Love in the Wake of Violence: Notes from Oakland, October 28th

by Miki Kashtan
“It is not nonviolence if we merely love those that love us. It is nonviolence only when we love those that hate us.” -- Gandhi

I have not been to OccupyOakland since Saturday. For almost two days, no one was there, as police blockaded the area after destroying the camp early Tuesday morning. As of Wednesday night, occupiers broke through the police blockade and reentered the plaza. Along the way police used so called “non-lethal” weapons, one of which critically injured a young man who has since become a symbol for global solidarity for Oakland.

I sat at the computer intending to write an entirely different piece, one that’s been waiting for days now, about leadership and facilitation in the movement. I was simply unable to do so, because my heart is completely consumed with how to hold all that’s happened with love and human understanding. This includes all the people whose actions I find extremely difficult to comprehend. I cannot write about anything else involving this movement I so want to support until I am able to metabolize these events.

It is easy for me to extend love and understanding to the occupiers who braved the police and continued to march towards the plaza in an effort to reclaim it. It is easy to extend love to Scott Olsen. I read about him a little. I looked at his face. He’s a young man who chose to ally with the occupiers after serving two tours in Iraq and then joining Veterans for Peace. No challenge for me. I find it inspiring that someone who was in the army can wake up to move towards peace and transformation. It is easy for me to extend love and understanding to the people from Egypt who are organizing a march specifically in solidarity with Oakland. It is easy because I can identify with them, see them as being like me. I can see their care, and I connect with care easily.

And it’s not all easy. My attention is drawn to some reports suggest that some of the marchers threw rocks or bottles at the police. How can I extend love and understanding to any who may have participated in such actions?

I close my eyes, and I do all I can to imagine that I am the one throwing a bottle at the police. I imagine the rage, the helplessness, the absolute insistence on maintaining my human dignity despite everything, the surge of determination to remain powerful, to make something I believe is right happen. And I try to imagine my arm moving back with a rock in my hand to gain momentum, and then throwing the rock, and the sense of power I get from it, that I am doing something for justice. It’s extremely difficult for me to fully imagine this, an act so counter to my sensibilities, to how I know myself. I am filled with tears as I do it, and am completely connected with the human possibility of this act I would never myself choose.

I poke around, read some more, and encounter a comment on the OccupyWallSt site: “If that is true about ‘some protesters throwing rocks and bottles at the police’, it was EXTREMELY STUPID of those protesters and they should be banned from Occupy Oakland for life. Some of them were no doubt ‘AGENTS PROVOCATEURS’ planted by the CIA. Throwing rocks and bottles is EXACTLY what the 1% hope we will do, so as to justify a police crackdown and the imposition of MARTIAL LAW”.

I can feel in my body the anguish of being called stupid, and I pull myself away from that anguish to focus on the person who did the calling. I know about the power of nonviolence in the face of repression. I have such deep hope that the Occupy movement will deepen into more nonviolence. And so, despite having just understood in full and embraced in my body the people who possibly threw things at the police, I am totally and easily aligned with this person’s deep concern about this action. And yet a part of me recoils from the idea that they should be banned forever. That’s where the challenge lies for me. Why call them stupid, and why the desire to ban them. So I close my eyes again, and then I find the link. I know of the many times I wish that someone disappeared whose actions I find disruptive of some purpose that’s important to me. Through this, I can imagine being this person. I touch the active passion for this movement to work, to be impeccable in giving the police no excuse, so that the sympathy of the world can be maintained.

I am awash with overwhelm. So many more actors and players are involved, not only with Scott Olsen’s injury. I am thinking of the people dealing drugs in some of the encampments. Or the ones whose actions leave women feeling unsafe at night. I know of and have seen people who inhabit different enough realities that their participation in meetings and activities challenges everyone. I branch out and think of the police who attacked the occupiers, and especially those who made the choice to throw one more tear gas grenade at the people who were gathering around Scott Olsen after he had just been injured. Can I ever find room in my heart for all of them? Then there is the Tea Party person who holds the organizers of the Occupy movement responsible for Scott’s injury. And last and by far not least, I think of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who issued conflicting messages in response to the actions of the police, including initially commending the chief of police for what she referred to as “a generally peaceful resolution”, and is now facing increasing pressure to resign. There is no blog post that can be long enough to include my efforts to embrace them all.

It takes enormous effort to imagine the human emotional logic that would lead all these people to the actions that they have chosen. I find this effort deeply significant, because I want to live in a world where no one is a throw-away person. I want to create a world that works for all of us, not just those who are easy for me to understand and love. I want everyone to have their humanity honored, to have access to resources, to have food, and shelter, and health, and love. I really want everyone’s needs to matter, these are not just words for me. It’s the only way I know, ultimately, to end the millennia-old cycle of violence, hatred, suffering, and separation in which we live.

In the meantime, I want to extend love to myself for a moment. It’s so demanding to make room inside me for everyone, so, so challenging. Some years ago, when Rabin was assassinated, I called a friend to work my way through the many reactions I had. I do not have God in my life, haven’t believed in a transcendent being in many decades. Nonetheless, among the many feelings I found, the one that surprised me the most was a moment in which I felt something I can only call compassion for God. I understood, in that moment, that God’s job, in that moment and in all moments, is to love everyone fully and equally, all of creation. And that meant loving the assassin. And I felt compassion for the enormity of what it would take. I am a mere mortal, and it’s taking all I have to even imagine it.

In conclusion, I want to be sure I clearly articulate that no amount of love and understanding for everyone is a substitute for action to bring about concrete and material results. The point of this love is to ensure that our actions are free of violence, hatred, and separation. So that we don’t end up where so many revolutions have in the past: recreating the very conditions that the revolution was seeking to change. This means including, ultimately, the 1% in the final outcome just as much as the homeless that are being reached out to in some of the encampments where they have lived for years before the occupations started. Unless we include everyone, some people will eventually become some new 1% and some others will become drug dealers and threats to their fellow humans. I fervently hold on to this love. It’s my insurance policy that success will mean success for all.

Separation, Connection, and World Transformation

by Miki Kashtan

Last night I saw the movie I am by Tom Shadyac. In case you don’t know – Tom has been a writer and director of numerous comedy films which have netted him billions of dollars. In the course of the last number of years he has been on an incredible journey of shifting his values from success and consumption to simplicity, love, and compassion. He sold his mansion and established a foundation with the money. Here’s what his website says: “Ultimately, the goal of The Foundation for I AM is to help usher in a more loving, kind, compassionate, and equitable world for all.” The movie tells some of his story, and also sets out to answer two key questions through interviews with a number of well known thought leaders such as Desmond Tutu, Howard Zinn, and others: What’s wrong with the world, and what can be done to change it?

I enjoyed the movie tremendously. I appreciated the footage that served as background to the interviews, and his appearances on the screen that were interspersed with the interviews. It’s a rare documentary, in my experience, that manages to balance information, a strong point of view, and entertainment. This is what I experienced with this movie. I was inspired by seeing someone make such a personal journey of rededicating his resources to a cause other than personal consumption. I very much recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.

In addition, I have asked very similar questions, and have been thinking about the overlap between the movie’s answers and my own, as well as differences that were provocative and have already enriched me. The movie focuses on the profound role that the story of separation and its derivatives – scarcity, competition, and massive consumption – play in keeping war, domination, and poverty in place. I also was so happy to see a movie that shows some of the evidence that has been mounting in recent years that is challenging the core assumptions of separation. This evidence is so strong now, that researchers at UC Berkeley talk about “the survival of the kindest.” All of this was very compelling.

It was the “what can we do about it” part about which I was left puzzled and somewhat disappointed. It was a version of “Be the change” that leaves me lacking confidence about achieving the phenomenal mobilization towards change that I believe is necessary. The prescription, if I understood it correctly, is to make a commitment, all of us, to shift our internal story to one of love and compassion, which is, as the movie suggests, the fundamental nature of being human. If all of us do this, says Tom, then the shift will happen.

The movie calls for a massive waking up, a critical mass of people changing their actions and choices. What’s missing for me is first taking a serious look at how we can get enough people to wake up sufficiently. The challenge is immense, as I see it, because we are called to change millennia of deeply ingrained habits of separation that are often activated immediately when we see others take actions – personal or otherwise – that we don’t like. I am called to respond to this challenge. I want to find ways to sustain the loving orientation beyond the moments of epiphany. I want to learn more and more what keeps the story of separation so deeply ingrained. I want to provide vision, inspiration, and concrete practices that support making loving and vulnerable choices despite the strength of the message of separation.

The second missing piece for me is an understanding of the systemic and structural dimension of the life we live. It’s not just the stories in our heads and bodies. It’s also the organizations we have created, the institutions and norms that govern our lives, the economic engines of allocation of resources, the schools that educate our young, and the societal legacy of so many forms of separation that are beyond attitudes of individuals. Perhaps I am being small-minded, and I am open to that possibility. I simply can’t see that enough individuals can make enough change and create enough connection between them to shift that entire structure. To use a recent example, so many Egyptians came together and managed to topple the government. I am thrilled and in awe of this event. Does it challenge the fundamental logic of having a government that’s elected in particular ways and into which ordinary people don't have a real say except during the moments of election? I don’t think so!

Riding home I continued to discuss these rich questions. Then an idea arose that gave me some pleasure, much curiosity, and a little hope. If, as I also believe, we are equally capable of love and compassion as we are of conflict, protection, and separation, then there is likely an ongoing flow of opening and closing that happens to each of our hearts, in an entirely different rhythm and orientation than anyone else. Sometime we converge and have moments of exquisite love and intimacy. Sometimes we diverge and can’t connect. Tom shared, for example, that he noticed how much love there was in church communities that then doesn’t stay for the daily living outside the service. Something happens in times such as the Obama election that galvanized so many people, or the Egyptian uprising, or even something as small as a group of people getting together to share their experiences in a workshop. That something may simply be a form of synchronization of rhythms and orientation of the openness. How this happens is entirely mysterious to me. I am clear that people like Gandhi and King or the young people that organized the Egyptian mass demonstrations knew how to do this. Somehow they could issue a message that included enough vision and enough attentiveness to the real suffering of people that everyone could open up at once and a movement was born. That makes sense to me, and helps me understand how change becomes possible.

I am called to respond to this challenge, too. Beyond the individual level of functioning, I want to keep learning and teaching ways of working together, of creating organizations and systems that embody the same principles we love as individuals, and help us synchronize and move closer to harmonious functioning. There is much to learn, and much that is already known about taking love, heart, and empathy to the larger levels of functioning. I want to hold out, without wavering, the real, tangible, and practical possibility of establishing social systems that make room for everyone to thrive.

A Slice of Heaven

 Dante & Beatrice gaze upon the heavens.

by Miki Kashtan

Being someone very deeply immersed in this world, my notions and images of heaven are also about the here and now, not about some other world or some mythical time. Heaven for me is about dissolution of what I see as culturally-imposed barriers between people, and between any of us and the experience of being fully and glowingly alive. I never expect heaven to be pain-free, or even conflict-free. I only hope for the possibility of facing and using all pain and conflict as doors into the vast space of the human spirit, and into our capacity for love that surrounds and encompasses all that is human.

One of the reasons why I so treasure the work that I do is that it allows me, time and again, to experience snapshots of this kind of heaven. I just returned from one such experience, and I have a burning desire to invite all of you, my known and anonymous readers, to dip into this experience with me. My hope, almost invariably, is for this dip to inspire you into attempting to create such islands of love in your surroundings.

All this happened during the Living Undefendedly women’s retreat that I just came back from on Wednesday. There were eighteen of us. All of us wanted more freedom in our lives. One by one we each took a turn to expose, open, share, delve into, and transform the places in us that block us from flowing fully with life. The level of commitment and dedication I discovered as we opened our circle was to begin was beyond my expectation. This willingness, the trust and the hunger that it signified, then served as the foundation for all the learning and surprises that came as the days unfolded.

We got to see and feel the depth of how debilitating shame can be, and how much it interferes with living fully, openly, and authentically. We noticed how shame even interferes with loving and presence when we begin to think that what we have to offer is not enough or not the right kind of support. For some years now I have had the goal of becoming 100% shameless, so I can experience freedom beyond measure, the freedom to show up with the fullness of my love, power, and longings.

And so, one by one, we opened up and exposed the truth of our being. For some this meant revealing painful secrets, sometimes things that had never been shared with anyone else before. As each bit was revealed, a tapestry of love and respect was being woven together. We discovered we are not alone, and not the only ones. Others allowed themselves to express feelings they had previously been ashamed to show. The similarities and connections between different pieces of work became palpable. So much so that at times a piece of work began, or continued, during someone else’s turn rather than one’s own. At other times many in the group mobilized their empathic presence beyond the already long hours we were keeping to support someone’s work. The unifying theme behind it all was finding the core human needs that gave rise to everything. We discovered, for example, the depth of care towards self and others that was motivating some painful behavior for one participant, and the longing for authentically including all parts of herself that another behavior was signifying for another. Those moments, when we could all connect with the beauty at the root of what had been so hidden and despised inside, nourished all of our faith in ourselves, each other, and people more generally.

And so it was that the biggest surprise was ultimately not surprising at all: the love we created, which deepened and deepened as our time proceeded. We did this work over the course of six days. The quality of presence and attention and empathy that were necessary to support each of us on her way were summoned up from within each of us. Even as some of the time some of us became a trigger for each other, we didn’t shy away from facing the difficulties, and in the end those, too, were rewoven into the fabric of our magic. As we grasped all that we brought forth, all the anguish that led us to adopt our defenses and protections, and all the life underneath, we became luminously beautiful to each other. There is no doubt in my heart and mind that this is what it ultimately means to be human.