I too am waiting for Neil Youngs’ new album!

A few years ago, I was part of a Toastmasters club for progressives (yes there are such things, and they’re badly needed), and I gave a speech about how we progressives need to watch Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and other Asian martial arts movies.

My point was, that although Lee was frequently outnumbered in his fights, he constantly looked for openings, for tipping-points in his confrontations, that he skillfully leveraged to his advantage.

The right is like a brutal beast, that really only understands thuggery and lying and power politics. They completely embody the saying that might makes right. For years we’ve stood by, with jaws dropped, dumbfounded by each new level of depravity these people display. They don’t know how to respond to creative, deft, sincere, truthful actions such as your leafleting, which was novel and inspired.

In my Bruce Lee speech, I brought up people like Elvis Presley, and the Beatles, who changed the entire world, because the world was ready for them, and yet no one, even themselves, could ever have predicted this. That’s the power of leveraging tipping points, and using creativity to change things. We should never be intimidated by the size of our opponents.

Related note, I’m waiting with baited breath on the impact of Neil Youngs’ new album, which is unabashedly anti-Bush.

Doing what we can, while being alert to opportunity. Yes.

Your responses have helped me fine-tune my thoughts. I realize that I tried to write about ‘allowing confusion’ because I have been a bit alarmed at folks sort of bottoming out in pessimism, or worse, proffering ideas ‘borrowed’ from rovian tactics [like smearing whole groups of people], or even worse…giving up ahead of the unfolding future.

Gandhi understood that the means we choose form us in the end.
So, I don’t want to fight terror with terror, or abuse with abuse, and otherwise slip unwarily into becoming what I fight.

In a mayoral election in my own small town, I really was upset with the thought that one candidate with a slick campaign might ’snow’ the citizens, many of whom were recent transplants to a growing community. He had earlier been our mayor then had been defeated after abusing democratic principles of governance.
For the two days before the election, I followed through on a creative idea. I walked my town and hung onto doorbells a one-page ‘essay’ I had written [ and copied in a bright color]about why I loved my town and what I saw as our community spirit…..embedding within that essay a soft chastisement of this candidate for his failure to apologize for earlier actions, but also giving him credit for some good he did. The only part of town in which he won was the section I did not get to, having run out of hours in the day. He lost the election, and a few days later, told a local service club that what I had done had made the difference.

If I had not acted on my novel idea [and I surely did struggle to overcome a fear of being subject to embarrassment], this guy might be my mayor today……leaving me very sorry to have not done the unusual.

I do agree that being alert to opportunity is crucial, and I also believe in doing some things that I think unlikely to make a difference right now just because they’re good things in themselves, and I might be wrong in my pessimism. I would hope that things don’t fail because I failed to act.

When I think of uncertainty, I think of it as a place from which one can only guess, where no clear response comes to the foreground. Yes, realizing, “I am uncertain” is the correct first step to learning extra stuff to cure the uncertainty.

When I think of confusion, I think of a state of many things jumbled together, which is, of course, a very unsettled place. But too, realizing, “this is confusing” can be a correct step to allowing new ways of responding to emerge.

If I am canoeing a new river, and I stop along the bank to preview how to navigate a particularly challenging set of rapids, I can stand there and be uncertain of how to do so. But it is only when I am actually in the confusing swirl of those rapids that I can allow timely ‘in the instant’ responses that meet the challenge.

In my lifetime, I have never witnessed such consistently human-ugly behavior as that of the greed-head power-maniac sorts who have hijacked elections, the Republican party and our nation. But, I am also watching that immoral power edifice crumble under its own sheer incompetence and hubris.

Karl Rove has only one ploy in terms of the upcoming elections and that is to somehow stonewall full awareness of the crumbling of the edifice, and to try to steal once more.. The edifice is nevertheless crumbling, and the public is increasingly in no mood to ignore what would be an even bigger [than last time] discrepancy between exit polls and ‘official vote tallies’.

Look at what is happening in Florida at this moment. Governor Bush was hoping to stonewall about the truth of the teen’s death at the boot camp, stonewalling being a corporate-tested strategy to thwart the sustained passion for truth and justice. Instead, the stonewalling has energized passions, and thousands of college students and others are marching in Leon County, Florida as I write this.

I suppose I am trying to say that we all should be alert to swirling waters and tipping points and be open to heretofore unexpected, even magnificent responses arising out of our sustained passions.

That said, I see no reason to be confident or even hopeful about the midterm elections. The 2000 election was stolen. The 2004 election was stolen. The tools the thieves used are still there, and so’s the lack of media interest that made it easy. All the good that people like Dr. Dean are doing now can be undone with a few flips of switches and swipes of memory cards, and it’s not like the Bush/Cheney cabal has gotten any less fond of power.

Here’s a gentle, maybe strange suggestion. Welcome confusion and appreciate that a state of confusion is often the only place from which we can learn something new….. this is because the not-confused mind usually puts new data in already established mental categories, reinforcing what is already ‘known’.

Within the theories of gestalt, it is the impasse [like a dead-end alley] which births creative answers to problems. A willingness to abide the tension and unpleasantness of uncertainty and ambiguity
evokes something within the self to stretch beyond its old ways of thinking and doing.

I often think that these dynamics are in play when folks do super-human responding in the midst of sudden disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes.

With the sheer size of the disasters created by the Bush administration, I believe we need to center ourselves in our deepest values [which are so well expressed by Maha and her fans], let ourselves be buffeted by all the confusion and angst, and open ourselves to allow in absolutely new notions about how to counter-vail those Bush messes.