Adapt
Hope in the Face of the Polycrisis
[Part two in our four-part series: “Local Organizing in a Polycrisis Era”]
According to many historians, it is currently the best time to be alive in all of human history. We live longer, we are on average wealthier, we eat better, and are more educated. Yet, many of us wake up each morning overwhelmed by the current or looming crises of our time. Climate change, threats to democracies across the world, wars, a growing wealth gap, deep disparities in health and well-being, mass extinction, mass migration – the list goes on. These large, evolving, and often interconnected, crises are known as a polycrisis. (For a full description of the polycrisis, please see the first article in this four-part series here.)
Towards a Polycrisis Consciousness
Challenges and opportunities of organizing amidst societal collapse
[Part one in our four-part series: “Local Organizing in a Polycrisis Era”]
The polycrisis, which is the result of the compounding pressure of simultaneous global crises, presents a unique threat in human history. Some experts on the subject, including Daniel Schmachtenger, go so far as to call it “the end of history,” – an “extinction-level threat.” While we cannot pretend to know the outcome of humanity’s long and winding road, we know that business as usual will no longer suffice. It will take nothing short of a global shift in consciousness at all levels in order to defuse the ticking time bomb that is the polycrisis.
A Cult Is Not a Party
“It’s a cult,” Idaho grandmother Pam Hemphill told CNN, referring to the MAGA crowd that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. After spending two months in federal prison for her participation in the riot, she returned home and now admits that she had been “brainwashed.”
A Prejudice We Can’t Ignore
It is good that we are having important conversations about prejudices and implicit biases — racial, religious, sexual, linguistic, even educational. But we are missing one of the most important. If we don’t identify and address this prejudice, all the others are likely to get worse. The group being stereotyped, and sometimes denigrated, goes by a variety of names. Some of them sound neutral: “centrists,” “moderates,” “bi-partisans,” "trans-partisans." Other names are explicitly critical: “cowards,” “frauds,” “complicits," “wishy-washy.”
Why I Am Transpartisan
For me, transpartisan describes a meme, a field, a constituency, a dynamic, a movement, and even a philosophy. Like pragmatism – its homegrown, American predecessor from the late 19th to the early 20th century – transpartisan has emerged as an important political expression in the 21st century, recognizing differences agreeably while mostly focusing on our commonalities.
If We Can Laugh Together, Maybe We Can Last Together
I need a reasonably decent sense of humor to do the work I do, bringing people together across differences and helping people discover their capacities to affect positive transformation in their communities. I have to see the comedy in everything even if not all of it can be turned into a joke. That is because laughter is the most effective natural tension reliever there is. And without it, I am sure that we would not have made any of the social progress that we’ve had up to this point.