on politics and the world. I think part of the solution is to be compassionate to the ones you see as enemy. On the other hand how to come to grips with the violence that people say is just how humans are or it’s a dog eat dog world, or American’s are violent and that’s the way it is, all this.
I’m thinking of joining a local gym that I always thought was a weird cult thing, but am feeling it might offer a way to use my fire or aggression. Lot’s of classes with kick boxing and Asian martial arts and Yoga, along with Chinese
Chi raisers. Anyway I enjoyed your essay it is a dilemma now that the Change is here. Or is it? This last decades has been a strange trip as far as passivity vs aggression. Sometimes you just have to say rip her to shreds and other times you say your likable enough.
Wish I could be as cool as you. Dousing a fire is not as productive as knowing how to bank it and use it in a way that actually makes people stop and look and listen. I found a picture the other day of a young hippie sticking a flower in a soldiers gun.
…the art of bringing agression and passivity together…wait…
I wouldn’t suggest it would answer all your questions appropriately for our time; –but you could do worse.
Tell ’em about your dream, Martin.
I’m so glad I didn’t sneeze.
I think… we choose. If a fight is personal, a core issue, I think the fire is not only internally fed, but consistently fed. It becomes an integral part of who we are; we are able to shape it. We become co-creators of its expression.
Me for example, I have a lot of fire. (What, this isn’t all about me, it’s about you? Phash! ;-)) Learning to argue (dispassionately) was something we were consciously trained to do at the dinner table. I can also cuss like a banshee.
Most people who engage me in a fight rarely come back for a second round. But, I have limitations to pursing arguing as a way that are intensely personal and not for blogsharing, but boil down to the idea that anger is a luxury and not one I can engage in for any length of time.
So yeah, aggression is a choice, as is yielding.
Another example: the Bush years. I started fighting hard against GWB in 1999. The fire from the Impeachment Folly and the Reagan/Bush years were plenty enough fuel. By the time the buildup to the second Iraq war (and I stood against the first war, also), those of us who were standing straight up against this tide were bent over like willow trees. That war was a fucking juggernaught that millions of people couldn’t stop. So in 2003, I changed course; quit fighting conservatives and joined the fight to elect John Kerry. We all know how that turned out. On a personal level, the fights were raging daily. Nothing like living in the belly of the beast. I didn’t win, but I didn’t lose, either. Still standing, still bent over like a willow, but holding ground.
Did I choose stand up and shout at deployment ceremonies? No, to my ever-lasting shame.
Did my husband choose to stand up when given a chance to speak at a public event? Oh yes, to my ever-lasting astonishment.
Did I finally call the game dirty when Katrina hit? Yes, on a Saturday in a Walmart to a couple of red-neck farmers (and the entire produce/deli section) in a loud, full-on pissed-off Irish/Pict woman display.
We were run out of town? Oh yeah. 😉
Was it worth it? Oh yeah.
So now I find myself in another belly of the beast… more red-neck conservatives. And I’m viewed- by some- with great suspicion. Do I fight? When necessary. Do I yield? All the time. Because now the fight is a core issue… “Oh, oh what I want to know is, are you kind?” Is, as I’ve chanted for years, compassion truly the center of my being? Am I not the co-creator of this expression? Yes, I am. Is this yet another chance to “Be the change I want to see?” Yes, it is.
I have no desire to relive the dark years in any manner. I am content to let others bring justice to the perps of the crimes. I fought when I needed to fight; now, I need to marshal internal energies to broadening the gap that has ruptured… the gap that exposes compassion and equality and love and higher purposes and community… the current current of history. I want to fight to open it wider, because there are too many still left out of the compassion, the equality, the love and the higher purpose and the community.
So that’s my fight now. That’s the choice I’m making.
Years ago I used to wax about a vision of seeing GWB baking out somewhere in the Texas heat with nothing but lizards for company. That still holds.
wanted to speak to the concept of yielding….
Yielding, to me, means forgiveness. Letting go. Not holding a grudge. It in no way is opposite to opposition or an aggressive stance… it is simply sweeping the space between clean, sweeping the temple’s steps, and moving on. We also yield when we bend, like the willow trees, to an overwhelming force, without uprooting.