We need a different story.
Or, what butter has to do with building power for transformative change. Or, instead of fear, love.
Since the seventies, the environmental movement has spoken a story of doom and gloom, something like: ‘If fossil fuel burning goes unchecked, then the temperatures will keep rising, and we are all … pretty much fucked.” As the fossil fuel profit party has continued, and climate chaos intensifies, we feel ever more overwhelmed and desperate.
Some part of me must admit to feeling motivated by a fear tactic. Due to whatever particular mix of early childhood experiences and my predilection towards hypervigilance that flows from them, I can go pretty far powered on the fuel of fear. But ultimately, fear alone scatters our focus and doesn’t clarify where we’re going. Fear puts us into a place of overwhelm coupled with urgency, a bad cocktail if you’re angling for endurance. When outrunning a bear, you can do it for short sprints. But if you’re training for a marathon (and quick spoiler: we are in a marathon that will last longer than our lifetimes), you need pacing, you need food along the way, you need the right shoes, you need a very loud cheer squad carrying signs of love and support when you flag.
And even more importantly, what’s wrong with this story is simple: doom and gloom has not worked. Last week I read another article predicting extreme societal breakdown within five years due to climate chaos. The time horizon is shortening. The future has never been closer. It’s awful and everyone is going to suffer. I understand, appreciate, and empathize with scientists doing their best to raise an alarm of peak emergency about what is unfolding, in a sea of “leaders” who seem to answer increasingly dire situations and data with a shrug.
From my experience last summer supporting farmers who were navigating how to survive and keep their communities fed amidst record breaking flooding, I understand that the predictions the article makes are already here. Government agencies were already so overwhelmed, not only with our flooding here in Vermont, but with the devastating fires in Hawaii and out West, erratic late freezes, power loss from storms, that the typical federal relief programs were maxxed out and under resourced. Farmers called federal offices and didn’t get calls back; some have yet to receive support for the events last year. The federal policies are (currently) designed for the large corporate agribusiness and chemical companies.
The scientists see this writing on the wall. And they care! So they raise the alarm, again. And yet they turn to the same strategy: a story of fear, backed up by the right data, on the hope that this will suddenly move us all.
This is the same problem with the “debate” about the land now known as Israel and Palestine: it just doesn’t work. When we’re locked into the same arguments, we aren’t working towards healing or peace. It doesn’t matter how right we are, if logic and facts are not compelling change. We need a new tactic.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last several months being challenged by people who want to prove me “wrong”, or really, prove their own narrative “right” about the current atrocities unfolding in Gaza. I’ve heard the same people decry the student protestors, choosing to spend more time arguing about why the student protestors tactics are flawed, problematic, or dismissible than they do addressing the reality of the suffering, starvation and horrible deaths those students are seeking to stop. (I’ve been struck recently with the polls from the ‘60s in which white Americans were asked whether sit-ins as a tactic were positive or negative and would ultimately “help the cause” of Civil Rights. It’s worth holding the question why we love to celebrate historical protests and decry them in our own times.)
I am humbled by the service of the many brilliant professors, writers, and thinkers who are willing to spend time teaching people a rigorously engaged history, and more: helping people remember and learn how to research, listen, and think deeply themselves. Learning how to engage deeply for a nuanced, authentic understanding of history, rather than parroting quick or convenient sound bites, requires a diligence and engagement that this country massively needs. If we refuse to study what really came before, we will unfortunately learn it again ourselves through painful experience.
But have we ever learned a truthful history in this nation? I invite you to walk into your neighborhood school during Thanksgiving and consider how the narrative of White settlers’ relations with Indigenous peoples on these lands is presented. Perhaps this is the crux of the issue: most of us have not had much experience with ‘right story’. We’ve not experienced a real story, which much like a real meal, cooked from what is growing around us, tastes like. So we’ve developed a taste for Twinkies, saccharine sameness that tastes like nothing at all, wrapped in plastic.
So, we need a story that makes repair possible. We need help remembering recipes for the healing stories: what are the ingredients? Who, if anyone, remembers how to simmer a story? Who has time to cook anyway? What has been tucked into the root cellars of our collective memory, lying in wait, calm and cool, for us to remember and dig up for nourishment?
We need stories that will help us to remember the best of ourselves. We need stories that grapple with our violent tendencies, and our ability to rise above our worst impulses. We need stories that remind us how repair can happen, and how satisfying it is to start that slow and awfully hard work. We need stories that warn us against what happens when we won’t. We need stories that move us, center us, and give us courage to take action. “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms” per poet Muriel Rukeyser. We are the stories we carry, just as we are the food we eat.
Tyson Yunkaporta’s book “Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the world” remains one of the most rollicking, hopeful, and mind- expanding texts I’ve ever sat with. If you haven’t had the joy and journey of reading it yet, I am so excited for you! He recently published a second book, ‘Right Story, Wrong Story’, exploring the way we make, hold, and pass on stories about ourselves, the land, and each other. He writes about how the technology of making the right story takes multiple generations; Indigenous myth production is not a fast process. To be sure to pass on a core cultural idea, relationship, or teaching, a story is developed, through dialogue, across long spans of time and with the participation of many. Yunkaporta juxtaposes the patience of Right Story creation with the worst qualities of Wrong Story: fast, greedy, immediate, generated out of, and in service to, our lowest impulses.
This language of ‘Right Story, ’ and of the work of creating it across many generations, helped me to understand why I went to rabbinical school. Facing the climate crisis in a very direct way through my work, I encounter incredible amounts of overwhelm. Being of childbearing age, I hear friends wrestle with nihilism as they consider whether to bring kids into this world. I have been yearning for old wisdom, stories that had taken generations of debate, wrestling, refining, and commentary to work through. Stories that people had prayed about, sealed into clay pots for hundreds of years, and then taken out to season, argue, polish, refine a bit more. Stories that came through a relationship with land, rituals in conversation with the cycles of the year that make our lives holy. Stories that have enough heft to them to hold us, bridge us, lead us through this narrow time of fear. (The recent burning of olive trees by the Israeli army in Palestine is such a devastating illumination of how perversely a story can go dark, especially when the old story’s mandate is so clear: "When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them, for you may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down" (Deuteronomy 20:19).
Many of us are not standing in the rivers of old faith traditions, and we are still in search of a story strong enough to be a bridge. Where are the old stories we can find together? What qualities do they share—how do we know if they will lead to safety and healing?
The clues are around us. Last week, an army general resigned in protest of what's happening in Gaza. Harrison and I grew up together. When he quit, as a high ranking official with a prominent post abroad, he wrote publicly, "As the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing." He shared that he decided to come forward publicly to make the way easier for others to dissent. Something about him citing his ancestors struck me. Harrison went on: “I am haunted by the knowledge that I have failed those principles [‘of not to just follow orders’]. But I also hope that my grandfather would afford me some grace; that he would still be proud of me for stepping away from this war, however belatedly.” Remembering what the ancestors taught. Finding the grace to try and repair. Taking a bold step at great personal risk. The possibility of change. Right story. Right story. Right story.
And just a couple of weeks ago we celebrated Mothers’ Day. Now wrapped in cellophane, a day of Hallmark cards that paper over the structural hostility of the nation toward mothers, Mother’s Day was once a revolutionary idea. Antiwar activist and co-founder of the day Julia Ward Howe offered us a clue in her Mother’s Day Proclamation, written in 1870 on the heels of a bloody civil war that devastated the nation, “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
This word—tender—calls me in: a whispered spell to put my ear toward, to listen. Mothers (and other people caring for small ones) are tender, yes—fierce in their tenderness. They split their own bodies open to make way for new life. The love strong enough to vow “our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn.” A love that clear and instructive will follow through.
(Let me note here that in “capitalism has no shame” news, Howe was later arrested protesting the commercialization of the day she herself had helped to create.)
I was listening to an excellent podcast recently about building power and union organizing. While the podcast is slightly old (recorded after Super Tuesday in 2020), the themes around mobilizing (getting people who largely agree already to take an action) as distinct from organizing (working to actually move people together across difference of initial opinion towards a common shared goal) felt more relevant than ever.
In the conversation, Jane McAlevey (author of A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy) talks about what you need to be a good organizer. Jane is a straightforward, f-bomb- dropping union organizer with massive wins under her belt. I was moved listening when she articulated the three qualities she sees as core for good organizers:
You have to believe ordinary people are smart. 2) You have to believe people can change their minds. 3) Most basically, you have to love regular people.
Love. Her word choice struck me. Love as a primary tool for change. Love as the story, the practice, the principle. Like Howe’s tenderness—not meek love, but a love with follow through. MLK Jr wrote, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
We need a story powerful enough to remind us of what is possible: we can create a world without war. We can design educational systems in which no child is trained to fight another human, ever again. We can collaborate with nature to heal our planet. We can say thank you and place trust in a good, generous earth that will rise up to meet us.
We do have some old recipe books still lying around, and we do have some food left in the larder. Last night I was on my back porch with my a gaggle of neighborhood children of all a range of ages from toddler to newly driving teenager. A friend had gifted me with some extra cream from his farm and I decided to make it into butter. The kids were taking turns paddling the butter with big wooden spoons, pressing out the buttermilk. Suddenly I remembered a section of a fantastic article on building power for change making by Alexis Frasz that I read and loved recently:
“Participatory culture—the process of people making and doing themselves—is critical for power building. Creating culture with others builds social bonds, shared identity, a sense of agency, an attachment to place, and other critical capacities that serve as a foundation for community power. For people who have been structurally disempowered, this can be transformative. El Puente, an environmental justice organization in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, uses community art-making activities as “an antidote to disempowerment.” According to cofounder Frances Lucerna, “The arts are transformative because they help people see themselves and tap into their own potential for creation. The arts help people realize ‘I can.’” Transforming people from “consumers of democracy to agents within it” is a primary goal of power-building work. Participating in shared cultural activities builds relationships and a sense of agency that can be carried into other settings. “
I want a world where children know that butter is bright yellow in late spring because the cows are finally back on pasture after a long winter, eating that good good grass, because they’ll always be aware of the seasons— and that waiting for the good shit is worth it. These children will always move to protect the earth because they know the earth feeds them; that they are, in fact, made of the earth. These children will never have to unlearn an idea of separation. I want a world in which children have a relationship with the earth not primarily about fear, but rather deep love and reciprocity. Once you truly love the earth, dropping a bomb on the land will be unthinkable. I want a world where kids know how to work with people of other ages and abilities, because they’ll learn to take care of each other and work as a team across difference. I want a world where it’s OK to stick your finger right in to the cream, because the process should always be delicious. I want a world where kids know that food is a right and people share it freely, because the earth and our feasts are abundant when we are in right relationship. Butter is just a small part of the story, but it’s one part I can help to churn.
Remembering the whole story is of course held in a time frame much longer than ourselves. But we can handle that. We, mothers and other parenting people, think beyond our lives all the time. We teach skills we hope will stay with our children after we are gone. We sing songs so our little ones can hum them when they’re scared and we’re far away. We recite the prayers over and over, this one for bread, that one for the morning, this one for grief, this one for thanks, nourishment and instruction for the long journey of life that will follow after we are gone.
I was recently sitting with friends in a local Quaker meeting. One person stood up and started talking about George Fox, the abolitionist credited with founding Quakerism, (a religious framework founded on pacifism and abolition.) The speaker reminded us that Fox said to “walk cheerfully over the world”—but the speaker wondered aloud: how are we to do this when the world is so horrifying, so broken?
We sat in silence for a while, holding the question, breathing in and out slowly together, waiting. The light poured in to the meeting house. I, frankly, found it hard to settle. I tried to breathe but found myself looking around the room at elders who had been trying for a much longer time. I saw one who I know had been arrested recently, laying her body across the train tracks that led to a coal mine. She was still and had a small smile playing on her face.
A few minutes later another meeting elder stood up. She has calloused hands. She reminded us that Fox’s “Walk Cheerfully on the earth” idea came as the latter part of a sentence: “And this is the word of G-d to you all, and a charge to you all in the presence of the living G-d: be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of G-d in every one.” Cheerfulness comes once you’re in the right story. Discipline makes way for grace. Get arrested at the coal plant in the morning, make butter with the neighbors at night.
This sitting/ waiting/ sharing/ reflecting process that unfolded during Meeting reminded me again of Yunkaporta: knowledge produced by being together in real time, in conversation, making space for the sacred to move through us. Knowledge created in conversation with elders across generations. And finally, wisdom shared out of a heart-broken openness, refined through life experience, struggles, loss, practice. Wisdom born out of a lifetime of trying and not giving up.
The stories we need to remember are still here, flowing from grandfathers calling us back to what we know, and children looking wonderingly at us about how to learn. We’re all churning.