What a weekend! (PART 2): Although I could not participate in person in yesterdays big protest in New York City I am glad to have been able to offer some help and advice behind-the-scenes to some of the leaders of it. I will follow and support anyone who has a vision, integrity, and a deep love for the people, all people. I know the protest was a great success, and I am so happy to see people all around the country come together to raise their voices around any form of violence and hatred and ignorance and injustice. This is a critical part of our journey for change. Many months back a group of us planned a leadership retreat for yesterday in the New York metro area, an all-day retreat, morning to evening. That is why I had to miss the march. I am not going to go into details except to say, especially to the Millennial Generation and my generation, Generation X, it is long past time we take over, on every level, the leadership of this country and of this planet. We are the majority populations at this point, and we can no longer allow the old ways of thinking and doing things to be the rule of the day, to rule our lives. This is why people are in the streets. This is why people do not vote in large numbers. Because people are sick and tired of the same old nonsense and do-nothing-ism passing as leadership and vision, when it is not. But we gotta be strategic, we need to understand the work is on many levels, with many tactics, and we cannot just operate on anger and raw emotion. Anger is necessary, for sure, as we should be angry. But there is a big difference between proactive anger and reactionary anger. Proactive anger means we have a plan and we know what we want to see, because we are going to create it. Reactionary anger just says what we do not like and stops there. And we need to understand this work for real change and real justice in America, and on this planet, is a marathon, not a sprint. I have personally been an activist since I was a youth, since I was a teenager, and I have seen, as you can imagine, many people come and go, including many people who talked really loudly and did little to nothing around basic organizing of people and communities, and certainly never built or created anything: not an organization, not a institution, not a business, to serve their communities. So I am respectfully saying we the people, the ones who are fired up, really need to learn how to become leaders with the right and proper skill sets, and we the people really need to have consistent action steps, even when there are no cameras or media, even when there is no major injustice, like #EricGarner or #Ferguson, that we are reacting to. That is what our leadership retreat was about yesterday: THE BIG PICTURE. And that is what our national gathering on leadership, ideas, and action steps will be about, in the New York metro area, Thursday, April 23-Saturday, April 25, 2015. More details are coming, but please know it will not just be a conference. There are several parts to what we are proposing to help build a serious movement in these times.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 12:44:45 +0000
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