Article on social change movements by Parker Palmer

Article about youth liberation by Bill Andriette

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Links

http://www.olympia.youthrights.org/

http://www.olympia.youthrights.org/links.php

http://www.youthrights.net/index.php?title=Youth_Rights_Network

http://www.youthrights.org (I found this when I was searching something and found that someone had copied some of my stuff about respect onto the site.)

Most Recent Items

Jan 2008 ASFAR link

June 6, 2006 - Note and NYRA link

June 8, 2005- Article by Bill Andriette

June 1 - Added links

Text

...people with a vision for change may devote themselves to persuading powerholders (1) to see things their way, which drains energy away from the vision and breeds resentment among the visionaries when "permission" is not granted.

When organizations seem less interested in change than in preservation (which is, after all, their job), would-be reformers are likely to give up if the organizational approach is the only one they know.

Sometimes it is easier to live with the comfort of despair than with the challenge of knowing that change can happen despite the inertia of organizations.

There is another avenue toward change: The way of the movement. I began to understand movements when I saw the simple fact that nothing would ever have changed if reformers had allowed themselves to be done in by organizational resistance.

For a movement, resistance is merely the place where things begin. The movement mentality, far from being defeated by organizational resistance, takes energy from opposition. Opposition validates the audacious idea that change must come.

* The movement mentality takes energy from opposition. (2)

The black liberation movement and the women's movement would have died quickly if racist and sexist organizations had been allowed to define the rules of engagement. (3) But for some blacks, and for some women, that resistance affirmed and energized the struggle. In both movements, advocates of change found sources of countervailing power (4) outside of organizational structures, and they nurtured that power in ways that eventually gave them leverage on organizations.

The genius of movements is paradoxical: They abandon the logic of organizations in order to gather the power necessary to rewrite the logic of organizations. Both the black movement and the women's movement grew outside of organizational boundaries-but both returned to change the lay, and the law, of the land. (5)

How does a movement unfold and progress?

Choosing Integrity

Most of us know from experience what a divided life is. Inwardly our feelings tell us one thing, but outwardly we respond to something else. (pp)

The decision to stop leading a divided life, made by enough people over a period of time, may eventually have political impact. But at the outset, it is a deeply personal decision, taken for the sake of personal integrity and wholeness. I call it the "Rosa Parks decision" in honor of the woman who decided, one hot Alabama day in 1955, that she finally would sit at the front of the bus. (9)

Rosa Parks' decision was neither random nor taken in isolation. She served as secretary for the local NAACP, had studied social change at the Highlander Folk School, and was aware of others' hopes to organize a bus boycott. But her motive that day in Montgomery was not to spark the modern civil rights movement. Years later, she explained her decision with a simple but powerful image of personal wholeness: "I sat down because my feet were tired."

I suspect we can say even more: Rosa Parks sat at the front of the bus because her soul was tired of the vast, demoralizing gap between knowing herself as fully human and collaborating with a system that denied her humanity. The decision to stop leading a divided life is less a strategy for altering other people's values than an uprising of the elemental need for one's own values to come to the fore. (10)

* The power of a movement lies less in attacking some enemy's untruth than in naming and claiming a truth of one's own.

There is immense energy for change in such inward decisions as they leap from one person to another and outward to the society.

*...people who adopt a movement approach must begin by changing themselves. (11)

They also "refuse any longer to act outwardly in contradiction to something they know inwardly to be true" (12)

What drives such a decision, with all its risks? The difference between a person who stays at the back of the bus and one who finally decides to sit up front is probably lost in the mystery of human courage.

But courage is stimulated by the simple insight that my oppression is not simply the result of mindless external forces; it comes also from the fact that I collaborate with these forces, giving assent to the very thing that is crushing my spirit. (13)

With this realization comes anger, and in anger is the energy that drives some people to say: "Enough. My feet are tired. Here I sit."

These people have seized the personal insight from which all movements begin: No punishment can possibly be more severe than the punishment that comes from conspiring in the denial of one's own integrity.

But the personal decision to stop leading a divided life is a frail reed. All around us, dividedness is presented as the sensible, even responsible, way to live. So the second stage in a movement happens when people who have been making these decisions start to discover each other and enter into relations of mutual encouragement and support. These groups, which are characteristic of every movement I know about, perform the crucial function of helping the Rosa Parks of the world know that even though they are out of step, they are not crazy. Together we learn that behaving normally is sometimes nuts but seeking integrity is always sane.

...those who have decided to live "divided no more" are often unaware of each other's existence (14)

(since we are not socialized to share private feelings)

it is clear from all great movements that mutual support is vital if the inner decision is to be sustained and if the movement is to take its next crucial steps toward gathering power.

The conversations are informal, confidential, and, above all, candid. When you ask these people how they manage to add one more meeting to their crowded schedules, the answer often is: "This kind of meeting is not a burden, but a relief. It actually seems to free up my time."

Their purpose is to wrap the individual's inner decision in a resolve that can only come from being heard by a supportive community.

* Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

Going Public

The third stage of a movement has already been implied. As support groups develop, individuals learn to translate their private concerns into public issues, and they grow in their ability to give voice to these issues in public and compelling ways.

* To put it more precisely, support groups help people discover that their problems are not "private" at all but are the result of public conditions and therefore require public remedies.

When the language of change becomes available in the common culture, people are better able to name their yearnings for change, to explore them with others, to claim membership in a great movement. (15)

Group support encourages people to risk the public exposure of insights (and feelings (16)) that had earlier seemed far too fragile to talk about. (pp)

To "go public" is to enter one's convictions into the mix of communal discourse. It is to project one's ideas so that others can hear them, respond to them, and be influenced by them and so that one's ideas can be tested and refined in public. The public, understood as a vehicle of discourse, is pre-political. It is that primitive process of communal conversation, conflict, and consensus on which the health of institutionalized power depends.

Critics claim that there is no longer a public forum for a movement to employ. But historically, it is precisely the energy of movements that has renewed the public realm; movements have the capacity to create the very public they depend on.

However moribund the public may be, it is reinvigorated when people learn how to articulate their concerns in ways that allow indeed, compel a wider public to listen and respond. (17)

By giving public voice to alternative values we can create something more fundamental than political change. We can create cultural change. When we secure a place in public discourse for ideas and images ...When the language of change becomes available in the common culture, people are better able to name their yearnings for change, to explore them with others, to claim membership in a great movement and to overcome the disabling effects of feeling isolated and half-mad (18)

Alternative Rewards

As a movement passes through the first three stages, it develops ways of rewarding people for sustaining the movement itself. In part, these rewards are simply integral to the nature of each stage; they are the rewards that come from living one's values, from belonging to a community, from finding a public voice. But in stage four, a more systematic pattern of alternative rewards emerges, and with it comes the capacity to challenge the dominance of existing organizations. (19)

The power of organizations depends on their ability to reward people who abide by their norms, even the people who suffer from those norms. (20)

An educational system that ignores human need in favor of a narrow version of professionalism depends on a reward system that keeps both faculty and students in their place. But as soon as rewards for alternative behavior emerge for either group, it becomes more difficult for reform to be denied its day. (21)

What are the alternative rewards offered by a growing movement? As a movement grows, the meaning one does not find in conventional work is found in the meaning of the movement. As a movement grows, the affirmation one does not receive from organizational colleagues is received from movement friends. (22) As a movement grows, careers that no longer satisfy may be revisioned in forms and images that the movement has inspired. As a movement grows, the paid work one cannot find in conventional organizations may be found in the movement itself. (23)

In stage one, people who decide to live "divided no more" find the courage to face punishment by realizing that there is no punishment worse than conspiring in a denial of one's own integrity. That axiom, inverted, shows how alternative rewards can create cracks in the conventional reward system and then grow in the cracks: People start realizing there is no reward greater than living in a way that honors one's own integrity. (24) Taken together, the two axioms trace a powerful vector of a movement's growth from rejecting conventional punishments to embracing alternative rewards

These alternative rewards may seem frail and vulnerable when compared to the raises and promotions organizations are able to bestow upon their loyalists. So they are. Integrity, as the cynics say, does not put bread on the table. But people who are drawn into a movement generally find that stockpiling bread is not the main issue for them. They have the bread they need and, given that, they learn the wisdom of another saying: "People do not live on bread alone."

Notes

1- For teens "powerholders" can be thought of as parents, teachers, school authorities

2 - Like how Rob Emmerling just made me feel more determined.

3 - In other words, we don't play by their rules. We make up our own guidelines. We decide what is healthy and unhealthy for us and what is really in our own best interest. We don't believe them when they say it is "for our own good."

4 - For me, teens are these "sources of countervailing power"

5 - I also want to see laws and what is "normal" changed.

6 - This is what is happening as I introduce the suicidal teens to each other.

7 - My website is making their individual, personal issues more public

8 - "Alternative rewards" - We are not motivated by grades, money, pleasing our parents/ teachers or "success". We are motivated by helping people. We are motivated by making the world a better place. We are motivated by hugs, understanding, caring, emotional support, love, connection. We are motivated by stopping our pain from the feelings of fear, invalidation, hopelessness and aloneness. We are motivated by helping those younger than us or in more pain than us.

9 - At that time in that part of the USA it was forbidden for blacks to sit in the front of the bus. When she refused to go to the back of the bus, she was arrested. When I was in South Africa two years ago I learned more about the racial discrimination laws in that country. Laws that had put Nelson Mandela in jail for 27 years I think it was. Laws that said a white person could not date or marry a black, solely because of their race, just as there are laws that prevent teenagers from doing things, just because of their age. I would call this "age discrimination" not "protecting minors" as the adults like to call it.

10 - We are probably not going to change your parents or your teacher's values. We are looking towards the next generation. Your generation.

11 - So we must all work on ourselves. How we think of ourselves, how we talk to ourselves, how we feel about ourselves and how we interact with each other.

12 - This is a bit hard to do when your parents and teachers have physical power over you, and can easily call the police for back up, but at least let them know you are doing things not because it is your voluntary choice, but because you are being forced to do it under fear of punishment/pain. In legal terms I believe this is called "duress." It is illegal to get someone to sign a document under duress, for example. If this was done, the document has no legal validitiy. But it is perfectly legal to get teens to do things that they are ordered to do under similar conditions of duress.

13 - When he says "collaborate" he is talking about going along with things which you don't feel are right. He means not listening to your feelings, but instead invalidating yourself, saying "I shouldn't feel the way I do. I should go along with everyone else and just get through it like they do." This is also discounting your own mind and telling yourself that you don't know enough to think for yourself or make your own decisions. And it also means you are saying that your own feelings are not important enough to use them to help you make decisions. It is a little like letting someone else tell you when you should be hungry, thirsty and sleepy. And even when you should go to the bathroom!

14 - This is why what I am doing by connecting invalidated, suicidal teens with each other is so important.

15 - For example, talking about invalidation. And talking about feelings. An using the 0-10 scale.

16 - I added the feelings because this is just about the scariest thing to do. But it is easier when you are supported by people who care about you, even if, for now, your best friends are "just" online friends.

17 - And this is exactly what I want to do. Get more people to pay attention and talk about teen suicide and how teens are treated in general.

18 - This is especially important for suicidal teens. They are being convinced *they* are the ones who are wrong. And that *their* feelings are invalid, silly, stupid, etc. This causes them to wonder if they are crazy. The more they think about it and worry about it, the more crazy they appear. So what they need is a support group of people who say "You're not crazy. I feel the same way." Suicidal teens also always feel isolated. It is almost like he was writing this paper with suicidal teens in mind.

19 - What this means to me is some thing like, eventually we will need more than hugs to stay alive. So we will need to find ways to eat, etc. I'd say we can find ways to make money without being materialistic, possessive, competitive and greedy. Selling our own books, etc.

20 - Here is a question to see who is reading this and thinking about it. What does he mean by this? Write me!

21 - In a different system, different feelings become motivators. Instead of being motivated by fear, one is motivated by love, a desire to help people. Also, different institutional goals inspire create different feelings. If the goal is to make money, there will be certain feelings in the group. If the goal is to help people there will be different feelings. Also, different levels of awareness trigger different feelings. Once a person becomes aware they are being invalidated, pressured, manipulated, threatened etc. they feel differently when those things happen again.

The whole "paradigm" or model changes, as Stephen Covey talks about.

22 - Or for teens we could say the support we don't get from our "friends" in school and from our "family", we get from our online friends.

23 - Yeah, this is what I already said about selling our own books etc

24 - In my case I have realized that I don't seek the approval or admiration of average adults. I seek it from intelligent, sensitive, non-conforming teens, especially female teens. If one of these female teens truly admires me, I know I am doing a pretty good job. If she doesn't like what I am doing, it is a sign I need to take a look at it. I already have money, btw, so that doesn't motivate me.

And I see this is pretty much what he says in the final paragraph when he talks about "people not living on bread alone."