When the Going Gets Weird…

…the weird turn pro. Thank you, Hunter S. Thompson! I patterned myself after him more than has been exactly healthy, but I’ll stand by that quotation.

Now that the rest of the culture has fully adopted the grubby squalor that is my normal work environment as a professional campaigner in the world of organized labor campaigns in the United States, let me give y'all some tips for how to use the cultural sewage as fertilizer for your own humanity:

1) Are peace and greater humanity your goals?

1a) If no, then stop reading and jump back into the chimpanzee habitat. Soon enough you'll sprout hair all over and learn to throw shit with the best of them, and feel righteous doing so. Embrace it if this is your choice. You're a human, and nothing is more human than a chimpanzee.

1b) If yes, then congratulations! Peace and a greater embrace of humanity can be yours immediately. Leave the chimp habitat that you carry with you in your mind.

2) Embrace the notion that whatever you loathe the most about 'the other' points you toward something you loathe in yourself but don't wish to see. Examine this with courage and candor.

3) Recognize that 'the other' is just another 'you' and 'you' are just another 'other' to the other. Failure to do this leaves you in a permanent state of war.

4) The other 'you' has arrived at their views the same way you have. Their life brought them there. They are not more or less human than you are.

5) Embrace the notion that how you see them from the outside is about as accurate as how 'the others' see you from the outside.

6) The greatest distance in the cosmos is a single inch: the diameter of your eyeball. You are on the inside and know your inner monologue, your complexities and neuroses, your values, and all of that. We tend to see folks on the other side of our eyeballs mostly as simplistic billiard balls rolling around bumping into us. How can we get them to go in the side pocket?

7) Engage with 'others' as if you're doing an 'active listening' exercise where you don't get to move on until you're able to repeat the person’s views back to them and they say "Yeah, that's right." This will help you see the world they way they do. It won’t be the way you think it will be.

8) Do not expect this to be comfortable or easy. Don't even expect them to do the same. This is about you and your psyche. No one said peace would be easy. War is easy. Peace is hard.

8a) However, when you do this you will normally find that your commitment to humanity becomes contagious. People are starved for humanity. Give them some and they will often lap it up and look at you longingly for more: “Please Sir, May I have another?” You are ladeling out peace and humanity. Don’t be stingy with it.

9) Don't be insecure about your own values and experience; seeing things through other people's eyes doesn't make anyone righter or wronger. It just makes it harder to throw shit at them.

10) Ask yourself what kind of life experiences you would have to have had in order to see the world the way 'the other' does. Don't stop until you can imagine it. You'll start wondering why you've never noticed that when you scoop up a handful of feces to throw, you're the first one it smears.

11) Go read up on Bayard Rustin. He was a gay black man, and one of the most penetrating strategic minds behind the Civil Rights movement. He insisted on treating every racist white he came across with exactly the same respect for their humanty that he demanded for himself. This made him the true Grand Dragon of all dragons, and brought us one of the towering achievements in all human history: a time when the commitment to peace and humanity elevated the only tribe we all belong to, the human tribe. If he could do it in the face of lynchings, we can do it now.

These are things I've seen and practiced in twenty years on both sides of union campaigns, and a lifetime of living with and healing from a damaged psyche.

Peace to you!