A few years ago I watched a documentary about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It had a huge impact on me because after watching it, one question hung in the air: How is it that these women could see so clearly what needed to change when most other women had been accepting the status quo for centuries? We have names for these kinds of people…pioneers and prophets.

A few months later I heard a woman speak about leadership. She said something I’d never heard before…that leadership requires seeing what isn’t there. I immediately related that idea to the lives of Anthony and Stanton. They had a vision of what the role of women could be that did not yet exist. And they fought with everything they had to make it happen.

I began to wonder what I wasn’t seeing yet.  

The title is the first warning.

Here’s the second: I need to rant a bit about something Clinton said today. That might not be kosher here, but I need to get this off my chest. If you’d rather not hear what I have to say, there are plenty of other great essays and comments to read, so I hope you’ll take advantage of all the other talent here.

As many of us here at Docudharma try to find ways to change the trajectory of our system both outside and inside the political system, we often run into roadblocks that get in our way of feeling successful. What can we do on a daily basis to create the kind of radical change we’re looking for?

I think one of the things that gets in the way of a truly progressive movement is that we keep thinking we have to change everything that’s wrong with the world. That usually means we get stuck with having to change what others are doing. Sometimes we can have an impact on that, but its an uphill battle for sure. And when others aren’t interested in changing, we feel frustrated. Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, challenged us to “be the change we want to see in the world.” I believe that’s where our power lies…in ourselves.

Another thing that I think gets in our way is that we can feel small and powerless to actually have any impact. We get trapped into feeling like we can’t alter the course of history with our small efforts and then get immobilized to do anything at all. That’s why I added another of Gandhi’s quotes as my sig line. I need a constant reminder that:

Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it.

Finally, I think that we often get impatient. And its understandable why. There are lives in the balance. But if we look at history, we learn that the kind of change that we need now takes time. That’s not a call to complacency, but to sustained efforts with patience. I think that’s what Ruben Alvez was trying to say in this quote about hope:

So, let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.

This is the secret of discipline. Such disciplined love is what has given saints, revolutionaries, and martyrs the courage to die for the future they envision; they make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.

One of the many cesspools we’ll have to clean up post-Bushco is our language. There are words I find myself avoiding because they have been so tainted with lies and evil that their original meaning has been mutilated. A project like that doesn’t rate as high on the priority list as things like ending the war in Iraq, stopping the use of torture, addressing climate change, fixing the economy, and joining with the people of the gulf coast to restore their home. But it is something I hope we can do along the way.

For me, a word that is seriously in need of restoration is “awe.” I just hate the fact that every time I hear that word these days, I think of the destruction and death “shock and awe” caused in Iraq. Its such a beautiful word and it was used in the most vile way imaginable. So, my hope is that we will not only end our perpetuation of violence in that country and at least TRY to find a way to make amends for what we have done, but that we will also recognize that our leaders took a concept that should inspire peace and bastardized it as a tool for war.

I know, I know, its Barry Manilow, but get over it!!

A few months ago, I wrote an essay titled Leaving Our Most Vulnerable Children Behind. It was about a budget cut from January 2005 to a relatively small Medicaid program that provides funding for 70,000 troubled, abused or foster children and their families in Minnesota. Back in December 2007, a ruling was finally issued that eliminated the funding as of March 2008.

Given that we’ve all been so terribly disappointed in our federal legislators over these last few years, I wanted to make sure that I publicly gave credit to them for some good news that I heard today.

I’d like to start out with something I said yesterday in Buhdy’s essay.

If we are going to put an end to the MICMC, it means finding another way to structure our lives and our relationships. It means getting rid of greed/power over/hierarchy. And I think we are just in the infancy stages of learning what the alternatives might be. We have a lot of work to do in our own lives to recreate the cultural myths and memes that have predominately served the interests of the MICMC.

To me, one of the “memes” that needs to be identified and challenged is the tendency to “objectify” others. Once we have created distance from someone’s humanity and given them a label, its easy to dismiss them. It also leaves the door open for hatred and violence. We’ve all recognized this use of objectification in a time of war. In order to kill someone up close and personal, its easier if you think of them as a kraut, gook, or raghead.

I’ve never been able to separate my spiritual quest from the political. And I expect that both will be journeys that will take up my lifetime.

I often find myself at odds with those who seek only a political solution. That usually means playing the same old game in the same old way when I’d rather be learning to fly.

On the other hand, those involved in a spiritual quest can be so inwardly focused that their journey doesn’t seem to have any real impact on the world around them. I once heard someone describe his wife’s experience at a spiritual retreat this way, “She’s fallen in love with humanity, but she doesn’t like anyone in particular.”

In their book, The Great Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor sum it up this way:

In this world, at this point, no political revolution is sustainable if it is not also a spiritual revolution – a complete ontological birth of new beings out of old. Equally, no spiritual activity deserves respect if it is not at the same time a politically responsible, ie, responsive, activity.

Over the last couple of weeks, several people have been “riffing” off an essay written by Nightprowlkitty, A Personal View: Discontent. I’m still thinking about it today.

I am not looking for new answers.

I am trying to see what is already here.  Right now.  Fully formed.

What makes that vision difficult is the bombardment of information, the daily tolling of the bad news bell of the United States of America, the evils that prompt the human spirit to react instead of respond.  This to me is the most difficult task, to make myself quiet enough to see the answer staring me in the face.  It is easy to write.  It is not easy to do.

Have you ever felt like a “prisoner of words?”

It took me over 30 years to learn to speak with my own voice. Before that time, I did what others thought I should do and said what others thought I should say. My life belonged to them, not me. This poem by Marge Piercy captures what that feels like.

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The word “change” is being bandied about in political circles alot these days. We hear it from candidates constantly. But we also talk about it alot ourselves here at Docudharma. We want to change the country, don’t we? But I’ve been thinking about how little we seem to focus on how change happens. I’m sure many of us have experience with change in our own personal lives. What can we learn from our own experiences that might inform us as we work together to effect change in our country?

One of the most important lessons I learned along the way is that “willpower” is not enough of a force to ever be able to change me or to motivate me to become who it is I want to be in life. This lesson came in two arenas that defined my early years.