Biologist Maynard Smith has noted what many academics have observed, that politics seems closely tied to science.  Neo-Darwinists, sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists and reductionists in general seem inclined to identify with the conservative or the right wing of the political spectrum.

Scientists don’t often experience themselves within a larger arc of societal transformation or social evolution.  Scientists are warriors battling for space on journal pages and struggling for the respect of their peers.  Their perspective can be surprisingly limited by the time and effort it takes to carve out a sphere of influence in sub or sub sub-disciplines visited only by others that speak their arcane lingo.  These intellectual athletes are often testosterone obsessed, wearing metaphoric jockstraps on their heads to protect vulnerable ideas.  The environment itself selects for the competitors, not cooperators.  It is no mistake that there are, for example, so many women doctors but so few women academics in the biological sciences, though that ratio is changing.

I’m wondering if the conservative proclivities of the Neo-Darwinists and the reductionists are evidence of biological evolutionary principles in societal evolution.

When Darwin first proposed his theory of natural selection, the theory was considered audacious and maybe even useful.  (Theories can’t be true.  They can be useful.  Asking if a theory is true is like asking if a story is true.  A story is a story, a sliver of reality told from a particular point of view.)  Darwin’s colleague and co-discoverer of natural selection, George Russel Wallace, was a liberal of his time.  For example, Wallace assigned equal social and intellectual status to both aboriginals and western academics.  I’m wondering if these early reductionists, originators of natural selection, were political liberals.  Intellectuals with laboratories were often men of means, suggesting Tory rather than Whig associations.  Still, I’m wondering if adherents of new theories tend to be embraced by the political Left.  Those clinging to old theories would be, or course, conservative.

Were the reductionists/conservatives of our times liberals 150 years ago when these ideas emerged?  New species are formed when flexibility is evidenced and taken advantage of by fitting a new feature into a changing environment.  Flexibility is a liberal quality.  It takes flexibility of mind to embrace new ideas.  Neo-Darwinism was once new.

These days, like their might-makes-right, neo-conservative, ideological cousins, the Neo-Darwinists are failing to spin their stories in ways that satisfactorily explain.  Victorians both, Neo-Darwinists and social Darwinists are disappearing, but they are by no means yet extinct.

Paradoxically, perhaps the most serious thing we do is play.  The Left is filled with activists that aren’t that serious.

A hallmark of the American Left is inflated self importance.  I observe a near compulsion to express no joy while embracing outrage.  Frequent faction fights are encouraged by a Left/Progressive culture frightened of flexibility.

Anathema to creativity is an atmosphere of gloom and anger.  Yet, there have been some playful pioneers.  Billionaires for Bush performs satire.  Codepink has offered an antidote: the warrior woman with a big, light heart.  Still, there are not near enough jesters on the Left.  Codepink and the work of Medea Benjamin have been integral to a Left identity by offering buoyancy, audaciousness and spunk.

Choosing to exhibit playfulness is to perhaps choose that which is most unique about being a human being.  It is characteristic of those features we identify with our uniqueness:  language use, tool fabrication, idea manipulation, art and science.  Only when we are deeply into playful, accessing our creativity, does our humanity robustly emerge.  Neoteny is central to being human.

One Codepinker, Marcia, ran a toy store for 22 years.  This unique establishment inspired the Dustin Hoffman film “Mr McGorium’s Fantastic Emporium,” where the film’s author worked.  Saturday’s Child was legendary.  With dozens of Chicago toy stores to choose from, every Christmas the Chicago TV stations visited to interview Marcia and to film kids playing.  Marcia was a professional specializing in play.  A professional specializing in play she still is today.

As a full-time activist, Marcia brings her professionalism to the business of social and political change.  She plays with everybody.  She’s done sound and media for Voice of Creative Nonviolence.  For the North Shore Coalition of Peace and Justice, she cooks supper every two weeks while also offering her skills as facilitator and leader to create great events.  For the North Suburban Peace Initiative, she directed the annual dinner of several hundred people, manages the website, drafts all communications and brings in speakers from across the country.  She works with UFPJ on regional events, setting up sound for the bi-annual conference and helping organize mass actions.  Marcia has organized and sponsored Moveon events of several hundred people.  She manages websites for an anti-Blackwater group, a Department of Peace chapter, networks, coalitions, etc.  She prepares handouts, mailers, postcards and posters for countless organizations.  Marcia prepared all the legal documents and modified the text for the Peace, Justice and Environment Project going 501c3.  She helped write the structure for the Illinois Coalition for Peace and Justice, handles their media and co-chairs the communications/technology committee.  She fed 100 veterans for peace, cooking for days for their big event.

Marcia is my wife.

Marcia plays with peace by working with everyone.  She is a one-person boundary buster.  Where she speaks, there is often laughter.  Where she facilitates, the Left’s signature seriousness loosens up.

Being the change she wants to see, Marcia shows by example how to engage in change.  Marcia seeks Left/Progressive unity by working for the many groups she seeks to see unified.  Her years of selling toys to children was perfect preparation for teaching activists to play.  Marcia is a serious activist.  She never stops playing.

Just as there are fundamentalists in religion, there are fundamentalists in science.  Neo-Darwinians usually are about as talented at listening as evangelical creationists.

Whereas neoteny displays evidence of infant playfulness in adults, fundamentalism reveals an inability or unwillingness to change.

In politics as in science, there are compulsions to explore the unexplored and play with principles in ways that will provide deeper insight, make life better or allow us to exercise compassion.

Patterns can be common to several disciplines.  Neoteny manifests in evolutionary biology, medicine, societal transformations and personal growth.  Fundamentalists are often threatened by ideas that slop over from one area into another.  Playing with ideas often results in change.  Idea play is not a fundamentalist hallmark.

Still, a person may be playful, but his beliefs may be staid.  A person may be creative but his ideas firm.  I would have to conclude that I can form no firm conclusion.

Paradoxically, that would suggest that a belief that fundamentalists are defective would be wrong.  That belief would make the believer a fundamentalist, because it is firm.  Only by not believing anything can we have play genuinely emerge.

Play has no enemies.

Radical shifts in environment produce a proliferation of new species. Darwin noted vast gaps in the fossil record. (Evangelicals jump on this observation as proof that theories of evolution are fatally flawed.) Gould & Eldredge provided a name and explanation for this phenomenon: punctuated equilibrium. Theorists now conclude evolution often unfolds in sprints and spurts. Another way to understand it is that evolution rolls in and out, in waves.

Survival-of-the-fittest theorists would have us believe that some of the randomly produced progeny created during cataclysmic times, progeny exhibiting random features that are appropriate for the new environment, would survive to procreation, creating progeny like themselves. This view is fading.

Individually, ontogenetically, we as individuals reproduce a cellular march of a half billion years, improvising unique and interesting endings with every lifetime.

Two strong tides inform how this history unfolds. In one direction, individual modifications are embraced and stored–ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny–as innovations are transformed into history, becoming part of the ontological unfolding of descendants.

In the other direction, we have neoteny. With humans as an example, biological currents draw features of fetuses into adulthood, characteristics of infants into grown-ups, the creativity of creation into minds that invent, create and are inspired.

The tide of neoteny pulls from the opposite direction from those forces seeking to store what has been phylogenetically invented by flourishing adults. Neoteny grabs new and installs it in the old. The other tide takes the old and draws it back into the new.

This is the inhalation and exhalation of life, performed in single lifetimes and half a billion years. Imagine the inhalations and exhalations of vocalists performing improvisational choral jazz. Breathing and singing modify depending on the behavior of the others in the room. Environment influences individual and individual influences environment. Imagine your genes engaged in this process from before conception on.

We are encouraged to grow in response to the song that surrounds us, with the music/environment telling us the options. In utero, information comes in, ontogeny modifies. Not random variation but deliberate proliferation. How did an embryonic stage learn to listen? Perhaps from ancestors when that embryonic stage was phylogenetically adult, though maybe more salamander-like than human.

Could we as embryos not only be reproducing ancestors, but also be reproducing our ancestors’ history of choices responding to an ancient environment? Are choices we made millions of generations ago choices we now make in the womb, providing an ability to respond to the present environment? Perhaps we don’t just carry the forms of our ancestors in our genes. It is possible we also carry their process.

Songs change with every singing, and they evolve with time. As individuals, we learn, we change. Some of that change is stored inside our genes. As species, we learn and store it ontogenetically so that descendants can adapt. Influenced by a distant moon, ancient environments inform present decisions as tides recede, while the other tide with origins in creation is paradoxically also that which is ever present and most new.

We’re seeing the fading of Social Darwinism and Sociobiology as the belief that might makes right disappears.  What society suggests is acceptable behavior and the origin myths of scientific theory are inextricably entwined.  As one goes, so does the other.  Peace is not supportive of Neo-Darwinist perspectives.  A sociobiologist is a blood brother to a war-enthralled neo-conservative.  We are watching both retire.

The Nature vs. Nurture battle looks like it’s also coming to an end, though it’s a little slow to manifest in culture.  This arbitrary dichotomy has made its contribution to our Reagan/9/11 return to Victorian times by suggesting that genetics and the environment don’t traffic with one another.  This is sociobiological dogma.  As “red in tooth and claw” withdraws and integrated insights into our origins emerge, specific changes in our society are inevitable.

Proponents of Nature say genetics are the primary determinant of behavior.  Supporters of Nurture emphasize the influence of the environment on how we unfold.  We associate the former with a politics of protecting those with something to protect.  The owners in an ownership society will always be in combat with the dark forces of those forced to behave the way their genetics tell them to.

Focusing on how a modified environment can result in profound change in behavior, Nurture enthusiasts are our political liberals.  Bend the budget in the direction of providing a better world for those without the resources to change it themselves, and a better world we’ll have.

Annoyingly, the division itself is a Sociobiological/Nature proponent point of view.

We now understand that the environment influences genetics, that genetics can be changed by the environment (implications that even a preMendel Darwin wrote about at length in his The Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication).  The whole argument that there is an argument is moot.  The disagreement disappearing has its societal implications.  If the right-wingers are wrong about it being OK to take resources from different colored people both near and far away, then lefties are incorrect that there are not deep differences between men and women, blacks and whites, indigenous peoples and moderns, between the autistic and nonautistic child.  Still, the differences are of a wholly different order than the differences we’ve been told to pay attention to, to date.

Environment is not more important than genetics.  Genetics are not more relevant than the environment.  Both conjectures are absurd.  Connections between Nature and Nurture are only beginning to be understood.  The inquiry may end with an understanding that there is no difference, literally, at all.  Hard to imagine.  But consider that before conception all the way past death, we are all interconnected, with environmental influences informing genetic triggers.  Consider that we are genetically predisposed to consider the environment when every single ontogenetic decision is made.  The concept of individuality would have to be re-interpreted.

Throw out individuality and you re-examine liberty and freedom.  Soon you have the philosophical foundation for noting how we’re all connected, not apart.

I have lived through miracles in my lifetime.  Perhaps the most transforming miracle was the USSR’s sudden transformation into Russia and other states.  My lifelong nightmares of nuclear war disappeared when the Berlin Wall crumbled.  I have a piece of that wall.  A friend harvested it from the rubble.

My personal ontogeny or ongoing unfolding has always felt connected to the state of international politics.  My son once woke from a dream with tanks chasing people.  He hadn’t known it, but tanks rolled into Lebanon while he slept.  My personal metaphors or stories have also been entwined with stories from the news.

I notice that I closely experience the dynamic of my own personal evolution as a reflection of the transformation that our culture is engaged in.  There is a mirroring going on.  Specifically, I note the influence of the abyss.  In my dreams, there would be the threat of atomic bombs.  My job in my dreams was to get my group to safety.  Dream after dream, I’d be marshalling people to safety.  The bombs would often go off.  Terror.  Death.

Over the course of decades, the dreams evolved.  Less terror.  The journeys to safety acquired more detail.  In the very last dream, my mother and I walked outside to watch the atomic bombs, like fireworks, light up the night sky.  I was not afraid.  I did not need to run.

In my own life, early on, I crawled or walked the cliff by the abyss.  The details are lost, but not the certainty that an alternative to life is ever present.  That certainty has informed how my life has unfolded.  At first, that alternative felt to be about death and the terror of death.  I was stalked by death into my 20s.  Nightmares.  Waking up screaming.  My relationship with that alternative has slowly changed.  The alternative to life became about what transcends life, the miracles that suggest its origins and what’s beyond.  My understanding continues to transform.  The alternative to life, paradoxically, becomes life itself.

So changes my life, so changes the world.  I sense our species/world having crawled the abyss as I have done, exploring where the limits are, looking at death.  I sense our decision process, our collective-conscious deliberation as we’ve taken fingers off the buttons and now face the need to embrace each other to keep our planet healthy.  We now form an interconnecting web, making the decision to become stewards of one another and the planet.  The experience of facing nuclear conflagration and stepping back was how this global civilization home-stretch journey to choose life began.

Not an Obama supporter, I still experienced it as a miracle when Iowans voted him number 1.  Many miracles are coming.  There is no avoiding them.  We’ve made the decision to revere life.  And as the world goes, so do we who are its children.

You’d think we’d notice horizontal, egalitarian communication emerging spontaneously in the West.  Such progress takes visible effort.  Education, legislation and political conflict are necessary to flatten stratified habits.  Still, there is evidence to suggest that powerful hidden forces are at work.

Something as subtle as changing perspective can have powerful effects.  What does it take for such a shift to happen?

I was raised a capitalist.  My immediate family was middle class (old house, camping vacations, furniture from relatives), but my grandparents were wealthy.  Though I was fascinated by science and attracted to art, the family matriarch made sure I kept my eyes on the bra.  Myrla wanted to make certain I took over the factory that my father ran, the one that she and her husband owned.  It was a girdle and bra factory.  As far back as I can remember, there was no question about what I would do when I grew up.  I would run the factory and grow the family business.  I remember wanting to make the family business multinational.

My budding capitalist tendencies faded during my mother’s second extended hospital visit for manic depression.  I was in high school.  Several years of protests against the war began to reach my ears.  I was in distress.  The culture was in distress.  Embracing counterculture, I began protesting and shifted to educating myself to be an artist.  What caused this shift was not subtle.  The world had stopped making sense.  I needed to see the world in a different way.

Over 200 years ago the Great Chain of Being placed white western males at the top of a pyramid of relationships that began with dirt.  It was believed that God had ordained the structure.  More complicated animals were established higher than the simpler animals below.  “Civilized” white males towered higher than the African or Australian aboriginals below.  Biological/social stratification was God’s plan.

As 19th Century decades progressed, that tower or chain teetered, then toppled.  First, evolution as a concept was considered.  Next, evolution as a concept by many was assumed.  Finally, evolution with explanatory principles was articulated.  All of it happened in a single lifetime.  The Great Chain of Being was turned on its side and introduced to time.  Instead of dirt at the bottom, dirt was on the left side.  Man was not at the top but at the right side.  A narrative had been added to the tower, transforming the vertical Chain of Being into a horizontal network of branching relationships.  Turning one’s head sideways, add time, profound systemic transformation.

Shifts occur both violently and subtly and sometimes both visibly and invisibly at once.  Horizontal, egalitarian communication and resource-sharing was often characteristic of disappearing aboriginal cultures.  Yet, these are also features of the current western transformation exhibited by the rising influence of the EU, flattening global commerce, social networking and the web.  As individuals, communities and cultures we are changing.

The Great Chain of Being still has influence.  Republicans still put white, male westerners at the top.  But, the tower has toppled.  The chain is broken.  Now we are connected by a web.

When I was tiny, kindergarten and before, I was fascinated by dinosaurs.  My infatuation lasted many years, at least until I was 12.  I would look at my little “guys” and wonder at how one species evolved into the next, estimating which ones were the closest relatives.  My love of these replicas of ancient reptiles led me to an adoration of science in general.  The “how” of things had captured by imagination.  My bedroom was filled with science toys:  a mechanical solar system with a crank, invisible man and women, chemistry set, geology display, water rockets, crystal radio….

When I was in sixth grade, my mother was diagnosed with manic depression and was institutionalized.  This first time was for two years.  “How” things worked suddenly became not relevant.  I wanted to know “why” things were the way they were.  The scientist stepped back and the artist stepped forward.  In junior high, I began exploring religion, spirituality and psychic phenomena, which bridged over to high school explorations of Sartre, Camus, Jung, Freud and, of course, Darwin.

Tiny, I wanted to know the mechanics of the world.  Older, I wanted to know why people broke and how to make them whole again.  I wanted to feel whole again.

Entering college, it was difficult for me to accept the stories told to me of how the world worked.  The world did not work.  It was broken.  I wanted to know how it really worked.  Subscribing to the hippie ethic, I attended Left political events.  I was desperate to find out how the world really worked.  I wanted to not feel frightened anymore.

I was blessed to be broken in a way that suggested where the wholeness was hidden.  I so wanted to not be frightened anymore that I would risk more terror to have it end.  End it did.  Finally, I risked love.

I was almost forty years old.  For almost a year I’d been in love.  I’d never been in love before.  I did not know I could be in love.  At 39, I became astonished at my newly discovered ability to understand what popular music lyrics were communicating.  Having never been in love, I had always found their meaning to be opaque.

Still, the relationship was over.  I was filled with grief.  I was filled with remorse.  I was filled with loss.  Most of all, I was filled with a deep certainty that I’d been through it before.  I knew, deep down before memory, that I’d lived in union, lost the union, and survived.  Week after week, this deep deja vu body memory persisted.

I remembered, before memory began, that I was loved.  Then the dreams began.  They lasted almost a year.

“How” and “Why” combined.  Science, art and spirituality began to play.  Dinosaurs danced with existentialists and saints.  Of course, everything is connected.  Societal transformation, biological evolution, individual ontogeny.  They are all the same thing.  They begin with love.

I don’t believe that our origin myths or beliefs about how evolution unfolds causes our societal structures.  It is not how we structure our culture that decides the stories we create.  Story and reality are inextricably all mixed up.  One doesn’t cause the other.  They are both the same.

Scientific theory, societal scripts that suggest the most important thing a government does is wage war and nurture an environment safe for corporations and what we tell ourselves inside our heads, are all emerging from the same mind.  That mind is changing.  The story is changing.

The stream of consciousness can’t easily be grasped.  Go ahead, dip a bucket in it and take a drink.  Oops, already the current you just visited has drifted on downstream.  It’s hard to understand the story you might be telling yourself while telling yourself a story about the story you might find.

Still, a landscape filled with water, land and sky inextricably related are still divisible or describable by words, at least, we can tell ourselves a story that this is so.  Regardless, 1) a story that says evolution unfolds according to the results of aggressive animals eating less aggressive competitors, 2) theories of human beings evolving because of aggressive male behavior, 3) corporations thriving because government allows them no restrictions, or 4) an individual’s experience of feeling dominated by feelings of frustration or dismay …. are all intricately connected.

They’re all the same story.

The origin myth of Western culture begins with the big bang and unfolds in varying narratives, depending on how the works of Darwin are interpreted. The story we know best is “survival of the fittest.”

How we experience our place in the world as social animals has an enormous amount to do with the origin myths we tell each other and ourselves. Sociobiology or evolutionary psychology–orthodox Darwinism extolling random variation as the central dogma of evolution–interprets species origins and evolution according to a strict or fundamentalist interpretation of only one part of Darwin’s life work. This story of life is the one told in our textbooks, on TV and in popular culture. It is often a story characterized by an experience of fear, life according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

It is no mistake that as conservative forces in American politics expanded their influence, controlling government, media and economics, their story line conformed to the prevailing origin myth that it is the strongest that survive. It’s called social Darwinism. It is the elite world view that it is the rich people’s skill at accumulating or retaining wealth that should be encouraged because it is that specific skill that is responsible for social evolution, progress. It is suggested that morality, ethics or humanism are not relevant to this discussion. Nature operates according to dog eat dog laws. What’s good enough for nature is good enough for us. Frustrating these principles only serves to inhibit a seamless movement onward.

It is not coincidental that the fear that is pitched with almost every narrative in the corporate media conforms to this world view–that it is the fittest that survive. Be afraid. While afraid, you will understand that what life is about is your position in this hierarchy of haves and have-nots. While afraid, you should focus on the glorious gifts of this world view: independence, liberty, individuality, honor, pride, patriotism.

Darwin’s other theories of evolution are starting to re-emerge. He had three. Survival of the fittest, his theory of natural selection doesn’t seems to be fitting so well in a world where a new story, awareness of global interconnections, both feels better and matches our experience better. At the same time, we are beginning to understand how the environment affects how we grow inside the womb, influencing the personality and physical characteristics of the emerging individual. The random in random variation is becoming deliberate.

The environment prepares us for the world we are born into by influencing us in the womb. Far from independent, we are interdependent, with deep connections forming even before conception. More than one central dogma has begun to topple. There are scientists that now believe that changes in the environment influence an individual’s genetics within a single generation–nonrandom, directed variation.

In other words, how can it be about survival of the fittest when the environment encourages and adjusts the features of individuals while preparing them for community? The core belief of Darwinism, that variation is random, is being superseded by another story. Survival of the fittest is being replaced by Resiliency in Community.

The new story still has us beginning with the Big Bang. But instead of just surviving, we are now being guided into adulthood.

Religion and spirituality are not about words, stories, myths, beliefs or spiritual experience.  Religion and spirituality are about behavior.  And it’s about music.

That being our definition, the world spiritual renaissance has begun.  Still, it’s important we not notice.

You’d have to turn off the TV to get a hint of this reality.  Statistics supporting our more respectful treatment of each other are rarely shared; and there’s little effort to mention the decline in rape, murder and other violent crime.  There are more than twice as many people in this country than there were when I was little.  Yet there’s less death by violence.

Yoga and martial arts are everywhere.  Oprah is revered by gazillions.  Politically active, I’ve never seen a fist fight or even a pushing match between opponents.

A shared experience that we are part of something larger than ourselves–the environmental movement–is tidal-waving itself into contemporary consciousness.

Believing religion or spirituality is about something other than behavior, we think that religion and spirituality is a small part of our lives, of our culture.  Not the case.

Believing what we see on TV, we think that the way we treat each other is characterized by fear and drama.  Statistics say otherwise.  Experience says otherwise.

Religion and spirituality are about behavior.  Our behavior grows more considerate and compassionate with every passing day.  Why is this not obvious to us?

Because we have the wisdom to know that we should not pay attention.  Self conscious, we’d forget to listen to the music and lose where we are in the dance

Sit in a room with Left/Progressive activists and note that left handed people are often about 20-25% of the people present.  Lefthanders in the U.S. comprise about 12% of the population.  What’s with all the lefties on the Left?

Note that when defining conservative and liberal, those most conservative are most comfortable going furthest back in time.  Get rid of the New Deal, and you’re pretty damn conservative.  Get rid of women’s suffrage, and you’ve crossed some line.  (The media won’t print your editorials).  Bring back slavery, and you’re nuts.

Demand universal health care, and you’re progressive.  Demand unions and environmental rights for third-world workers, and you’re pretty radical.  Cry out to end world hunger and initiate universal health care for all humans everywhere, and you’re crazy.

As you become more conservative, you move further back in time.  As your progressive tendencies increase, you stretch more and more into the future.  The center of this teeter-totter, where we sit now, is the present.

In our culture, time proceeds from left to right.  We read from left to right.  We turn pages from left to right.  In our diagrams of time and evolution, progress proceeds from left to right.  So what’s with all the lefties sitting in the narrative past and the right-wingers lodged so firmly in the future?  This placement does not seem intuitive.

It has been hypothesized that our genetic ancestors, who lived in a matriarchic social structure before pre Indo-Europeans, were largely lefties.  Anomalously dominant in neuropsychological jargon, these precursors to even ancient culture were random handed (half the time lefties, half the time righties), progressive radicals that believed in the commons or shared resources as the center of society, free love (kids did not know who their father was), with dance, music and a shared spirituality as the central bond of culture.  With two brain hemispheres near identical in size, right-handedness was not compelled by a larger left lobe creating a right-handed person, as is the case today.  How those pre-ancient lefties gave way to the right-handed, hierarchical, highly stratified, male-dominated, female-repressing societies that fill our history books is another story.

Relevant to this brief entry is the astonishingly recent (last 200 years) change in social and political current.  A perhaps 40,000-year-old tide has reversed direction.  Post enlightenment, there has been an at-first slow and now tsunami-fast change in how sexual partners are chosen.  You could call this the return of the lefties.

Conservatives demand male dominance characterized by no abortion, no contraceptives, one marriage, less pay for females, a belief that females should stay at home and a perception that the female’s job is to make men’s lives more tolerable, etc.  Basically, male-dominated culture controls female procreation.  The ideal male is macho.  The ideal female cooperates with the man.

But Progressives suggest neither sex should be legislatively controlled, and females, of course, get to pick their own husband, and he may be whatever kind of husband they want.  Macho is out.  As things stand now in the U.S., long-standing criteria for the perfect husband have disappeared.  This is a very recent development with profound implications, the most powerful of which is that macho male mates are no longer universally the cat’s pajamas.  Hence, force-filled females and sensitive males are highly valued. These are two very common participants in meetings of the political Left.  Meetings, not coincidentally, with a high percentage of left handed people.  You see, that old genotype never completely went away.

Linear time, as a concept, was created by ancients in early civilizations who were right-handed and who had a large left brain lobe.  Left-handed nature worshippers were the past.  They were disappearing.  Right-handed patriarchs had become the present and the foreseeable future.  So, time moved from left to right, matriarchal to patriarchal.

It also helped that right-handed writers would smear their writing medium if they wrote left to right, which maybe explains the convergence of “right” (as in correct), “right” (as in right-handed) and “write” all sounding the same.

The pre-ancient lefty past has also become the radical Progressive’s future (deep respect for the commons, shared resources, horizontal (think the web) nonhierarchical organization, women pick their own partners).

Marriage is evolving into serial monogamy.  Dance, music and the new spirituality–the environmental movement–are roaring into world culture.  The planet is our commons, and we’re starting to get it.  And, this time, it’s the righties that are getting left behind.

Drama drives action.  Too much drama can destroy motivation; some drama stokes it.  Without motivation, you have no action.  Drama motivates an activist.

I’m observing the ebb and flow of what it takes for things to get cruising to action speed on the Left.  (I’m defining the “Left” as that which unfolds mostly beyond the boundaries of where the Democrats roam.)  It often takes an opponent that you can grapple with to get things moving.

It’s often not enough that you have opponents in the news, opponents in the papers, opponents all across the mainstream media and on the web.  It’s useful if you have an opponent that can hear your distress, dismay and disgust, and talk back. Dis someone that can dis you back and …. bingo, motivation follows. I’ve observed talented activists lose their urge to act when there was no local peace opponent to butt up against.

On a regional scale, I’ve observed the far Left and the mid Left blast each other while at the same time motivate each other to accomplish their differing goals.  Clearly, some folks seek to prove themselves right, or maybe prove the other person or side wrong or simply seek to have their world view supported.  With an identifiable opponent, the available energy to mount a campaign to win increases exponentially.  With reasonable curbs, this energy can go on to accomplish tons.  Not infrequently, activists are frustrated and disappointed swimming in the wake of the commotion emotion.  Still, stuff gets done.

On a national scale, I’ve noted the identical dynamic unfold.  More energy seems available for conflict for some activists when the enemy is someone with whom you at least occasionally share the stage.  At this larger scale, often with many regional alliances at stake, the drama becomes so consuming that communication looks and sounds more like a divorce than a forced marriage.  Some players see less advantage to unity, or cooperation on joint projects, than the disadvantages of ongoing attempts at cooperation characterized by rancor.  Concluding that it’s not worth it, they don’t engage.

Then it’s the “kids,” the regional alliances, the local organizations and local activists that experience reduced motivation.  Without unity, it’s more difficult to feel part of something larger than the self.

Conflict can breed motivation, progress and success.  Conflict can also compromise those fiery Leftist marriages, forcing the children to leave home and go march in the streets by themselves.

Moveon specializes in software that enhances the ability of a small group of people to match issue with action within a short-term current event news cycle in order to compel a powerful response from membership in a way that both draws in new members and raises funds.  Moveon specializes in creating an experience of empowerment among a population not frequently involved in political action.  They do so by designing actions to bring in media (while guiding activists on how to do so) and by seeking actions that bring in enough participants that participants feel empowered by the experience.  In addition, when seeking funds through an email campaign, Moveon is very specific about where funds are being targeted while often tying fundraising to a specific current event or compelling issue.

Social networking software also offers an empowering experience of a totally different nature.  Users of social networking software are able both to accumulate and store digital resources (interest markers) in a customized digital space that they themselves can decorate while establishing a wider and wider circle of friends and acquaintances to share those resources with.  Users of social networking software create a space that reflects their unique tastes and circle of friends.  This circle of friends does not have the usual limits.  Geography, accessibility and status markers are barriers no longer.  Users can gather friends both based on common interests and on shared friends or friends of friends.  People they would never have had contact with they can discover and get to know through intermediary friends and acquaintances separated by multiple degrees of separation.  The software allows users to note and examine these indirect contact pathways or degrees of separation.

PJEP, with its unique SNAPAP programming, merges two different forms for empowerment, political (Moveon) and personal (social networking).  Users are introduced to political action that encourages positive experience (matching action, issue and current event with media coverage and robust activist turnout) along with a viral decimation of the action details through multiple degrees of separation software characterized by social networking applications.  Still, users are introduced to another level of social networking characterized by an enhanced experience of empowerment.

Each individual action or campaign has its own online lineage chart that notes the exact influence each activist has upon his or her community at large.  Revealed are both the direct and indirect effects of each activist on other activists involved with the specific issue/action.  Whereas in social networking the software only tracks your degrees of separation or lineage based on initial contact with the next person down the line, SNAPAP tracks the exact nature of your relationships for every online action or campaign, providing detailed information revealing the number of people involved in an action (including those you influenced), the degrees of separation or depth a campaign has inspired (including how many degrees extend from your participation), the speed an action courses through a community of activists and the geographic distance an action travels from its origin.

Activists are able to perceive and examine their exact position in their community in relation to the activities that they are engaged in.  The detail of information about an action or campaign is far greater than that previously available to even the heads of organizations.  Political and personal empowerment merge as individuals are offered panoramic action overviews, an ability to experience their exact indirect effects on the surrounding activist community, an unprecedented access to tools and an astonishing ability to view online the exact connection an activist has with that which is larger than himself or herself.

Feeling personally empowered is about feeling confident that we can make a difference while feeling secure that we are important in our community.  Merging political empowerment and personal empowerment paradigms, SNAPAP offers an opportunity to see and feel how exactly we belong.

SNAPAP was initiated on 11/10/08 with nspipeace.org. It is testing now to be introduced nationally within the week.

Both sides of the debate have been accused of behaving in ways that disrupt the unity that exists against the war.  Both sides have said, if I understand them correctly, that there is no unity to have been broken.

As I understand them, one group of advocates, the mid Left, see their actions as making it possible to bring in new groups and individuals, although many members of the first group are uncomfortable participating with what they perceive as the “far Left”.

A primary feature of the “far Left” is a focus on U.S. behavior internationally.  Viewed from an international perspective, many of the far Left have concluded that the differences in behavior between Democrats and Republicans are relatively small.

Many of the groups and individuals that this one group of advocates, the mid Left, is seeking to bring into this war debate do not focus on U.S. behavior internationally.  The following is a generalization, not applying in many cases, but African-American, union and other groups not associating with the far Left do not share the far Left view that Democrats and Republicans are little different.

Their focus is local, not international.

There is a major split in the Left that can be framed as those that view the Democrats as allies or potential allies, because there is a not small difference between Republicans and Democrats on domestic issues, and those with an international perspective.  Granted, Democrats have failed expectations on the domestic front incalculable times, but there are major differences between the two parties when viewing local, not international, accomplishments.

We’re going to get universal health care.  Republicans will vote against it.

I don’t believe with some advocates for the mid Left or the far Left that the other left is behaving in ways that create a schism.  As both sides have noted, that difference already existed.  Minorities, unions and many others are not showing up to the mass protests organized by the far Left.  The far Left does not embrace with enthusiasm events where Democrats appear on stage.

I’m seeing a lot of upset people calculating degrees of blame for the distress that they are experiencing.  It boils down to this.  Viewed internationally, Democrats suck.  Viewed locally, Democrats may suck, but for folks that don’t have shit, they have come in handy.  If we’re only able to ally ourselves with one of these two perspectives, we have a schism.

There is a term in hypnosis that describes the process whereby profound systemic change occurs in a patient with a debilitating condition while the transformation is masked to the patient’s self awareness.  Their attention has been diverted to an unrelated event.  Therapy often ends when the patient loses the desire to see the therapist, the presenting problem having disappeared.  Change without awareness.

Observing society around me, I am struck by how much is changing.  Debilitating conditions begin to lift, but how little we seem to be aware of the transformation.  Our attention is focused on what media chooses to present in news and entertainment.  We are told to fear.  What we are told to fear changes from year to year.  We are guided to experience intimidation by circumstances outside our control.

There are layers in this world we live in.  There is a belief on the Left that those with money control the information that those of us without money receive.  In this way, the wealthy compel us to behave in ways that keep the wealthy rich.  That may be true, but additional forces are at work.  Like a Russian doll, forces within forces are in play.  As we are distracted by the message of the mainstream message makers, fundamental transformation continues unobserved, in this case unknown even to the makers of the message.

Unconscious does not mean not conscious.  There is that which is conscious outside of awareness.  Just as there is that part of me that I am not usually consciously aware of that guides my life, there is a societal presence, a characteristic of society that guides its progress that society is not aware of.

The hypnotherapist, when engaging in change, forms an alliance with the patient’s unconscious, the other conscious–the conscious that is outside the patient’s awareness.  Fundamental to the transformation is the relationship established between the therapist and the patient’s other conscious mind.

In a similar way, in societal connections, healing alliances have been and are being made.  When I was born, there was no such thing as an environmental movement.  In thirty years, there will be no such thing as a national leader who is not also an environmental advocate.

When we awaken from this trance of transformation, there will be no more war.

The strength of the Left is partly about the numbers it achieves, partly about the insight/compassion derived from an understanding of human/planet needs and the direction we can go.  The deep strength is about interconnections between people, a vast webbing of horizontal relationships that provides an environment of trust, connection with the near and far away and an understanding that it’s about the connection, not the content coursing through the connection.

This principle is an evolutionary principle.  Ecosystems rich in interconnections among species display strength and beauty.

There is a deep, underlying connection between processes that guide the unfolding of biological evolution and social/cultural evolution. Stephen J. Gould has described in detail how neoteny, or the unfolding of infant features or characteristics into the adult of a species over the scale of evolutionary time, influences the evolution of a species. The same dynamic is now engaged as technology encourages the empowering of individuals by providing them access to information and access to other humans. The process is transcending barriers of knowledge, distance and national boundaries.

In evolutionary biology, humans displayed increased neotenous characteristics as maturation rates delayed the emergence of features later and later in an individual’s ontogeny. Similarly, new technology provides increased transparency, breaking down the barriers between human beings. The increase in transparency evidences itself in several ways.

There is less information hidden from participants at lower levels of hierarchy. The effect can flatten hierarchy because information control informs the decision-making process. When information is widely dispersed, the decision-making processes can be widely shared. New tech voting options can streamline consensus when information is widely held.

Transparency emerges when national boundaries and geographic barriers fall. Instantaneous global communication is creating a transparency surge.

Just as infant features unfold into the adult over time, the features of the individual unfold into the features of multilevel social systems. As hierarchical and geographical barriers fall, organizations function in ways analogous to a single human being displaying unencumbered abilities to gather, analyze and communicate information.

This process has been underway since before the advent of the corporation. Ever since corporations were redefined as “individuals” after the Civil War, there has been a movement toward increased transparency as power has moved from controlling individuals and families to controlling investors. A movement within corporations to enhance transparency has been gaining momentum as the benefits become more obvious.

There has been increased transparency in government long term, and the media, of course, seek to keep walls down. Though there have been obvious exceptions in the way media and government have behaved post 9/11, a stark contrast has emerged between the secrecy extolled by the Bush Administration and the direction new technology is taking society as web vehicles continue to reveal what the older paradigm seeks to hide.

Both in the biological and social spheres, there is a systemic drive to carry the lowest to the highest, the creative source to the completed adult, the grassroots to the controlling power. We can see the future of society in ourselves, for the individual is the model for an integrated world just as the power, beauty and creativity of conception is the enlightenment achieved by the actualized, neotenous adult.

I ran a sales firm for 19 years. I went from art school to working for my dad in a girdle and bra factory for a year and three months. Then I tried to establish a commercial art business, ending up as a salesman. I observed that there were two polarities of salesman.

There were those salesmen that concentrated on converting whomever they were with to an opinion that would result in the purchase of that salesman’s product. These were the hard sales guys; though their pitch might be gentle or respectful, they still wanted to convert a potential customer into a customer. This technique involved many, often unproductive, conversations.

The second kind of salesman sought first to establish whether the potential customer was interested in what the salesman had to say; and then, he evaluated whether what he had to sell would result in a potential long-term relationship with multiple purchases. This second kind of salesman wanted to form this conclusion quickly and not waste time, because if the answer was no, then the salesman would continue to search for a potential long-term customer. This technique demanded that unproductive conversations were to be avoided.

When there is a limited territory with a clearly defined customer base, the first kind of salesman tends to do well. When a salesman has a far larger territory and a relatively unlimited customer base, the second kind of salesman can thrive.

New technologies are redefining geography. The Left does not have to behave like salesman number 1, which is how the Left has been behaving up to now. We have been engaged in trying to convince each other that all or many of us should retain a particular opinion and that this persuasion is the most important thing we can do.

With barriers coming down, we can find customers or allies in places where it was not easy to find them in the past. We can spend our time forming bonds with activists of like mind and heart and planning and executing actions that will result in positive social/political change.

When barriers come down, there is access to new resources. Spending our time matching actions with resources across the state and across state lines is a productive use of time. We can spend our time finding allies and resources instead of spending our time seeking to convince those closest geographically that they should share our opinion.

Less conversations, more action.

My father was a salesman with his own firm.  His father was a salesman with his own firm.  So was my Mom’s dad.  That’s what guys did in my family.

The Beatles, the 60s zeitgeist and the Vietnam anti-war movement planted an alternative value system into my psycho-bio operating system.  From 1969 on, I struggled to function both with a businessman’s and a radical’s points of view.  The synthesis could be called something like Business With Integrity.

I started by selling my illustrations as greeting cards.  Other small greeting card firms asked me to sell their lines.  After a year, I was selling perhaps 8-10 lines.  My sister joined me.  After a couple years, my sister and I were joined by three more young people.  I wasn’t selling my own paintings as greeting cards anymore but serving chains like Sears, Montgomery Wards, OSCO and Walgreens, selling the products of other illustrators.

Standing in my booth during trade shows, I’d have ample time to watch thousands of buyers wander by several hundred vendors of American gift stuff.  In the 80s and 90s, I spent untold boring hours in these giant temples of consumer glee.  I’d imagine I was watching the unfolding of Darwin’s principle of natural selection.  Back then I was unfamiliar with sexual selection or Lamarckian principles, but I’d read The Origin of Species in high school, so I thought I understood evolution.  I thought evolution and natural selection were the same thing.  Still, I imagined I could watch the emergence and disappearance of new individuals and species of American gift crud here in the primordial ooze of the American Dream–the trade show.

For nineteen years I ran the sales firm.  Now I run a web development company.

I operate as if each client can see all my actions.  This method has as much to do with neurotically feeling like if I do anything untoward, that person will find out as it has to do with seeking to act with integrity.  Still, neurosis or no, I practiced and practice business with a clean and somewhat unconventional style.

One of the practices of Business With Integrity applies to my work on the Left.  Don’t sell to someone who doesn’t need your product.  Don’t sell to someone who doesn’t want your product.

Encourage someone to share your point of view when you see that the person can profit from what you have.  Don’t take the time to sell points of view to folks with a point of view that they want to keep.

I work with coalitions and movement groups across the country and all through Illinois.  I’m in meetings and conference calls several times a week.  Hours of listening, minutes of talking.  Occasionally, an individual with a different point of view from my own stations himself or herself between me and my particular goal.  Selling that person my point of view is not a prudent use of time.  I listen and move on.

Persistence is the most powerful piece of Business With Integrity.  It does not mean persistently going after the same person over and over, be it in business or organizing activists.  It means persistently going from door to door, store to store, person to person, looking for those folks that can profit from my point of view.  How do I treat the folks that don’t need or want what I have to say or sell?  I move on.

Several aspects of my life inform my work as activist.  Almost thirty years of running small businesses have had a powerful effect upon how I organize.  I’ve tried nine related and unrelated professions.  Two thrived.

Living and working through rejection and trusting your impulses regardless of the number of times you feel rebuffed carries over from starting and running your own business to gathering and organizing people around an action or event.  I don’t take it personally when calls don’t get returned or an email goes without response.  I keep focused on the goal.

But there is a balance.  In business, I constantly adjust my product and my presentation to the people that I’m selling to.  I let myself be directed to success by my audience.  Someone who is organizing often must listen until someone comes up with an idea that feels right, and then the organizer supports it.  Selling is often listening, listening to what potential clients want and consulting with them on whether what I offer fits their needs.

My position as an organizer is to know where the resources are located, to be in contact with people with goals and to match up the resources with the people.

As a businessman, I seek to convince those that can profit from my access to resources that I am the right person for the job; then, I must follow through.

The most important frame that carries from business to activism is to tell the truth.  I pay close attention to doing what I say I’ll do.  To communicate that I can be relied upon, I don’t make estimations of what I can do that are not true.  I am reliable.

There is no small amount of anti-business bias on the Left.  A part of me shares that bias, but it is an unreasonable part.  I carry guilt that I find it relatively easy to make money.  That guilt drives me harder to behave with integrity.  So I find myself an anomaly among the organizers I work with.  I’m an entrepreneurial anarchist.

Love them.  Hate them.  The bane of my existence and a way to get things done.  Listserves can both create consensus and seed a sense of powerlessness.

Sometimes I dread sitting down at my computer and facing a string of a conversation where no one is showing evidence of listening but just putting themselves on record with an opinion.  You can tell a good listener in a room full of people.  Those folks seem to draw out thoughtful responses, modulate the bombast, get the quiet folks to talk.  Listeners in a listserve often disappear.  In a listserve there is no voice tone, timbre, intonation patterns or quiet words to quell those who are thumping chests.

Yet, strangers can gather on a listserve and in a matter of days start to coalesce into a group.  Personalities emerge.  Leaders begin to show themselves.  The articulate have a chance to practice their craft.

Some folks, in a real room, won’t let the scathing, inner voice be overheard, but on a listserve, they have little hesitation to unchain the beast.  Digital mayhem.  Words with no smile you can see, no lowering of voice, no deferential nod, no shrug at the end.

I know an activist that in person is charming, sweet, yet confusing.  She often shrugs.  The shrugs come fairly frequently, and I can’t tell what they are punctuating or what the shrugs might be referring to specifically in the room.  This person is unusually quiet during meetings.

In a listserve she is a predator that takes no prisoners.  The same person in a different medium becomes a different person.  The medium is the person.

I’ve concluded that the shrugs that I can see when we’re together are responding to a predator’s internal dialogue.  The shrugs signal to herself, and we observers see some sort of tip-of-the iceberg evidence of the turmoil underneath.

In a listserve, one can neither see nor intuit when the shrugs are signaling her or his dissatisfaction.  There are no analog signals to inform the words she or he says to moderate or balance the communications.  So, they stop shrugging.  Instead of the tip, we get the iceberg whole.  We get the cold words of a person on the prowl.

Listserves can both create consensus and seed a sense of powerlessness.  They can also empower people who have difficulty speaking in the analog, in the world.

In a meeting of activists discussing strategy, policy or simply process, there emerges an issue that transcends politics, usually even before the meeting begins.

Hormones.

Get mostly guys in a room to discuss the details of an action, and you get chest thumping.  The less the guys have worked together, the more thumping goes on.

Get mostly gals in a room to discuss the details of an action, and you get long, meandering explorations of common ground.  It seems to be the case whether the women know each other well or not.

Of course, there are more exceptions to this generalization than there are cases that fit the rule.  Often, the presence of some non-chest thumping males or some focused, target-thinking females will change the nature of the whole group in a useful way.  Still, over time, this is what I’ve observed.

I’ve found a good mix is 2/3 females and 1/3 males if you’re looking for a group to both bond and get something done.  If the group doesn’t bond, there is no foundation for future actions.  If nothing is accomplished, many folks will not come back.

Conflicts among activists predictably congregate around several themes:  endorsements, speakers, Democrats and structure.  I spend most of the time that I’m organizing with regional or state networks or coalitions.  Whether the coalition has 12 local organizations or over 100 state organizations, these same four issues keep emerging.  I’m personally deeply fascinated by the nature of structure yet find myself dismayed by the frequent friction that accompanies the working out of the details.

There is more than one polarity at play, but lately I keep seeing the struggle for balance between top-down vs. bottom-up, sort of a vertical teeter-totter.  Authority vs. anarchy is another way I hear the conflict described.  Seeing things from an evolutionary perspective, I must admit I have a soft spot for anarchy.  Biology is messy.  Messy makes for such a resource-filled, creative start.

Yet, I see what a creatively led, top-down organization such as Moveon has accomplished, and it’s obvious to me that no easy conclusion can be drawn.  Balance seems necessary.  Many people whose opinions I respect reflexively lean toward the more hierarchical perspective because often you can accomplish more with fewer resources if there are fewer people giving directions to a cooperating group of folks.  If resources are scarce, anarchy is less reasonable.  Nature can go berserk with fecundity when there are vast, untapped resources or after massive death.  Creativity seems more connected to scarcity.  Species become narrowly channeled into unexpected blossoming when forced into behaviors that are unfamiliar.

So you need some sort of balance.  Things need to be loose enough to allow ideas and new energies to rise up from less obvious sources of inspiration.  Yet, for there to be direction to accomplish specific goals, it is useful to grant authority to a position characterized by experience and/or perspective.

Watching the dance of emotions that seem to accompany the discussions of these matters, I conclude that these issues of authority vs. anarchy and the control of resources that the polarity seeks to address tap into personal issues, scripts and varying personal experiences that have informed our conclusions.  I am stunned by the passion that a discussion of structure will stir among people who are allies in almost all other things.

I was fifteen during the Democratic National Convention in 1968 that unfolded a few miles from where I lived.  Still a few months away from becoming politically aware, my hair was growing longer, which was polarizing me from my father.  My mother was back in the mental hospital.  When Lee, the new kid in the neighborhood, asked me if I wanted to attend an anti-war protest planning meeting, I said yes.  At the age of 16, I joined the ranks of the politically disaffected.

Mostly I sold buttons at political events.  I felt competent to sell things because I’d won the pup tent in Boy Scouts a couple years before.  John Yowell and I sold the most fruitcake, so we both got a tent.  My male relatives were all merchants or manufacturers.  In my world, selling stuff was what guys did.  From 1969–1971, that was my contribution to the anti-war protest.  I sold buttons.

At the Evanston Farmer’s Market in July of 2004 I saw Dale handing out flyers and selling tickets.  For a year and a half, I’d been attending meetings of Evanston Neighbors for Peace.  Dale was usually there, one of its articulate founders.  Neighbors for Peace began on 9/14/01.  I started coming to meetings in late 2002.  I literally never talked.  Speaking to groups, even small groups, felt terrifying.  I watched and listened.

Chatting with Dale at the market, I expressed my interest in traveling to New York for the convention.  Dale sold me a ticket on the protest bus.

I had been political since ‘69 and I’d been going to Neighbors for Peace meetings for 18 months, but I still had never attended a demonstration.  I felt frightened and enraged when I was unable to maneuver in a crowd.  Concerts seemed overwhelming to me.  Bunched up in line, shuffling toward the seats.  I stayed away from events with lots of people.  I stayed away from events with just some people.

One day in 2004, around supper time, my wife dropped me off in front of the Art Institute, where a couple hundred people were gathering as they waited for the four buses that would take us to New York.  My family and friends all wished me well, but on this particular weekend I could not find someone to accompany me.  I felt compelled to participate.  The demonstration at the Republican National Convention was expected to be huge, possibly seminal in swaying opinion, and I longed to effect positive change.  In 2004, watching cultural progress deteriorate around me, I wanted to be part of something that could create profound, positive change.

Standing around waiting for the bus, looking at the people who would be accompanying me on the journey, I felt particularly out of place.  I was at least twice the age of most people there.  I was not a person that liked the mob.  Yet here was a mass of young people, all bunched up, many holding up signs, waiting to pile on the buses going overnight from Chicago to New York.  We would arrive just in time to march.  I focused on getting a seat near the front of the bus.  On a recent bus ride in Jamaica I was made sick by the swaying motion of the vehicle from where I was sitting in the rear.  So I stood by the curb, watching the crowd, hoping for a seat near the front that wouldn’t have me sick for the next 14 hours.

Scanning the crowd, I noticed that everyone looked so 60s.  The piercings and tattoos were, of course, new, but the ambiance was just the same.  Hair styles and clothing worn to communicate that a thinking/feeling individual occupied this space.  There were two particularly wild-eyed males that looked ready to jump out of their skins; one carried an American flag.  Many people were holding their placards as if they were practicing for the event tomorrow.  An extremely slim, sweet-faced girl with an almost predatory intensity to her gaze held a sign quoting an English author that I could barely construct some meaning out of.  One woman, in her 30s, held a huge sign declaring Kerry would help autistic children.  There were lots of buttons being worn.  One man, almost my age, had long, dark hair, a wrestler’s build and a stern, handsome Italian face.  Whereas I was watching the crowd, he seemed to be watching over the crowd, comfortable in the commotion.

Then, like shepherds, there were some folks my age barking orders to the crowd, telling them where to stand.  These were the organizers of the event.  One of them was the man with the wrestler’s build.  They announced that the buses were about to come around the corner.  Indeed, they did.  The magic of cell phones.  I was almost the first in line to the second of four buses.  I got a seat at the front just behind the bus driver’s back-up.  No one sat down next to me.  I stretched out.  The bus took off.

One would think that the experience of being embedded into a large group of college-aged young adults would have me feeling regressed to those years of my early 20s.  Not exactly.  While holding my travel satchel and waiting for the buses, and again while sitting on the bus, I was remembering vividly my childhood camp experiences.  As I settled in, I pulled out of my satchel a bag of homemade banana bread slices and oatmeal cookies, baked by my wife for my bus mates.  I handed the bag to the woman behind me and told her to pass it on.  I felt like a little boy hoping to make friends by passing out the cookies my mommy had baked me.  It was very odd.  But it worked.  Soon I was in conversation with the people nearest to me on the bus.

Pam, just behind me, took care of an autistic child.  She was a former marine, perhaps 30 years old.  She’d read a lot about autism and we struck up an animated conversation.  Pam was loud, aggressive, yet tactful.  She was a person who was used to taking charge and being right.  Like most people on the bus, there was no sign in her dress that she was a member of a counterculture, and she wasn’t.  She just hated the Administration and craved a society that would prioritize children with special needs.

Across the aisle were Juan and Teresa.  Juan, maybe 45 years old, carried a huge picture, perhaps 3’ X 4’, of a young man in uniform.  I hesitated to ask who was in the picture.  Teresa was a friend of Juan’s and had agreed to accompany him on the journey.  She seemed a little out of place on the bus.  Perhaps 30 years old, stunningly pretty, dressed as if for a Saturday night.  It became apparent that she was not there to protest but to support Juan.  She spoke English but she was difficult to understand.

Juan was on the bus because his son had just been killed in the war.  He was a featured speaker at the rally that was to precede the march.

Two hours out of Chicago, deep in Indiana, the bus engine turned off.  We glided for a mile or so, and then the bus pulled over.  Exits were miles ahead and behind, though malls were mere feet away, just across the fences that lined the highway.  We all piled out.  Mike, the bus leader, told us it would be two hours before the replacement bus arrived out of Chicago.  The magic of cell phones.

The first bus in our four-bus caravan continued down to the rest stop 10 miles farther and deposited the people from that vehicle.  Then it returned, circling back around to the exit above us, hustled back to where we stood and then finally pulled over, empty, so we could get off the side of the highway where our wounded bus was parked.  We all piled in, heading to the rest stop down the way.

Standing by the side of the road, before the emptied bus returned, I did not share that evident, growing disappointment expressed by the others milling around me as the cars and trucks whizzed by.  There was very little fudge time built into our schedule.  The replacement bus would have to arrive in 2 hours for us to get to the protest march in time.  It did not seem likely the bus would move that fast.  I found myself feeling relieved.  A lot of the talk within the bus involved making sure everyone had the right phone numbers in case they got arrested.  Mike had outlined the likelihood of losing all cash and possessions permanently if someone was arrested.  Mike also emphasized that if you were in contact with someone on the bus who did not come accompanied by a friend, it was not unreasonable to expect that there were federal agents incognito amongst us, and to keep that in mind.  As such an unaccompanied person, I felt the comment deeply inappropriate.  Talk about words having a chilling effect.

While we were waiting for the bus to arrive, a drizzle drove some of us to get back on the grounded bus.  I was feeling relieved (that we might just have to turn around and return to Chicago), disturbed (by Mike’s paranoia) and regressed.  Regressed, because at age 11 my bus had broken down on the way back from summer camp in Minnesota, and I stood outside a broken-down bus for 8 hours until a replacement bus arrived.  Standing in the Indiana drizzle, the situation was feeling serious and unserious at the same time, like we were children playing at protesting with a camp counselor that was a dork.

The replacement bus arrived an hour late, 3 hours after we pulled over.  The other three buses in our caravan were long gone.  It was decided to keep heading to New York.  Whereas the first bus had AC fully cranked, this bus had no AC.  Whereas before we could almost see our breath, now everyone started sweating.  Still, things were far more relaxed.  We’d gotten to know each other some while waiting for the bus to come.

I got to know Juan.

The month before, Juan’s son had been killed in Afghanistan.  The circumstances of his death were suspicious.  The huge poster-size photo of his son stared at me from across the bus aisle for the 14 hours to New York.  Juan talked.  I listened.

I don’t think I got even 2 hours of sleep on the bus.  We were inserted into the subway system to emerge in Manhattan, where several hundred thousand people were assembling.  In a surreal moment, as I was rounding the first corner before crossing the street, F. Murray Abraham (who played Mozart’s nemesis in the movie Amadeus) ran up to me and asked me where the protesters were gathering.  I didn’t respond.  I just stared at him.  I was asking myself why F. Murray Abraham was asking me a question.  He seemed so short, a mere two inches taller than I am.  Then he ran off to ask someone else.

Estimates ran as high as 600,000 people assembled.  Many of them were mothers with strollers.  Lots of creative theatrical protest constructions.  I felt calm, yet excited.  Six hours walking with the crowd.  I felt calm as it ended.

I’d felt embraced by the crowd.

Fourteen hours on the night bus going back to Chicago with Juan’s son watching me.

Marcia picked me up at the Art Institute the next morning.  Things had changed.  I had changed.  I didn’t know it yet, but I was an activist.