http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMC8Owx0Fkk
Potent activists, the insanely humane Unviolent warriors,
INSHE warriors, these are our great ‘heart’ surgeons, practicing a much more
difficult type of heart surgery than those we generally think of by that
name. They're reaching first into their
own heart, and then with all of their skill, into the heart of others to try
and pull to the fore their own, and then our humanity. Much more difficult than regular heart
surgery because there are no visual references.
It's all imagination, empathy, compassion, wisdom, intuition, vision,
understanding, clarity...Heart; probing inside oneself and inside others for
that all-important heart, how to get it
engaged, to bring alive, get it in charge.
So, a heart surgeon is going to allow a co-worker that might
not show up on time, that might have a lapse of attention, that might say they
are handing a scalpel but they actually hand something else? No, it's not going to happen, not if they
love the patient that they're trying to save.
Not if they're a caring human being.
And yet post-60’s activism? Oh, I
mean excuses are the stock in trade. ‘Oh,
I forgot,’ ‘Oh I didn't make it on time….’
What is implicit in this endemic lack of trustworthiness is
- this isn't important work. What's
important is my comfort, my self-image, my convenience, my self-indulgences,
that you forgive me…. But the work, it's
not important. The work we're doing is
not important, the people we're trying to help are not important, that's the unspoken
but lived truth of activism for the last 40 years. Is that the truth you want to see go forward?
Is that the truth you are comfortable with?
I don't think you are.
That's not being alive. That's
activist masturbation.
Really, really? Is
that what you aspire to? Is that what
you want be?
I don't think so. Do
better.
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