The World Goes On

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This morning I woke up to news from McKinney, Texas, where over the weekend a police officer broke up a pool party, throwing a 14-year-old girl to the ground and pointing his gun at nearby teens.

There was news out of New Jersey, where state troopers shot tear gas into a crowd outside a concert, arresting 61 people and turning ticket-bearing customers away.

From my home town of Oakland, CA, there was news that police shot and killed a man who was sleeping in a car with a handgun on the seat next to him.

And then there’s news of Kalief Browder, a young man arrested at 16 for stealing a backpack. The charges were eventually dismissed, but not before he spent three years in prison without a trial.

At the age of 22, Kalief committed suicide this weekend.

This is the world we live in.

I listened to these stories on the news this morning, interspersed with tidbits on race horses and football players. I listened to these stories of death and destruction, stories of our own criminal justice system turning against us.

And for a moment I wondered how I was supposed to get up and go to work today as if nothing had happened.

Now we all experience moments of tragedy. Through personal tragedies and national tragedies we persevere.

And there can be great power and strength in that. In soldiering on despite the torrent of tragedy, in pushing through a world which has ceased to make sense.

For many of us, that’s part of the healing process. When nothing will ever be okay again, step one is desperately pretending that everything is okay.

But this morning felt different.

These were black men and women being attacked, these were black bodies who were suffering.

The message wasn’t that we were facing a deep national tragedy, that we somehow had to get through it together and soldier on despite the gnawing despair within each one of us.

The message was that it was someone else’s problem, that it was other communities being affected. Their world might be crumbling down, but my world went on.

I was supposed to get up and go to work because my world hadn’t changed.

The police aren’t coming for me.

My world goes on.

But my world has changed. It changes every time an innocent person is shot in our streets and every time our criminal system is about less than justice.

My world has changed.

These are our neighbors, our streets, our laws. This is fundamentally about our society, and everyone’s right to exist equally within it.

And until we each realize that, until we see it as our collective world shattering, until we accept that it is our responsibility to make our society better, until then –

The world will just go on.

As if nothing has changed.

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engaging America’s interested bystanders

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The Google Civic Innovation Team (Kate Krontiris, John Webb, Chris Chapman, and Charlotte Krontiris) have released an important strategic report based on original research. They argue that 48.9% of American adults are “Interested Bystanders” to civic life. These “people are paying attention to issues around them, but not actively voicing their opinions or taking action on those issues.”

Looking more closely at how the Interested Bystanders think about politics and civic life (and the actual civic actions that they take), the Google Team uncovers some interesting gaps. For instance, “many Interested Bystanders believe they have the most power at the local level, [yet] most participants reported voting only at the national level.” They also divide the 48.9% into eight archetypal groups, each of which would respond to different messages and opportunities.

The main implication for civic organizers and innovators: “you don’t have to design for activists or the apathetic. You can design for Interested Bystanders and still reach a huge market of people and have a huge impact.”

Kate Krontiris and colleagues advocate a strategy that sounds, at first glance, different from the argument of my book We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For and the findings of “America’s Civic Renewal Movement: The View from Organizational Leaders” by Eric Liu and me. Both documents argue that we ought to focus on a small (but demographically diverse) cadre of civic leaders in America–not 48.9% but more like 0.5% of the population–because only about one million grassroots organizers have the experience and motivations to engage other Americans in civic life. These are the people who not only attend meetings but call meetings; who not only vote but get out the vote. They are already at work on civic renewal in America but need better tools, policies, funds, and other supports.

It’s important to have more that one strategic proposal on the table, so I enthusiastically welcome the Google report even if it lands in a different place from my own work. In any case, these strategies may turn out to be complementary. The “One Million” grassroots civic leaders about whom I write are essential for reaching the “Interested Bystanders” whom Kate and her colleagues describe. In some ways, the Google Team is writing for the One Million–or for an even smaller set of national leaders who have the capacity to engage the One Million through their organizations. They advise these civic leaders to engage the next 48% of the population, which sounds smart to me.

It is a familiar option to try to change a society by engaging a relatively well-placed minority as leaders. Consider W.E.B Du Bois’ early embrace of the Talented Tenth strategy, for example. The advantage is realism: not everyone is ready to participate, and anyone who tries to catalyze a significant change has too few resources to engage the whole population. The potential disadvantage is exclusivity. Marxist revolutions based on “vanguards” have all turned, in my view, into nightmares.

Thus it is very important to my argument that America’s grassroots civic activists are (empirically) a diverse group–diverse in terms of demographics, styles of engagement, and substantive beliefs. My paper with Eric Liu begins to explore the kinds of people who  engage through Ducks Unlimited, PICO, Tea Party Patriots, and United We Dream, among others. Their diversity is important not only for equity and representativeness but also because there is no serious prospect that people this different from each other could turn into a clique or interest group. The question is whether we can get them all working–in different and even competitive ways–to engage their fellow citizens in public life. The “Interested Bystanders” report is a helpful step.

The post engaging America’s interested bystanders appeared first on Peter Levine.

NPR Covers Deliberative Polling Efforts in Tanzania

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We recently read a fascinating article from NPR on the cutting edge work being done by NCDD member James Fishkin of the Center for Deliberative Democracy when he shared a link to the article a few days ago on our NCDD Discussion Listserv. It’s a story that we think would interest many of our NCDDers, especially those doing D&D work across cultures.

James and the CDD have been advancing the technique and process of deliberative polling for years. They have recently been experimenting with deliberative polling in Tanzania around questions of how to spend the African nation’s forthcoming natural gas income, and the process has been filled with expected and unexpected challenges, which the article explores.

Here’s how the article starts:

It’s Not A Come-On From A Cult. It’s A New Kind Of Poll!

You get a visit by someone you’ve never met before. You’re invited on an all-expense paid trip to your country’s biggest city for a two-day meeting on natural gas policy.

Oh, and if you show up you get a free cellphone!

It might sound sketchy. But it’s actually an innovative strategy that is being tested by researchers at a Washington, D.C.-based think-tank, the Center for Global Development, or CGD, to help the African nation of Tanzania decide how to spend its expected windfall from new discoveries of natural gas.

Participants listened, they asked questions and then they went home, where they’ll be polled on their views.

The approach was actually first developed in the late 1980s by James Fishkin, a professor at Stanford University. Fishkin has devoted his career to persuading leaders to consult their citizens before making difficult policy decisions. But he says you can’t just do a poll.

“If you have ordinary polls people usually are not well-informed. You don’t want to follow public opinion when the public just has a vague impression of sound-bites and headlines.”

So Fishkin created what he calls a “deliberative poll.” You gather a representative sample of a population for a one- or two-day meeting. You give them tutorials on the issue and a chance to question experts from all sides. Then, you send them home and poll them…

The article gets much more interesting from there as it goes into the challenges of literacy and low education rates in Tanzania as well as some of the unusual cultural hurdles that James and his team had to overcome in getting rural Tanzanians to participate.

We encourage you to read the full article, or you can listen to the radio version of the story by clicking here.

You can find the original NPR story by visiting www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/18/406462789/its-not-a-come-on-from-a-satanic-cult-its-a-new-kind-of-poll.

how our two-party system frustrates political innovation

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I was in Spain this past week for a pair of political science conferences. My visit came soon after an election in which two new parties emerged: Podemos (leftist and innovative in how it engages voters) and Ciudadanos (center-right and also somewhat innovative). Naturally, many conversations turned to these parties and to party competition in general. I return feeling jealous of multi-party systems because they present opportunities for civic innovation.

The United States has had the same two parties for 155 years because we use single-member districts. A third party that at first attracts less than 50% of the vote in every district wins no seats at all and can’t get off the ground. Also, despite our important regional differences, we have essentially one national public sphere, so regional parties don’t arise to win majorities in their own areas. A case like Bernie Sanders from Vermont is anomalous and arguably getting more so. In 2012, voters chose straight Democratic or Republican tickets more than at any time since 1952.

If the question is how best to represent the public, a two-party system is not intrinsically worse than a multi-party system that emerges from proportional representation. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proves that no system is really ideal in that respect. If voters are given many choices, no party is likely to gain a majority, and then either a minority leads the legislature or there must be some horse-trading to produce a majority coalition that voters did not deliberately select. In a two-party system, the people choose the majority, but only because their choice has been restricted.

The problem, then, is not that our system is especially unrepresentative but that certain kinds of innovations and opportunities are blocked. In the US, as everywhere else, people form new groups that reflect their views, not only about how the world should be but also about how they will relate to each other and make decisions. These groups vary enormously, from terrorist cells led by charismatic clerics to New Left assemblages in which all the decisions are made by consensus and anyone can enter or exit at will.

Let’s assume that some groups are better than others and, indeed, that a few are very good. Because they start as small associations, they cannot directly govern at large scales. They need more than ideals and ways of interacting with their own members; they also need strategies for influencing law, government, and the economy. In a word, they need leverage.

In a system that encourages new parties to form and compete for power, one powerful form of leverage is available. The intellectuals and grassroots activists who emerged from the Occupy-style social movement in Spain naturally formed a political party, Podemos, to reflect both their views of national policies and their ways of self-organizing. It remains to be seen whether they can remain faithful to their origins as a social movement now that they are a formal political party with seats in the legislature and control over some cities and provinces. But that path was available and they took it.

Innovation is not intrinsically good. ISIS is highly innovative. But it is crucial that a political system allows new entrants: not just individuals who haven’t run for office before, but new kinds of people with new ideas. Otherwise, it hardens into an oligarchy.

In the US, people still come together in all kinds of movements and networks within civil society. #BlackLivesMatter, Occupy, and the Tea Party are just some of the high-profile recent examples. If you looked more closely, you would see many more of these groupings, some with narrower ranges of issues, less explicitly political agendas, or more idiosyncratic organizational forms.

Such movements and networks often talk about scale and leverage. In the US, they think first about trying to change public opinion, influence the media, or recruit new members. Occasionally, they also talk about running candidates for office. In the Tea Party’s case, they have used primary campaigns to obtain some influence over a major party. But they cannot gain momentum by launching new parties of their own and coming before the electorate with their own platforms, leaders, and organizational structures. And this is why the discussion of large-scale strategy is so frustrating in the US.

This problem is going to be especially acute for the left for the next few years. On the right, the Tea Party and libertarian movements have found ways to compete within the GOP. The seemingly open and competitive Republican primary campaign means that conservative activists have a strategy for leverage: pick one of the candidates. Although only two or three of the Republican contenders have plausible chances, the competitive start of the campaign makes the GOP presidential primary look like an opportunity for diverse activism on the right.

On the Democratic side, the unprecedented dominance of Hilary Clinton means that supporting a campaign is really not a way to innovate in politics. Clinton and her staff can innovate if they want to. As a voter, you can support Clinton if you agree with her more than with the Republicans. Otherwise, you must innovate outside of formal politics.

I exaggerate because there are other Democratic presidential candidates, and more could enter. But the lack of a candidate who reflects (for instance) any of the recent ferment about race and racism is a symptom of our situation.

My point, again, is not that our elected leaders fail to represent the people. Some Democratic Members of Congress represent predominantly urban African American communities and are reasonably in sync with their constituents. The point is rather that no one–other than established party leaders–can seriously innovate within electoral politics on the Left for the time being. I predict that will produce a lot of frustration unless someone can figure out an alternative form of leverage.

See also community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale; beyond small is beautiful; leverage as a moral issue; and “En EE UU, el populismo es bastante razonable.”

The post how our two-party system frustrates political innovation appeared first on Peter Levine.

how our two-party system frustrates political innovation

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I was in Spain this past week for a pair of political science conferences. My visit came soon after an election in which two new parties emerged: Podemos (leftist and innovative in how it engages voters) and Ciudadanos (center-right and also somewhat innovative). Naturally, many conversations turned to these parties and to party competition in general. I return feeling jealous of multi-party systems because they present opportunities for civic innovation.

The United States has had the same two parties for 155 years because we use single-member districts. A third party that at first attracts less than 50% of the vote in every district wins no seats at all and can’t get off the ground. Also, despite our important regional differences, we have essentially one national public sphere, so regional parties don’t arise to win majorities in their own areas. A case like Bernie Sanders from Vermont is anomalous and arguably getting more so. In 2012, voters chose straight Democratic or Republican tickets more than at any time since 1952.

If the question is how best to represent the public, a two-party system is not intrinsically worse than a multi-party system that emerges from proportional representation. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proves that no system is really ideal in that respect. If voters are given many choices, no party is likely to gain a majority, and then either a minority leads the legislature or there must be some horse-trading to produce a majority coalition that voters did not deliberately select. In a two-party system, the people choose the majority, but only because their choice has been restricted.

The problem, then, is not that our system is especially unrepresentative but that certain kinds of innovations and opportunities are blocked. In the US, as everywhere else, people form new groups that reflect their views, not only about how the world should be but also about how they will relate to each other and make decisions. These groups vary enormously, from terrorist cells led by charismatic clerics to New Left assemblages in which all the decisions are made by consensus and anyone can enter or exit at will.

Let’s assume that some groups are better than others and, indeed, that a few are very good. Because they start as small associations, they cannot directly govern at large scales. They need more than ideals and ways of interacting with their own members; they also need strategies for influencing law, government, and the economy. In a word, they need leverage.

In a system that encourages new parties to form and compete for power, one powerful form of leverage is available. The intellectuals and grassroots activists who emerged from the Occupy-style social movement in Spain naturally formed a political party, Podemos, to reflect both their views of national policies and their ways of self-organizing. It remains to be seen whether they can remain faithful to their origins as a social movement now that they are a formal political party with seats in the legislature and control over some cities and provinces. But that path was available and they took it.

Innovation is not intrinsically good. ISIS is highly innovative. But it is crucial that a political system allows new entrants: not just individuals who haven’t run for office before, but new kinds of people with new ideas. Otherwise, it hardens into an oligarchy.

In the US, people still come together in all kinds of movements and networks within civil society. #BlackLivesMatter, Occupy, and the Tea Party are just some of the high-profile recent examples. If you looked more closely, you would see many more of these groupings, some with narrower ranges of issues, less explicitly political agendas, or more idiosyncratic organizational forms.

Such movements and networks often talk about scale and leverage. In the US, they think first about trying to change public opinion, influence the media, or recruit new members. Occasionally, they also talk about running candidates for office. In the Tea Party’s case, they have used primary campaigns to obtain some influence over a major party. But they cannot gain momentum by launching new parties of their own and coming before the electorate with their own platforms, leaders, and organizational structures. And this is why the discussion of large-scale strategy is so frustrating in the US.

This problem is going to be especially acute for the left for the next few years. On the right, the Tea Party and libertarian movements have found ways to compete within the GOP. The seemingly open and competitive Republican primary campaign means that conservative activists have a strategy for leverage: pick one of the candidates. Although only two or three of the Republican contenders have plausible chances, the competitive start of the campaign makes the GOP presidential primary look like an opportunity for diverse activism on the right.

On the Democratic side, the unprecedented dominance of Hilary Clinton means that supporting a campaign is really not a way to innovate in politics. Clinton and her staff can innovate if they want to. As a voter, you can support Clinton if you agree with her more than with the Republicans. Otherwise, you must innovate outside of formal politics.

I exaggerate because there are other Democratic presidential candidates, and more could enter. But the lack of a candidate who reflects (for instance) any of the recent ferment about race and racism is a symptom of our situation.

My point, again, is not that our elected leaders fail to represent the people. Some Democratic Members of Congress represent predominantly urban African American communities and are reasonably in sync with their constituents. The point is rather that no one–other than established party leaders–can seriously innovate within electoral politics on the Left for the time being. I predict that will produce a lot of frustration unless someone can figure out an alternative form of leverage.

See also community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale; beyond small is beautiful; leverage as a moral issue; and “En EE UU, el populismo es bastante razonable.”

The post how our two-party system frustrates political innovation appeared first on Peter Levine.

how our two-party system frustrates political innovation

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I was in Spain this past week for a pair of political science conferences. My visit came soon after an election in which two new parties emerged: Podemos (leftist and innovative in how it engages voters) and Ciudadanos (center-right and also somewhat innovative). Naturally, many conversations turned to these parties and to party competition in general. I return feeling jealous of multi-party systems because they present opportunities for civic innovation.

The United States has had the same two parties for 155 years because we use single-member districts. A third party that at first attracts less than 50% of the vote in every district wins no seats at all and can’t get off the ground. Also, despite our important regional differences, we have essentially one national public sphere, so regional parties don’t arise to win majorities in their own areas. A case like Bernie Sanders from Vermont is anomalous and arguably getting more so. In 2012, voters chose straight Democratic or Republican tickets more than at any time since 1952.

If the question is how best to represent the public, a two-party system is not intrinsically worse than a multi-party system that emerges from proportional representation. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proves that no system is really ideal in that respect. If voters are given many choices, no party is likely to gain a majority, and then either a minority leads the legislature or there must be some horse-trading to produce a majority coalition that voters did not deliberately select. In a two-party system, the people choose the majority, but only because their choice has been restricted.

The problem, then, is not that our system is especially unrepresentative but that certain kinds of innovations and opportunities are blocked. In the US, as everywhere else, people form new groups that reflect their views, not only about how the world should be but also about how they will relate to each other and make decisions. These groups vary enormously, from terrorist cells led by charismatic clerics to New Left assemblages in which all the decisions are made by consensus and anyone can enter or exit at will.

Let’s assume that some groups are better than others and, indeed, that a few are very good. Because they start as small associations, they cannot directly govern at large scales. They need more than ideals and ways of interacting with their own members; they also need strategies for influencing law, government, and the economy. In a word, they need leverage.

In a system that encourages new parties to form and compete for power, one powerful form of leverage is available. The intellectuals and grassroots activists who emerged from the Occupy-style social movement in Spain naturally formed a political party, Podemos, to reflect both their views of national policies and their ways of self-organizing. It remains to be seen whether they can remain faithful to their origins as a social movement now that they are a formal political party with seats in the legislature and control over some cities and provinces. But that path was available and they took it.

Innovation is not intrinsically good. ISIS is highly innovative. But it is crucial that a political system allows new entrants: not just individuals who haven’t run for office before, but new kinds of people with new ideas. Otherwise, it hardens into an oligarchy.

In the US, people still come together in all kinds of movements and networks within civil society. #BlackLivesMatter, Occupy, and the Tea Party are just some of the high-profile recent examples. If you looked more closely, you would see many more of these groupings, some with narrower ranges of issues, less explicitly political agendas, or more idiosyncratic organizational forms.

Such movements and networks often talk about scale and leverage. In the US, they think first about trying to change public opinion, influence the media, or recruit new members. Occasionally, they also talk about running candidates for office. In the Tea Party’s case, they have used primary campaigns to obtain some influence over a major party. But they cannot gain momentum by launching new parties of their own and coming before the electorate with their own platforms, leaders, and organizational structures. And this is why the discussion of large-scale strategy is so frustrating in the US.

This problem is going to be especially acute for the left for the next few years. On the right, the Tea Party and libertarian movements have found ways to compete within the GOP. The seemingly open and competitive Republican primary campaign means that conservative activists have a strategy for leverage: pick one of the candidates. Although only two or three of the Republican contenders have plausible chances, the competitive start of the campaign makes the GOP presidential primary look like an opportunity for diverse activism on the right.

On the Democratic side, the unprecedented dominance of Hilary Clinton means that supporting a campaign is really not a way to innovate in politics. Clinton and her staff can innovate if they want to. As a voter, you can support Clinton if you agree with her more than with the Republicans. Otherwise, you must innovate outside of formal politics.

I exaggerate because there are other Democratic presidential candidates, and more could enter. But the lack of a candidate who reflects (for instance) any of the recent ferment about race and racism is a symptom of our situation.

My point, again, is not that our elected leaders fail to represent the people. Some Democratic Members of Congress represent predominantly urban African American communities and are reasonably in sync with their constituents. The point is rather that no one–other than established party leaders–can seriously innovate within electoral politics on the Left for the time being. I predict that will produce a lot of frustration unless someone can figure out an alternative form of leverage.

See also community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale; beyond small is beautiful; leverage as a moral issue; and “En EE UU, el populismo es bastante razonable.”

The post how our two-party system frustrates political innovation appeared first on Peter Levine.

Compassion is the Best Defense in the Great Computer War

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There is a whole genre dedicated to the fear of computers turning against us and taking over the world. And as our capacity to build Artificial Intelligence improves, this concern seems to become more and more palpable.

A computer can win at Jeopardy. That puts us at 15 minutes til midnight on the computer war doomsday clock. Or thereabouts.

And there is, at least in theory, good reason to be concerned about domination by computers.

Computers have so much control over our lives it would be fairly simple for them to take us. Even if they don’t build huge robot armies of Terminators, they could wreak plenty of havoc through control of cars, airplanes, and missile launch systems.

But perhaps more concerning is the fundamental ways computers operate. Many computer doomsday scenarios envision computers who take their instructions too literally – destroying humanity to fulfill their command of making the world better.

Others stress the ruthless efficiency with which computers can operate – given a goal and the ability to learn, a futuristic computer could try unlimited permutations before determining how to reach its goal. A person can be defeated, but under this scenario a computer can not – it will always try again and always try better.

But what makes us think the computers – even if they were to gain sentience – would want to destroy us in the first place?

Perhaps because we know that’s what we would do.

Humanity’s history is one of dominance and destruction. It’s a history of enslavement and appropriation, of bending every one and everything to our will.

And to be fair, it’s probably that ruthlessness that has gotten us so far in this world. They say, for example, that neanderthals died out because they were too kind.

It’s a harsh world, and only the harshest survive.

But times have changed. We have dominated. We have reshaped the world in our image.

And we fear our creations will have that same drive that got us here, those same Darwinian instincts.

So perhaps it is time to let go of that harshness. To live in a world of love and respect, where all living things are valued.

If we could truly embrace such values, if we could pass such values on to those who follow –

Well, then, surely the computers would show us that same humanity.

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Bologna, a Laboratory for Urban Commoning

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Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber argues in his recent book, The Utopia of Rules, that bureaucracy is the standard mechanism in contemporary life for coercing people to comply with the top-down priorities of institutions, especially corporations and government.  Anyone concerned with the commons, therefore, must eventually address the realities of bureaucratic power and the feasible alternatives. Is there a more human, participatory alternative that can actually work?

The good news is that the City of Bologna, Italy, is pioneering a new paradigm of municipal governance that suggests, yes, there are some practical, bottom-up alternatives to bureaucracy. 

Two weeks ago, the city government celebrated the first anniversary of its Bologna Regulation on public collaboration for urban commons, a system that actively invites ordinary citizens and neighborhoods to invent their own urban commons, with the government’s active assistance.  I joined about 200 people from Bologna and other Italian cities on May 15 for a conference that celebrated the Regulation, which is the formal legal authority empowering citizens to take charge of problems in their city. 

How does the program work? 

It starts by regarding the city as a collaborative social ecosystem. Instead of seeing the city simply as an inventory of resources to be administered by politicians and bureaucratic experts, the Bologna Regulation sees the city’s residents as resourceful, imaginative agents in their own right.  Citizen initiative and collaboration are regarded as under-leveraged energies that – with suitable government assistance – can be recognized and given space to work.  Government is re-imagined as a hosting infrastructure for countless self-organized commons.

To date, the city and citizens have entered into more than 90 different “pacts of collaboration” – formal contracts between citizen groups and the Bolognese government that outline the scope of specific projects and everyone’s responsibilities. The projects fall into three general categories – living together (collaborative services), growing together (co-ventures) and working together (co-production).

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Join the Transpartisan Conference in Boston this June 20th!

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Those of you within driving distance of Boston won’t want to miss this event at UMass Boston on the 20th…

A partnership involving the Public Conversations Project, University of Massachusetts Boston’s Center for Peace, Democracy and Development, and the Bridge Alliance (which NCDD is part of) is hosting Boston’s first Transpartisan movement event at UMass Boston on June 20th, from 10am to 4pm.

This event is part of a national series of gatherings aimed at shifting our polarized political landscape, and finding more constructive ways to communicate across difference. Whether the conflict at hand is Boston 2024, tension between law enforcement and communities, or local disagreements around planning and development in our cities, we have to find better ways to talk with one another.

The gathering is part of an effort – spearheaded in part by NCDD organizational members Mark Gerzon and John Steiner of the Mediators Foundation – to help move our country’s politics beyond the partisan divides and gridlock to start making better decisions that move us all forward. This gathering will be building momentum from previous Transpartisan gatherings including the pre-conference gathering NCDD hosted in conjunction with our 2014 conference as well as gatherings in Colorado and San Francisco, and upcoming events planned in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

Here’s how the organizers describe the conference:

The goal of this particular conference is to offer Boston’s leaders an opportunity to think collaboratively about how to shift the  electoral culture regionally and nationally, and find alternatives to the partisan political paralysis that dominates our public sphere…

Over the course of the day, eight speakers will share their vision for embedding the Transpartisan movement in our culture, and offer practical skills from cross-spectrum bridge-builders to transcend polarization. Speakers include Christian Science Monitor editor Marshall Ingwerson, representatives from No Labels and the Mediators Foundation, bridge-builders from across the political spectrum and educators from University of New Hampshire, Gordon College, and UMass Boston (full list available in the press release).

This gathering promises to be a pivotal conversation on how we in the D&D field can help transform the political climate in our country, and we encourage you to register today! There is a nominal $30 fee to attend.

You can check out the press release for the Transpartisan Conference here and find more information by visiting www.publicconversations.org/transpartisan.

We hope to see you there!

The Dangling Conversation

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It can be easy to be overwhelmed by the ills of the world.

For years, I worked on efforts to end genocide in Darfur. Or, perhaps more accurately, I worked to raise awareness of genocide as a real problem. A problem that, perhaps, someone ought to do something about. People were dying.

We raised money for on-the-ground and advocacy organizations. We held events with survivors of genocides from the Armenian genocide to the present. We pointed to the dark history of humanity and the shameful inaction of our forefathers.

We questioned why there was always a reason for the U.S. not to get involved, for the world not to get involved.

There’s always a reason not to act.

But the people keep dying.

I’m reminded of that song by Simon and Garfunkel:

And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference
Like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
The borders of our lives.
Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said…

I long ago stopped engaging in anti-genocide work. I, like so many others, simply shake my head and heave the windy sigh.

I’ve moved on to other issues, other causes, other problems which also demand to be solved.

There are too many ills to take on them all.

And the dangling conversation remains the borders of our lives.

We each do our own work, focus on the accomplishable, perhaps, or simply tack into the wind for other causes. We each have our strategies for staying sane while we desperately try to bend the arc of the universe towards justice.

It is not easy work.

And there is always more work to do.

And there is always a reason not to act.

The best we can do, I think, is to constant question ourselves. To push to understand our own true goals an motivations.

When you throw up your hands and say, “well, what can be done?” are you genuinely too busy with other work or are you more or less comfortable with the status quo?

Do you genuinely think that nothing can change, or are you simply willing to accept things as they are?

You don’t have to announce your answer to the world, but you deserve to be honest with yourself.

There is too much work in this world, far too much, for any of us to do it alone.

No one person can do it all.

So forgive yourself for embracing some issues while being lukewarm on others, forgive yourself for preferring advocacy to direct service, or favoring one type of work for another.

Follow your strengths and your passions, but know there is always more work to be done.

And be skeptical of yourself when you find your dangling conversations, when you walk away from an issue rather than engage. There is only some much we can take on, sure, but we should push those borders back as far as possible.

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