From a talk by Diane Shisk at an RC Community Building Workshop in England, February 2020
We are more and more fully facing that we are in a climate emergency. That’s great. But what do we do now? Yikes!
THESE ARE THINGS WE KNOW
We know how to apply our minds to a problem. We don’t wait for somebody else to solve problems or tell us what to do. We think together. We pool our collective intelligence and keep thinking about what to do. We stay in good touch with an ever- larger group of people who are thinking and taking action and share our thoughts about what we think makes sense.
We have already developed a climate emergency draft program for the RC Communities (see <www.rc.org/climatechangedraft>). It’s on target. We know what steps need to be taken, and groups of us are putting that into practice where we live.
We know we have to keep having big sessions on the early distresses that get restimulated as we work at the edge of what we can do. We’ve pushed ourselves and done what we have figured out.
WE NEED TO PUSH FURTHER
We need to push further. We need to keep building our Communities so that our minds have more and more resource.
We want to get our ideas out into the world. We want to make our Communities work well for a wide diversity of people.
We need a huge movement, one with many people, including Indigenous people and people on the frontlines of climate change. We need the working class. The working class has the power to shut down industry—we need that power with us, and we don’t yet have it.
Tim Jackins recently led a small workshop at which we looked at the intersection of capitalism, the collapsing society, and the climate crisis. We have to solve the climate crisis, but we don’t want to shore up [strengthen] capitalism in the process. Instead, we can use the climate emergency to expose how capitalism works and the damage it causes. Some of where he pushed us was on where we have limited our use of RC, especially in reaching for people who don’t easily agree with us.
We know we need a movement to make such a big change. We know we need a lot of people with us-and we need people who are not yet with us. It's time to use all we know about reaching people. In general, we are still letting our fears and timidities - about people rejecting us, or not liking us, or criticizing us, or fighting with us, - limit the people we reach out to. We are too often staying away from people who are difficult for us - and we need some of those people.
WE NEED EVERYBODY
We know we need a movement to make such a big change. We know we need a lot of people with us-and we need people who are not yet with us. It's time to use all we know about reaching people. In general, we are still letting our fears and timidities - about people rejecting us, or not liking us, or criticizing us, or fighting with us, - limit the people we reach out to. We are too often staying away from people who are difficult for us - and we need some of those people.
In the long run [eventually] we need everybody. We need to remember that everybody has a mind and that everybody can think about the climate emergency to the extent that they aren’t lost in a lifetime of distresses—which to some extent we still are, too. But we have RC theory and practice to free our minds.
I don’t think it is the best strategy, in the limited time we have, to reach for everyone. But we need to keep in mind our long-term goal of having everyone with us. Otherwise we run the risk of narrowing our contacts and writing off [dismissing] many potential allies—which I think would be a big mistake.
Tim is pushing us to look at every single human as our potential ally in this work and to communicate to them that we are thinking about their interests, not just our own, and that we want to know what they think. We need to listen to them and communicate that we want them with us.
Early powerlessness, defeats, and struggles with relationships can make us stay away from some people, or we might try to connect a few times and then give up and go away. We can forget that it might take many, many repetitions of “I like you” or “What do you think?” or “Could you help me with this?” before someone can feel we are thinking about them and can open up to communicating with us. We need to set aside any patterns of arrogance that tell us we are right and that we know what to do and they don’t. It’s not possible to reach and bring people in with that approach. We can remember how hard life is on people. We can remember that everyone has done their best.
In our work, including our work on the climate emergency, we try to get people’s agreement on rational policies. By rational policy we mean one that works well for everyone. If two people cannot agree on a rational policy, it must mean that one or both of them are caught in distress and not fully present in the way we know is possible or that there is a lack of information.
People have had to construct a “public person” that protects who they really are from the harm and danger they feel. They don’t often show us the hurt individual inside. They interact with us from their “public person”—but we know that’s not who they really are, and that’s not who we are trying to reach. We are trying to reach past that. We need to reach for the human instead of only engaging with the shell that people put up to function in the world. These understandings are so basic for us. It’s important not to forget them in any panic about the climate emergency. We can discharge all we need to in order to reach for each human.
Think about how scared we still are, how much danger we feel from things out there in the world—even with all the discharge we have done—and how easy it’s been to give up on people.
Tim gave us homework—talk to somebody new every day about climate change. Practice reaching for people. Practice showing ourselves and who we really are. Practice reaching past their “public person” to the real person—and discharge about it!
For me, all the above is connected with the U.S. presidential election. We need a president who will act on the climate emergency. In order for that to happen, we don’t need everybody, but we need to reach a larger percentage of people than we already have. I plan to keep reaching past people’s public construct to the human inside. I am excited about the possibilities.