Do You Need A Weatherman?

A smarter writer than I recently wrote, This is Not Going to Work, and I'd like to stand on those broad shoulders for a moment.

Let's remember the last time we had open conflict in the streets, the last time that American police were asked to face angry crowds of their fellow citizens, the last time that American cities burned. Let's remember the 1960's, somehow 50 years ago.

There were two causes challenging established authority in the 1960's: the civil rights movement and the antiVietNam war movement. The police response, which was no more and no less than the official, intended, desired response of the Establishment, escalated and went over the top. Although people held different opinions, among some of the American people the government, the Establishment, and the military-industrial complex lost the consent of the people.

Harlem, NYC, 1964

Chicago, 1968

When the System lost the consent of some portion of the people, most of the disillusioned remained in their box - but not all of them. Some went to Canada to avoid conscription in a war they didn't support. Some chose to respond to the challenge, and they worked in groups designed around the two conflicts: Anti-War and Civil Rights.

Remember the SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, with a manifesto written by Jane Fonda's husband? Remember the Weather Underground, which declared war on the United States? Bill Ayers? Bernadine Dohrn?

Remember the Black Panther Party? Bobby Seale, the cookbook author? After the Panthers were shut down, the survivors formed the Black Liberation Army?

Quick Question One: In what American city was a building blown up in a 1970 bomb-making operation? Greenwich Village, New York City.

Quick Question Two: In what American city did a police aircraft drop a bomb onto a block of buildings containing a black liberation group? Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.

Right now, the Occupy movement is a mostly white-male display of GoreTex and modern camping equipment that would make any sporting-goods store salivate at the notion of sponsoring them.

If we keep responding to public assembly and freedom of speech (see: The American Revolution) with military supression tactics, most of the protesters will pack up their tents and their GoreTex and go home, probably after the next election. But some of them will become Weathermen 2.0.

Kristin Stoneking is a campus minister at UC Davis, and she has been recognized for her leadership in the aftermath of the UC-Davis pepper spraying. She writes,

... in a larger sense, we are all in danger of being trapped. We are trapped when we assent to a culture that for decades, and particularly since 9/11, has allowed law enforcement to have more and more power which has moved us into an era of hypercriminalization. We are trapped when we envision no path to reconciliation. And we are trapped when we forget our own power.

It's bad enough that we're radicalizing Pakistanis. We shouldn't be radicalizing our own people. "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"

Change, Emo Change, and Mass Movements

In my day job I sometimes get involved in change, and change is hard to do well, at least for me. I puzzle over what are the factors that make change difficult. On the other hand, some situations make people (jihadis, for instance) eager to die for change and I wonder what separates these two very different responses. Why is it so hard to implement, for example, a new computer procedure but so easy for a Philadephia single mother to become Jihad Jane and join forces with assassins? What do the Sheiks (or the Nazis, or the Communists) know about managing change that I might benefit from?

In the last few weeks I've finished two books, each dealing with Change in their own way. One was written by a Ph.D., the other by a self-educated longshoreman, and I've enjoyed them both.

In Managing Transitions, William Bridges (Ph.D.) writes about the emotional impact of change and suggests that before people accept change they need to go through the emotional phases of transition: grieving the ending of the previous "normal", a chaotic empty neutral zone, followed by a willingness to come to terms with the "new normal".

Bridges goes on to point out that as the speed of change increases, people are increasingly dealing with multiple changes, each in their own phase - so that rather than dealing with one transitional phase in isolation, people are simultaneously in multiple endings, nuetral zones, and beginnings.

This was an interesting book, I've tended to see it as the "emo-change" book in the way it focuses on the emotional implications of change. It's certainly a balancing read for technoquants who see change management as a merely technical exercise.

While Bridges describes change as something difficult that people are adverse to, the second book discusses how and why people sometimes embrace major changes. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer discusses the nature of mass movements in which people eagerly seek change.

Eric Hoffer is an interesting study himself. Born into a working class family, he went blind at age seven. When his sight returned at 15, his fear of returning blindness prompted him to read voraciously. He became a migrant worker, living "between the books and the brothels". When called an intellectual, he insisted that he was a longshoreman.

Hoffer's book The True Believer talks about a situation in which people embrace radical change: the mass movement. He analyses the motivations that cause people to seek massive change, and explains that it is people with poor self-esteem that initially support mass movements, and that for them their membership in a movement is more important than the goals of the movement.

Hoffer's book is brilliant. Written in 1951, it explains both al Queda and the Obama presidential campaign. He analyzes the reasons that some seek big change (low self-esteem, frustration, no creative outlet) and the reasons that some people are impervious to movements (high self-esteem, individual identity, a fully formed personality).

He charts the leadership of movements from the men of words, to the fanatics, to the men of action, and finally to the administrators. In Hoffer's book, which is quite non-political, resistance to change is attibuted to people who are people who are fully formed individuals - and apathy to change is attributed to people struggling for survival.

My take-aways from Hoffer's book are (1) marveling at the philosopher and (2) re-appraisal of resistance to change. Perhaps it's a good thing that some people are resistant to change, and perhaps those in that category are among our best people.

Maybe change shouldn't be easy. Maybe initiators should have to justify it, earn it, and work it.