one aspect of this canadian situation was the widely held mental model that aboriginal people needed to "be developed." this model had been institutionalized in, among other practices, a policy of aggressive assimilation that since the 1850s had taken children away from their parents to be educated in church-and state-run residential schools. one of the founders of residential schooling in north america characterized his approach as "kill the indian and save the man."[21] residential schooling created a legacy of physical, emotional, sexual, and cultural abuse. by the time the last residential school in canada closed in 1998, this power over aboriginal people had been replicated for generations.
after this meeting in ottawa, i and a few colleagues began working with a team of national government and aboriginal leaders to try out a new way to unstick this stuck situation. we chose as our entry point the extraordinarily high rate of suicide among aboriginal youth: five times the canadian average. but after four years of on-and-off efforts, we had hardly moved forward at all. we kept running into roadblocks, large and small. at one point we were frustrated in trying to communicate with the staff of an aboriginal-run conference center. i complained about this to my friend, activist michel gelobter, and he chided me: "why are you surprised that oppressed communities exhibit serious dys-functions? these dysfunctions have to be recognized and dealt with; they reinforce and maintain oppression by diminishing the capacity of these communities to heal." the degenerative impacts of power-over are resolutely persistent.
i also noticed that within our microcosmic project team, we succeeded in re-creating the stuck relationships that characterized the macrocosm we were trying to change. the government leaders wanted to remain in control and to "fix" the aboriginal problem. the aboriginal leaders didn't want to be controlled or fixed or developed by anyone. and those of us who were consultants dispassionately kept ourselves apart from and above the situation. we all had our own different roles and powers and trajectories of self-realization, which never really moved and never really met. so we made no progress on the challenge that we had set out to address. (only later, when these roles and power relations were forcefully restructured and ownership of the project was taken over by a local aboriginal community, did the initiative begin to move forward.)
in canada, as in south africa and houston, i had been able to recognize the sound of power-to more easily than the sound of power-over because the former resonated more strongly with my own privileged experience. then in 2004 i got a taste of the experience of the underside of power-over. my london partner zaid hassan and i were invited to facilitate a workshop in michigan for a group of u.s. minority activists who were rethinking their strategy for achieving racial equity in light of the just-issued supreme court decision that sharply limited affirmative action.
i was unsettled even before the meeting started. zaid is muslim and i am jewish, and on the plane ride he had shown me an article in an activist magazine that pointed out how many of the u.s. neoconservatives are jewish. he also showed me a letter to the editor that he had written, in which he acknowledged how contentious this assertion was but defended it as informative and fair. we started into a tense discussion, a fractal of the larger muslim-jewish conflict, but then cut short our argument to get ready for the workshop.
with this unresolved tension between zaid and me, the workshop started awkwardly and got worse. the participants were feeling beaten down by the regression in civil rights in the united states and discouraged about the poor results their existing strategies were producing. they didn't think my leadership of the meeting, with my white and foreign colleagues, was legitimate, and they were unhappy with the process we were using. harsh power struggles swirled around and within the room. eventually it became obvious that i wasn't wanted in the workshop at all, and so, feeling humiliated, i gave up. i left the group to lead itself and went back to my room.
that night i had a terrifying dream. a gang was harassing me mercilessly-crowding and shoving and hitting me-and i couldn't escape. eventually i became so hopeless and despairing that i pulled the pin out of a hand grenade and blew myself up with all of them: i became a suicide bomber. through this dream i experienced the terrible, debilitating feeling of being on the receiving end of power-over.
by 2008, my understanding of the dynamics of power and love was taking shape through such experiences and reflections. then i had another encounter with aboriginal issues, this time in australia. i was invited to melbourne by an australian aboriginal leader named patrick dodson. he is well known for his decades of varied struggles-mobilizations, negotiations, invocations, lawsuits-to address the challenges faced by his people, and specifically for his efforts to achieve reconciliation between aboriginal and nonab-original australians.[22] he knows how hard it is to move forward on these challenges and wasn't surprised by the lack of progress of the effort in canada in which i had been involved.
dodson wanted me to contribute to a meeting that he was convening with john sanderson, the former chief of the australian army. they were trying to construct a new set of agreements (including constitutional amendments) that would, more than 220 years after the arrival of the settlers and 15 years after the high court verdict that overruled terra nullius, put the relationship between these two peoples on an equal footing.
the evening before our meetings were to start, i walked by an outdoor cinema and found myself watching two documentaries. the first was the white planet, a film about arctic wildlife and the dangers it faces from global warming.[23] the second was kanyini, about an australian aboriginal leader named bob randall, a member of the "stolen generation" who as a child had (like many canadian children) been taken away from his family by the government.[24] in kanyini, randall argues that the crisis in aboriginal society originated in their having been dispossessed and estranged from the four aspects of life that are essential to survival: their belief system or law, their land or country, their spirituality, and their families. "the purpose of life is to be part of everything that is," he says in the film. "you take away my kanyini, my interconnectedness, and i'm nothing. i'm dead." i was struck that randall's yearning was the same as paul tillich's love: "the drive towards the unity of the separated."
in the juxtaposition of these two films, i could now see what happens when we employ our power without love. our destruction of aboriginal societies worldwide and our headlong rush towards the destruction of the ecosystems on which all our societies depend arise from our disconnection from one another and from the earth. environmentalist julia butterfly hill made the same point in describing her unlikely partnership with social activist van jones: "i brought the piece that we are not separate from the planet. his piece was that we need to uplift everyone. we were committed to seeing how those pieces fit together. we could see underneath all of it was the idea of disposability: the idea that you've got disposable people, a disposable planet."[25] if we push away or abandon our sense of connection with others-our acknowledgment, our sensitivity, our love-there is no limit to the sadness, terror, and pain that our unchecked power can produce.
we can recognize this degenerative phenomenon of power without love because, in so many contexts and at so many scales, power dominates love. we see this in our homes, organizations, communities, nations, and in international affairs. patrick dodson told me a story about michael long, a popular australian aboriginal sportsman who had walked from melbourne to canberra to draw attention to the desperate situation of his people. long met with prime minister john howard and asked him the anguished question: "where is the love for my people?" we all feel the anguish that results from the deficit of love.
love is what makes power generative
based on these experiences, then, here is how i understand the nature of power and its relationship to love. power has two sides, one generative and the other degenerative. our power is generative and amplifying when we realize ourselves while loving and uniting with others. our power is degenerative and constrain-ing-reckless and abusive, or worse-when we overlook or deny or cut off our love and unity.dengbi.net dmxsw.com qqxsw.com yifan.netshuyue.net epzw.net qqwxw.com xsguan.comxs007.com zhuike.net readw.com 23zw.cc