As we turn the page from 2011, the year when the world rose up and said “enough!” and now embark on the journey of  2012, a year arriving with mythic baggage galore, I find myself heartened by big-picture reflections from several writers who often shed fresh light on our society’s struggles and dreams.  Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen pieces by Alex Steffen, Rebecca Solnit, Starhawk, and Michael Meade that are typically incisive and heartening; each has his or her own deeply resonant perspective on life, society, and engagement, and I recommend them all!

Rebecca Solnit sets the tone with her year-end missive, Compassion is Our New Currency:

Occupy has some of the emotional resonance of a spiritual, as well as a political, movement.  Like those other upheavals it’s aligned with in Spain, Greece, Iceland (where they’re actually jailing bankers), Britain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Chile, and most recently Russia, it wants to ask basic questions: What matters? Who matters? Who decides? On what principles?

Stop for a moment and consider just how unforeseen and unforeseeable all of this was when, on December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable vendor in Sidi Bouzid, an out-of-the-way, impoverished city, immolated himself. He was protesting the dead-end life that the 1% economy run by Tunisia’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali and his corrupt family allotted him, and the police brutality that went with it, two things that have remained front and center ever since. Above all, as his mother has since testified, he was for human dignity, for a world, that is, where the primary system of value is not money.

Storyteller of the soul Michael Meade hits the nail on one of its many heads with his recent piece, Occupy vs. Nihilism: All or Nothing at All:

The Occupy movement may be an instinctive response, not just to the greatest disparity of wealth and power in the history of America, but also to the emptying out of institutions and loss of meaning at all levels of life. An underlying instinct to inhabit life more fully may be arising and taking root in different places for different reasons. The message of Occupy may be “all over the place” because the underlying message is about “place,” about reclaiming and more fully inhabiting public places, about being more present to the critical issues in each place, and about taking one’s own place in life more fully.
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When mini-Occupy sites appear at individual houses threatened with foreclosure and neighbors set aside typical disagreements in order to protect each other’s homes, the roots of community are trying to resurface. Genuine grass roots movements can cross typical “party lines” and dissolve class distinctions as the deep-rooted connections between people and the underlying dreams of the country rise up from below. The difference and distance between those who inhabit the land and those who rule the nation become revealed. For, it is not simply that government has gotten too big, but that it has become so empty of meaning and devoid of the values that sustain common humanity.

Alex Steffen, of WorldChanging fame, recently reposted a piece he wrote in early 2010, entitled Putting the Future Back in the Room.  He sets the tone this way:

The future that my parents’ generation warned us about forty years ago looks an awful lot like our present. The ice caps are melting, deserts are spreading, the planet is thick with people, most of the world’s primeval forests are gone, the seas are in crisis, and pollution, famine and natural disasters kill millions of people a year. Compared to the world we might have had, had the progress of the early 1970s continued steadily through the following four decades, we live on a half-ruined planet.

That half-ruined planet, though, is our home. People old enough to remember the first Earth Day can well grieve for that other, healthier Earth we might have had if only older generations had made different choices. Kids born today won’t have that luxury. This world is the only one they’ll ever know: they’ll have to make the best of it; life goes on.1970 is the same distance in time away from us now as 2050: that’s how close the future is…In an amount of time about equal to that from the first Earth Day, we have to remake the world.

Starhawk’s most recent missive addresses one of the key human challenges facing those currently engaged in this attempt to remake the world, which involves finding ways to compassionately respond to and provide for the needs of some of our most outcast citizens, the homeless and neglected people who tend to become a major presence at most urban Occupy sites. The inclusiveness and compassion at the heart of the Occupy movement creates social dynamics we’re not used to: the marginalized people are welcomed rather than ostracized, and in most cities have become a significant presence in the social reality of the camps and the General Assembly meetings (rather than being limited to their normal role as a tiny sliver of our daily lives, easily – and unfairly – discounted as merely drunks or freeloaders or lacking in ambition).  In the occupy camps, they are seen in their full complexity, as human beings with their own particular backgrounds and perspectives and wounds.  It’s manifested in the dynamics between the drum circles and those working to accommodate neighbors living near encampments; it’s also common to hear of General Assemblies being disrupted and pulled far off-topic by verbal outbursts from folks who react badly to any structure, planning, or authority.  The challenging dynamics this creates has been the focus of some media features, and crops up in the reflections of most facilitators:

Even more than troubles with the cops and city authorities, the biggest challenges the Occupy movement faces seem to be internal.  How do we make decisions together?  How do we resolve our own conflicts within our groups?  Once we’ve said “We are the 99%”, how do we set standards of behavior and say what is okay and what is not?  Once we’ve renounced force and coercion, how do we enforce those standards when we do set them?

None of these are easy questions to answer, (and) the Occupy movement poses them in a form more stark than I’ve ever encountered before, in four decades of horizontal organizing.  Sitting down in the public square to Occupy and protest an unjust system attracted the very people most impacted by the injustice, some of whom are badly wounded in ways that make it very hard to organize and live together.

After the break: Steffen’s insightful breakdown of the heartfelt worldviews pulling against each other in this time, Starhawk on questions of strategy and the need for linear thinking guidance in horizontal consensus process, Solnit on the depth of the movement’s heart, and Meade’s evocation of the soul of the movement, of America, and of each of our lives. (Thanks to Riyana’s always-compelling Wild Serenity blog for the three color images in the strip above, and to Alex Steffen’s post for the black and white one.)

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