Most Sundays, I make over 60 phone calls to Left/Progressive activists across the country. Mostly I leave messages on machines. The conversations I have are usually pretty short. I’m looking to find out what specifically local organizers are working on so that I can get those actions, events and projects posted to the statewide networking websites that my PJEP colleagues and I facilitate. Often activists express astonishment that there are people out there working hard primarily on helping other activists and organizers achieve their goals rather than focusing on a particular personal social change issue.

I think big-scale, long-term and larger patterns. Immersed in evolutionary theory and the evolution of humans and their unique form of split consciousness, focusing on current politics and social change, I find myself attracted to the bigger picture and longer-term goals or transformations. It’s partly personality, partly habit and partly what I’ve found interesting over time that attracts me to how interconnections form and larger systems function.

Making those Sunday phone calls, I’m struck again and again by how focused organizers are on what is happening in their immediate area and how little they feel attracted to making sure that what they are doing is available for exploration on a larger scale, a broader geographic region. Organizers, generally, don’t think big.

This is particularly obvious to me when I send an email to a large group of organizers that are the heads of chapters or affiliates of national organizations. I note that my communication is authorized or sponsored by their central office. A very small percentage of the organizers respond. Or, a central office emails the affiliates or chapters, urging them to contact PJEP to become part of a statewide network. Few respond. What local organizers are focused on is what they are doing at the moment. Thinking outside the moment to consider how that individual and the local organization will benefit from connections to numerous other organizations is a relatively uncommon occurrence.

In other words, most members of the Left/Progressive movement that I am in contact with, and I’m in personal contact with over 700 organizers in 30 states, don’t think big in the context of interconnections with organizations across their state and in other states around the country. Not thinking big is the same as not thinking in an interconnected, horizontal, transparent fashion. I believe this is because most of the organizers I work with are old (over 55). Organizers often also have low expectations regarding the benefits of working with other organizations or letting other organizations know what they are doing. This sense of isolation seems characteristic of Left organizers of all ages.

I haven’t hit upon a solution, a way of successfully encouraging activists to think big, take risks and see a larger picture across larger periods of time. The American Left/Progressive movement is rife with disappointed, frustrated organizers that keep their focus close to home. This is another reason why I believe the coming changes will be enacted largely through young folks and those with communications technology expertise in Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For the young, big picture is effortless and ubiquitous. All they need is an expanded sense of time. Then, everything they’d like to see won’t just seem possible; it will feel achievable in an immanent future.

We’ve been mulling over the relationship between the American Left and the new communications technologies. Integrally involved with this process is our role as co-facilitators of PJEP and its network of 41 statewide or multistate websites, where we are constantly seeking ways to empower small local organizations. The network sites provide them access to easy ways of communicating with allied organizations while building their effectiveness and contact lists through online petitions, eletters, boycotts and fundraisers. For example, right now we’re posting demonstrations surrounding the 7th anniversary of the US led invasion of Iraq. Actions are occurring across the country, appearing in the 40 networks, to a central position on the home page of pjep.org that lists over 120 actions around the country. The question we keep asking ourselves is: What other vehicles are there, that not only share information, but also offer opportunities for organizing?

There are, of course, the various national Left organizations that endorsed the protests that occurred the day after Obama announced he was sending additional troops to Afghanistan such as the United for Peace and Justice, Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Peace Action, the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, National Assembly,…

In late November and early December, my colleagues and I were working at collecting information from the 1,500 organizations that comprise the Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP).  We work with organizers that are the contact person for their organization, mostly through email, occasionally by phone.  For me, it averages out to my talking to each person that I work with maybe once or twice a year.  There are several hundred people that I work with.

Those mostly fairly tenuous relationships resulted in our being able to accumulate 100 actions protesting the Obama escalation of Afghanistan, while keeping the 1,500 organizations apprised of the growing number of actions.  Just after the December 1 and 2 actions, I got a call from a North Carolina organizer wanting to know how we were different from United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which had limited resources and was not able to organize around the escalation protests, other than sending out emails.  I responded that PJEP is sort of like a national organization’s outreach, communications and technology departments.  PJEP involves itself in no content creation or leadership articulation of the issues.  PJEP is mostly just process, process seeking to empower the actions and projects…

Marcia and I have been working within the social change community since just before the second Iraq war started.  As a political activist, you can find that politics can become your life at several levels.  Because our kids are now all out of the house and mostly out of college, time formerly unavailable to be social is now often time spent with people we meet in the social change movement.  The kids were leaving the nest as we became involved in political protest, which has resulted in a proliferation of friends that also protest.

Many of the Left activists we know move in social circles comprised of other Left activists.  A result of the integration of political activism and friendship networks is an interesting nondifferentiation among actions taken in support of friends, actions taken to impress friends, actions taken because that is what your friends are doing and actions taken because we feel compelled to do so politically.  In other words, the line between friendship and politics becomes blurred.

Whereas I find many of my friends and political associates focused intensely on the larger politics of what they are involved in, my focus is often following through with what I…

It is December 4.  Preparing to write this entry, I considered describing the process of working with Lee Goodman to create the video describing the December 1 and December 2 Afghanistan escalation protests occurring across the country.  Those of us working as facilitators with PJEP kept 1,500 local organizations across the country in touch with the other small organizations across the country conducting protests.  We then requested video and photos of their events.  That stuff poured in.  On December 3, Lee and I cobbled the content into a five-minute video.

Becoming aware that this essay would not be published until March (after sending it to an editor), I considered what the view of these events would be from a season in the future.  Then, I became aware of myself conducting a dissociation to achieve an alternative perspective.  This was followed by my being aware of my being aware of my conducting a dissociation.

There is a difference between debilitating dissociation that leads to an experience of feeling removed or separated from an integration with the environment and the kind of dissociation that offers an ability to achieve both an experience of integration accompanied by a grasping of the relationship of…

At the end of last November and the beginning of December, Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP) volunteers worked hard to keep the 41 websites serving 50 states current with actions appearing across the country, which were protests of the Obama Afghanistan escalation. There were 99 events posted, by far the most comprehensive list available on the web.  Nevertheless, though attendance was often excellent at these events, it was usually older activists.

Though some activists posted the wider list to Facebook, Facebook events were mostly not linking to other Facebook actions in other locations.  Twitter, profoundly effective at encouraging worldwide attention on events in Iran, was strangely absent from the almost 100 events occurring across the U.S.

This obviously points to young people not being as motivated to fight the Obama escalation as their older activist associates.  If young people were not Twittering their friends to attend events, then it is likely young people were not consumed by the particular issue.  There is another thing suggested.  Not only were young people not feeling compelled to congregate, young people were possibly not feeling empowered to make their feelings known.  There is the possibility that former young…

It happens that while I am deep into composing text describing evolutionary theory, I’ll get an idea having to do with creating or adjusting online website programming designed to enhance communications among social change organizations.

There is the actual idea and there is my awareness of the context of the idea generation.  Then, there is my awareness of the context’s context.  One of the interesting repercussions of theorizing about the origins of consciousness is a frequent shift of position to being aware of how I am aware.

Back to the idea.  It struck me that our PJEP network of almost 1,500 organizations spread across 50 states has little ability to effortlessly proliferate a local action, petition, boycott, eletter or fundraiser campaign across state lines without someone having to cajole, encourage or harangue an ally or potential ally, who could then take that action or campaign and post it in a different state network.  Negotiation accompanies almost every attempt to forge an alliance if there is text involved.  Most organizations have few contacts outside their immediate town or region and so don’t even start the process.

The idea was to simply allow the banding together of different local organizations, or chapters…

It struck me this evening that there are no Leftist specialists on the Internet and the Internet’s influence on Left politics.  There are journalists that write stories about the Internet and politics.  There are Left and left-of-center blogs that discuss the influence of the Internet on politics.  There are books, such as Viral Spiral and Here Comes Everybody, that are partly devoted to Internet activism and how the Left is impacted by the web, but I’m having trouble finding examples of those concentrating pretty much exclusively on Left politics and the net.

There is Richard Stallman’s late 20th-century crusade to carve out a commons on the web.  His influence has been astonishing.  In the Left community that I am part of, I am in contact with hundreds of activists.  His name has never been mentioned.

The word “hacker” has evolved over the last 20 years.  It rarely appears in Leftists’ conversations.  Nevertheless, its emerging meaning has more to do with an egalitarian revolution than with one that violates private cyber space.  The folks I am in contact with are little aware of the young programmers’ community fighting for free code and shared universal software.  There are few bringing the young,…

There are about a dozen of us volunteers working with nearly 1500 local peace, justice and environmental organizations in 50 states. The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP), located at pjep.org, places in the hands of local activists, at no cost, the kinds of tools that larger organizations have access to. This includes such features as online fundraising, eletters, online petitions and boycott tools. In addition, we make available almost 1000 resource documents congregating in 44 issue clusters, offer inter-organizational communications tools, and connect activists with like minded grassroots organizers in other states.

Spontaneous protests have been emerging across the country this last week with activists demonstrating against Obama’s anticipated escalation of the Afghanistan war. Currently United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) is in flux. They are in debt functioning with all volunteer staff as the steering committee reaches out to member groups to help define the future of UFPJ. As a result, A.N.S.W.E.R., National Assembly, Codepink and World Can’t Wait (WCW) have been, by and large, offering attention to this issue as national organizations. Nevertheless, none of those organizations have an inclusive national presence with chapters or affiliates in every state. Only WCW has put any…

From my sophomore to junior year in high school I went from selling fruitcake for my Boy Scout troop to selling buttons and bumper stickers for my anti-war group.  I grew up in a merchant family and looked at the world as an opportunity to sell things.  I didn’t exactly have the personality for it.  I was shy, but I was moderately obsessed with numbers and so made a numbers game out of whatever I was trying to encourage people to purchase.

That money bought stuff never seemed particularly relevant.

So my contribution to the Left in the 1960s and 1970s was mostly handling the accounting for the various things that were exchanged.  Forty years later, at protest planning meetings, I mostly handle display and transfer of information because web development is my profession.  Watching and listening to organizers in meetings, I notice that same deadpan earnestness I remember from my youth, but relations today are plagued by decades of hurt feelings and activists taking personally the former strategic decisions of their peers.  I am constantly astonished by how often present behaviors are informed by past disappointments or frustrations.  Experiencing forgiveness is not a common experience in the Leftist avocation. …

Jacqui Russell is the artistic director of Chicago Children’s Theater.  My good friend Arnold April mentioned to me the unique program that Jacqui manages at Agassiz Elementary School in Chicago, encouraged into existence by CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education).  Arnold is CAPE’s creative director.

The program that Jacqui manages guides autistic children into more interactive relationships by blending performance with a sensitivity to the nuances of emotion.  An audio interview is located here, an article here, with CAPE documentation of her process located here and here.

The documentation describes a step-by-step process that guides children with deep difficulties intuiting the experience of others into a place where they can estimate another person’s emotion and respond in an appropriate way.

What has me thinking is the possibility of approaching autism with a blending of performance, rhythm and education around emotion, something that this program has been doing to a large degree for more than ten years.

If autistic children can be encouraged to dance to rhythms, dancing to the same beat in a group, experiencing the mirroring of each other’s experience in a performance context, then perhaps bridges…

In the United States, there have been three powerful democratization surges in the last 100 years.  Each featured an experience by participants of feeling part of something larger than themselves.  It continues to astonish me how the one we are experiencing now is almost invisible to folks I know.

In the 1930s, working people were provided a voice and power to affect their lives in positive ways.  The commons emerged as a political power as people were able to realize that the process of focusing on shared resources provided a new way of viewing influence.  Democratization was viewed as a feature of the commons.

In the 1960s, democratization acquired an almost spiritual dimension as peace and new interpersonal-communication protocols became integral to understanding how the commons operated.  Integration and feminization transformed the idea of how working together worked.  I felt part of something larger than myself.

Over the last 20 years, there has been growing a third wave of commitment to the commons.  Far more subtle than the other two waves, its influence has been exponentially more powerful.  Perhaps it makes no sense to separate them; they are all part of the same process.  The process features a horizontalization of…

At the end of this last August, Marcia and I attended a Jan Schakowsky town meeting at Niles High School.  There were almost 2,000 present.  Most of those folks were in the auditorium where the event was held, and many were outside holding signs and banners.  The focus was the proposed health care legislation.

Marcia meets with Schakowsky fairly often as the leader of the North Shore Coalition for Peace, Justice and the Environment.  A couple years ago, Jan was at our home for a meeting regarding Iraq, Iran and Israel where one of our group brought up Blackwater establishing itself in Illinois.  At that time, Jan was not familiar with Blackwater’s presence in the state.  Not long after that, Jan emerged to become an important congressional opponent of military contractors, Blackwater in particular.

Schakowsky is a strong supporter of Israel.  My fellow activists and organizers strongly oppose Schakowsky’s support of Israel’s conservative governments, and they also oppose West Bank settlers, Gaza atrocities and the way Israeli government policies treat Palestinians.  Our contact with Schakowsky is characterized by agreement with some of her positions and opposition to her support of Israel.

The meeting in the auditorium in August was attended…

As we are transitioning out of magazine presentations of Left or Progressive news, news analysis and societal observation and into Internet exhibition of similar content, it looks and feels like we have been presented with several paradoxes.  Paradoxes can seem to disappear once a transition is complete.  The old world view just seems quaint.  Nevertheless, at this point in the process, many print vehicles are experiencing struggle.

Old Model
• Print
• Insight and Erudition
• Professional
• Older Demographic
• Well-researched, articulate, unique content
• Visionary individual
• Community is defined by those that share common values (alliances are with those you respect)
• Hierarchical, segregated, secretive (content is hoarded and shared for money)
• Measured delivery expecting respect for a calm and reasonable presentation
• Unique content

New Model
• Web
• Insight, Erudition, Commentary, Editorializing, Entertaining, Linking, Aggregating
• Amateur
• Young Demographic
• Aggregated, articulate, shared content
• “Wisdom of the crowds”
• Community is defined by those that share common anything (all alliances are ad hoc)
• Horizontal, diverse, transparent (content is distributed to all for free)

The Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP) has over 1,400 organizations participating in 40 online networks in 50 states.  A basic premise of the project is that by making available powerful online resources such as petitions, eletters, boycotts and online fundraising, it can allow small local organizations to have more choices when seeking to accomplish social-change goals.  PJEP seeks to enhance creativity, empowering local activists to facilitate change.  In addition, PJEP seeks to put into the hands of local activists powerful email lists, built from these online resources, providing access to allies to accomplish goals.

There is a sleeper issue regarding health care that only occasionally gets much play in the media.  My wife and I have been running small businesses for 30 years.  Good staff is integral to a healthy business.  Health care benefits are too expensive to provide to staff in a business as small as Marcia and I maintain.  This is particularly true in our case because we have a daughter with diabetes, a condition which closed off options regarding health care.

After our daughter contracted diabetes, our insurance was doubled to $30,000 a year.  We then contracted with a staffing firm to handle payroll in order…

The Peace, Justice & Environment Project now covers 50 states serving over 1,400 organizations.  Our first fundraiser on July 4th was a success.  Where do we go from here?

I began working on this project over three-and-a-half years ago.  It started with my seeking a way to flip Moveon’s model by supplying local activists an ability to create actions and develop powerful lists with the potential to propagate those actions across wide areas from the bottom up.  Marcia and I experimented with Moveon techniques locally.  We were effective, quickly building an 1,800-person activist list, driving people to events, getting media coverage.  Would it be possible to develop a system where the lists were shared by all participating organizations in a state?

Programmer Rod Homor and I worked out a web application that we were able to test statewide in Illinois with the new Illinois Coalition for Peace & Justice.  It was well received.  It was an online commons offering participating organizations an ability to form ad hoc coalitions with other organizations around the state.  Organizations shared network resources (a central email list) when enough organizations voted support for one another’s projects.

I took the show on the road.  First Minnesota,…

The American Left, divided on many issues, maintains one deep division not often talked about.  Many in the American Left despise business.  Doing so, they alienate supporters, making it more difficult to accomplish goals.

In high school and in college, I harbored a deep prejudice against business.  I’m not talking about just corporations but small businesses run by a single person or a family.  My father ran a girdle and bra factory on the west side of Chicago, on the fourth floor of a factory building that is now art studios for the University of Illinois.  The factory had maybe 50 employees.  My father was passionately dedicated to achieving respect by running a successful business.  His whole life revolved around the factory’s health.  He worked six days a week.  When business was good, my dad was relaxed.  When business was bad, he was preoccupied and irritable.

Dad’s politics revolved exclusively around his business.  What he perceived as good for the factory was good for him.  He would never consider voting for a Democrat.  He concluded that Republicans wanted him to succeed and Democrats wanted to use him to support those that didn’t have the resources or ambition to have their…

Just after the Iran election, Twitter emerged as news.  It seemed not only to be able to share information about what was happening in Iran with folks following events around the world, but Twitter was also encouraging the ability of protesters to congregate spontaneously and keep each other informed of developments in real time.

I work with Left/Progressive organizers across the country, talking with maybe six to ten out-of-state activists each week. In a week I’m in email communication with several dozen. In Illinois, far more.  Over the course of a three-month period, I cycle through communication with almost 600 organizers in 30 states, trying to touch base with each four times a year.  In addition, I consult with In These Times, a revered Left/Progressive print publication.  I mostly work with In These Times as a local expert on the Internet and social media.

So, I have a pretty broad view of ongoing American Left strategies and tactics to accomplish specific goals.  Regarding my area of expertise, the Internet, the independent Progressive movement is at the very beginning of becoming aware of the power of horizontal, online social networks.

Right now, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the others are enhancing communication…

As a member of the board of directors of the old and respected print publication In These Times (ITT), I have a front row seat observing media and social transformation.  As our society changes, so does its institutions.  In These Times, like many print businesses, is facing change.

Perhaps unique to this situation is that ITT is itself a publication that represents the forces of change, having represented a Left/Progressive perspective for several decades.

In These Times is transitioning to a board-of-editors format from a traditional paid-staff paradigm, forced into this alternative organizational and production structure by an unforgiving economic environment.  There is no irony here.  As a harbinger of change, ITT is changing.

Across the country, there is much talk of the 1930s both because our economy feels informed by what happened last time things were this bad, but also because it was in the 1930s that there was a powerful societal shift from corporate interests to the commons.  In the 1930s, that shift was characterized by hierarchical institutions championing positions that empowered those with almost no ability to help themselves.  The unions exhibited strength and vision.  The Democratic Party sometimes reflected this grass roots, “common man” perspective.

Eighty…

It does not seem like a good idea to invest in that which you wish to see fail.  Such mixed feelings are not useful when it comes to money.

The American Left is filled with incongruities and the occasional hypocrisy that comprise any large movement or social group.  Made up of dozens of subgroups, the American Left can’t be said to hold too many positions that are universal among its followers.  One of those controversial positions, a position not often discussed, is the relationship between that section of the Left seeking profound systemic economic transformation and the Left that has a 401(k), IRA or other investments.  Often, a single person may seek both deep economic evolution and profits from investments.

One-half of such a person roots for the destruction of the Dow; the other half desperately seeks the stock market’s return to health.

I have more than a few friends that seek a sustainable, environmentally sound world economy that cares for the starving and makes health care available to all.  With the United States absorbing 25% of the world’s nonrenewable resources, deep systemic transformation needs to be characterized by an end of business as we know it.  Clearly, this has…

Consider that those female children with low estrogen levels as they cross over into their teens may find themselves experiencing delayed puberty.  This may manifest delayed testosterone surges pruning cerebral synapses, resulting in more cerebral synapses and larger brains.  What exactly might be the relationship between low estrogen, low enough to delay puberty (particularly with girls), and increased encephalization?

With girls, estrogen levels that are too low will delay the first estrous cycle or stop it if already underway.  Introducing a high-fat diet to a girl nearing puberty can add on fat that sparks the transition to adulthood.

With girls, high fat encourages puberty.  It would seem that Western high-fat diets might be responsible for the drop in puberty by four years over the last 100 years.

A question arises.  Is the same dynamic engaged for boys?  Do thin boys introduced to high-fat diets also experience a push into puberty?

This dynamic suggests a number of questions.

To what degree have high and low-fat diets influenced human evolution?  If low fat delays puberty and results in more brain growth, might this be because more synapses are useful for finding more fat?

When there is more fat in diets and puberty…

Marcia got home late last night from an activist event and burst whooping into the bedroom where I was slipping from book to book.  I was reading Alinsky on organizing, Freud on the structure of humor, an Evo Devo text on Lamarckian evolution and a book on handedness.  I jumped, startled by her entry.

“We got it!  We got it!”

Unable to read the letter without her glasses, she handed it to me.   I read what we got.  The federal government had granted 501(c)3 status to the Peace, Justice and Environment Project.  Donors writing checks to PJEP could take it off of their taxes.

It was time to call Laurel and break open the champagne!

Marcia has worked for three seasons conducting the research, writing up the documents, consulting with friends (thank you, Allan Gratch!) and rewriting documents in order that contributions to the project could be deductible.  We could now begin the process of soliciting donations.

Then I realized that this is when the mythmaking begins.

It’s astonishing what we’ve accomplished in the almost three years since we started this project.  After Kerry lost, I went from being an occasional activist uncomfortable attending demonstrations to a hyper activist and…

Talking with Left activist and organizer friends, I would conclude that there seems little awareness of the deep structural societal changes underway.  Much of the Left expects more of the same.  In the 1960s, many of us had the experience of participating in a profound cultural transformation.  Most of the folks I know now don’t see or feel what we experienced then as happening now.  It is astonishing how deeply the Left has been purged of vision and optimism by the free market free-for-all of the last thirty years.  Our youth are not burdened in this way.

Perhaps part of this is due to the split between the practical and the spiritual.  Since the 60s, folks I know either stayed politically active or drifted off in New Age directions.  Not too many friends maintained a position in both worlds.  A re-embracing of the two polarities would be useful going forward.  Practical spirituality or spiritual pragmatism would be a boon to the Left right now, a Left seemingly unable to intuit a politic that can experience destruction and positive transformation as closely tied.

Since the 1960s, there has been a remarkable surge in secular spiritualism with yoga, martial arts, alternative medical…

Approaching the sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War and the second anniversary of there being no Left mass action to protest the war, it is interesting to consider the United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) conference last December.

At that UFPJ conference, there was surprisingly little rancor between those that sought mass action and the status quo that wanted no large single demonstrations to protest the war.  It was not a close vote.  Perhaps that’s why there was little combat.

There was the decision to conduct mass action in early April with an emphasis on a variety of issues.  There would be no one clear message.  But, then again, the Left has no one clear message.  There are three reasons why.

Obama, running against the Iraq War candidate, emphasized that he would be pulling troops out.  Obama, as a black man, has congruently, metaphorically manifested the change he says he’ll bring.  The economy is turning media and Left attention to issues of economic justice.

As economic justice becomes the new rallying point for the American Left, there is an opportunity for an alliance between hard and soft Left factions.  Maybe almost all the folks at the next…

It may be a natural process for an organization to seek to control outcome by controlling process.  At a United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) conference in December, I observed an attempt by the steering committee to establish permanent steering committee members based on the perceived constituency of nationally and regionally based member organizations.  The idea was that there is little parity when large constituency organizations were in the same voting pool as very small organizations.  It seemed that large constituencies were often disenfranchised.

The solution was to permanently establish an assembly of agreed-upon large constituency organizations.

The proposal failed.  There were a number of reasons.  Perhaps the most obvious was that the authors of the proposal had not done detailed research and seemed unaware of several established regional and statewide coalitions.  They chose a couple that were statewide only in name.  The choice for regional and statewide permanent members seemed arbitrary.

To me, there was a more subtle dynamic in play.

An established organization seeks to achieve organization goals with as little conflict as possible.  This involves individuals within the organization making decisions based on what individuals perceive will make his or her life easier.  Folks rely upon established…