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America broke the rules of living systems
“Without ethics, politics has no limits. America broke the rules of living systems, and lost its balance. All the oxygen flowed to a smaller and smaller section of the body politic. The history is brief and unquestionable: close to toppling, the society momentarily pulled itself upright, and then became even less ethical, less balanced, more endangered than ever as a lawless financial system came back from death, and like a foolish patient after a heart bypass operation, continued in its old ways.” […]
Playing to Change the World: The Time of the Jester
Just after midnight last night, I found myself in Boston’s financial district, following in the footsteps of a New Orleans-style brass band that marched along Atlantic Avenue. More than a thousand Occupiers and supporters were dancing in the streets as the city prepared to evict the Dewey Square encampment. The Mayor’s midnight deadline had passed, and the square and surrounding streets were overflowing with people singing and chanting and dancing. A few hours earlier at the evening’s General Assembly, a proposal was made to meet the City of Boston’s eviction demand with a dance party. The proposal’s champion called for [...]
Restoring Citizenship: Is Occupy Our Opportunity?
Last night, I attended a forum at MIT to reflect on the significance of the Occupy movement. Pete, one of the Boston Occupiers who coordinates the medical team, was sharing stories about the challenges of daily life in Dewey Square, which alongside activists and protesters, has attracted drug dealers, sex workers and the homeless. According to Pete, the Boston police have essentially handed Dewey Square over to the Occupiers, requiring that they police themselves. […]
Occupying Boston and the Hood, Together
Last week, Meg Wheatley and I hosted a conversation in Washington, DC, about the relationship between Walk Out Walk On and the Occupy movement. The event took place at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant, bookstore and community gathering place named for American poet Langston Hughes. It is also a place where activists, artists and dreamers challenge one another to think differently about race, culture, politics and social change—and for that reason, it felt particularly apt for us to be there. Because right now, I’m deep inside questions about what constitutes a movement, who belongs and who doesn’t, what happens when people [...]
Criminalization of friendship: Have we gone so far?
I’m sitting in a café in Copenhagen thinking about friendship. I’m here because a dear friend of mine asked me to show up, and I said yes. It has been three years since my last visit, and during that time, her father passed away. So I’m here now despite being in the middle of a book tour that has me away from home through to Thanksgiving. Even so, this was a good decision. I’ve been learning quite a bit about friendship lately. In the last few Walk Out Walk On workshops, the Intervention to Friendship distinction has been the most [...]
We are everywhere and we are one another
This morning I woke up to this email from Sarah Whiteley, one of the stewards of Axladtisa-Avatakia, the learning community in Greece that I wrote about in Walk Out Walk On. You might have heard… but two nights ago, Syntagma Square was stormed by the riot police—and now the tent village is not there. People were evicted and some arrested. Yet, the People’s Council still gathered last night—and continued to rock the cradle of democracy. Hundreds of thousands of Greek citizens have occupied Syntagma Square in Athens for 60 days in protest of their government’s austerity measures. Now the Square has been cleared—as [...]
Something is wrong with our money system. Duh.
“Something is wrong with the global financial system. International financial crises or near-crises have become regular events… The question is not whether there will be another crisis, but where it will be.” —Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 2003 It couldn’t be better timing. I’m reading New Money for a New World, a forthcoming book by economist Bernard Lietaer and co-author Stefan Belgin that examines the systemic failures of our current money system. Meantime, U.S. politicians are offering up drama, paradox, contradiction and befuddlement as we tumble toward the prospect of defaulting on our nation’s debt. […]
Liberating Structures
The elegance of physical form greeted my camera lens yesterday evening. Statuesque structures rising out of the base frame, etching the beginnings of a shape the will be a home to so much in the future. I have been musing this week about how this building process has been consistently inviting me to let go – to liberate, transcend and include the next level of form – again and again. Every day I see a shift in the physical creation – and have to let go of any attachment to what it was like before. It is developing, evolving… [...]
Walking Out isn’t about abandoning institutions.
It’s about abandoning beliefs.
In my May 21st blog, I bemoaned the decision to shut down more than a dozen schools in the Boston public school system—most of which serve low-income neighborhoods. I wondered what “walking out” of this system might look like, and went as far as suggesting “…that might mean pulling our children out of the school system and turning to one another to create neighborhood learning spaces which replace schooling with discovery.” […]
Doomsday comes and goes.
How come we keep falling for it?
It’s Doomsday today… again. Bostonians must be a cynical lot—or at least uninspired by the Rapture—because the only sign I’ve seen of the impending end of the world is three vans careening along Charles St. with “Judgment Day” and so forth emblazoned on their exterior. […]
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