Kate Bowler, Duke religion professor and cancer survivor often talks about an “after” time, the moment when people realize the future as they had previously envisioned it has changed. In the past few decades, presidential elections have felt like an “after” time for people whose candidate did not win.
No matter who won, a large portion of the population was always likely to feel angst about the nation's direction and the kind of country in which they live. It takes some time to sort out the way forward.
This week’s column is for the person who needs a plan, whether for this administration or the next. Rather than allowing division and disagreement to cripple relationships and giving into a sense of powerlessness or cynicism, it’s best to discharge negative emotions into positive action.
This week on Waging Nonviolence’s website, Daniel Hunter, founder of Choose Democracy, provided some steps to transform reaction into sustainable, transformative action. Hunter has trained with ethnic minorities in Burma, pastors in Sierra Leone, and independence activists in northeast India to strengthen democracies.
Hunter advises starting with trust. First, “Trust yourself,” he writes. Review your values, your principles and your reasons for acting upon them. We’re in an unprecedented era.
“Across the board, society has reduced trust in traditional institutions. Yes, there’s more distrust of the media, medical professionals, experts and politicians. But it extends beyond that. There’s reduced trust in most community institutions and membership groups. Whether from COVID or political polarization, a lot of us have experienced reduced trust in friends and family. Even our trust in predictable weather is diminished,” writes Hunter.
We can stop trusting ourselves. And we can stop being trustworthy, both with information, but also with our emotions. Hunter advises that we attend to our fears and anger. Limit news and outside information wisely. Turn to balanced and dispassionate sources and stay more connected in real-time to other people.
Hunter explains that distrust is “a social disease” wherein people look to their in-group “to know who to trust by who they tell you to distrust”—the “they” being the leaders of the in-group. It’s critical to combat distrust, a negative motivator, with a positive motivator. Note, though, that the human brain is wired for hypervigilance to negative motivators. Negative emotions like anger can be powerful motivators in the short term, but can lead to burnout and cynicism in the long run. It takes greater intention to work from, and toward, a positive mindset.
To help, Hunter advises finding an accountability circle and making goals. He advises prayer, meditation or reflection, based on your personal cognitive/spiritual practice, to remain present and centered on priorities, and aware of your disposition and approach in the face of what you want to change.
Hunter reminds us that we need to build trust, citing Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in which she explores how loneliness and isolation are a central ingredient to disempowering people. Create connections, rather than estranging ourselves from others and spiraling into social isolation.
As rational, social and emotional beings, it’s valuable to acknowledge emotions, rather than suppressing or ignoring them. Troubled? Make a list of what troubles you. Grieving? Add that. Feeling disempowered? Share that too.
Grieve and release what you cannot control. Many people recite the Serenity Prayers, which Hunter reminds us Reinhold Niebuhr created the most familiar version of the prayer during the rise of Nazi power in Germany.
We cannot change everything on that list. We’re going to have to pick one or a few top concerns for our personal action steps, but we can build connections with others working on others. Trying to do it all will catch up with us, creating internal chaos and ineffectiveness.
Hunter notes that it is “bad strategy” to turn to knee-jerk tendencies like public angsting on social media or merely symbolic actions like signing an online petition or only attending a few protests. While these actions can signal a unified front, they are impotent if they remain symbolic. Communication is only part of the plan of any effective action.
Sort out your action style. There are many pathways. Are you a person who protects people, reduces harm and shields the targeted population? An example of this is Sister Prejean, who ministered to people on death row, or Walt Whitman, who served in hospitals during the Civil War. Do you tend to be more like Henry David Thoreau or Civil Rights leader John Lewis? They disrupted and disobeyed. Thoreau refused to pay taxes in opposition to the Mexican-American War. John Lewis got into “good trouble,” arrested for protesting segregation during the Civil Rights sit-ins.
Hunter notes that some people work to safeguard institutions that are being dismantled. This can include union organizers like Shawn Fain. Others, like Hoosier Eugene Debs, build alternatives, such as alternative party platforms and new cultures.
Hunter encourages us to set aside our self-protectiveness and risk aversion, which can lead to being cowed and quieted en masse. It happened in many pockets of Europe during the Nazi regime when the populace adapted to what the Nazi leaders signaled was normal, including the extermination of “outsiders” and political opponents, or just the “weak and unfit.” In addition to six million Jews, they imprisoned and murdered the Roma (another ethnic group), the Polish and other Slavic groups, minority religious groups, the disabled, and politically unpopular dissidents with the support of the majority of the population.
To get the work done, we have to work outside of our in-groups, so it is important not to question people who cross the aisle or have company with strange bedfellows. We learn “to experiment with new language to appeal to others” when we move outside of our comfort zone.
Our strange bedfellows may help us understand why others supported a candidate or an idea we opposed and assess how strong that support is. It helps to learn other perspectives, to discover new approaches.
Many forms of power are structured not from the top down, in a solid pyramid with a wide foundation, so much as an upside-down triangle. They are often balanced single point grounding a top-heavy structure. In democracies, the supports that seem to prop up a party or leader at one moment are subject to persuasion. Forming uncommon alliances can create a tipping point. In a democracy, we get to work from the people up, not the leader down. To do so, connection matters.
Tipping democracy in the direction we envision requires courage and fearlessness. “Handling fear isn’t about suppressing it--but it is about constantly redirecting it,” says Hunter. In the 1960s when threatened with arrest, Civil Rights leaders wanted to go underground. But Bayard Rustin wanted “to make a positive spectacle of their repression.” He “organized them to go down to the station and demand to be arrested since they were leaders,” writes Hunter. Their actions persuaded other leaders not on police lists to publicly demand they, too, be arrested.
“Folks charged were met with cheers from crowds, holding their arrest papers high in the air,” writes Hunter It may be sobering to end on a note about the willing arrests of Civil Rights leaders, but people have risked this time again when they feel they are in the “after” time and have to take a moral stand. Looking toward a better future may require us to envision our own intrepid stands.
In Kate Bowler’s podcast with Parker Palmer, recorded before the election, he reminded her of the words of Sherilynn Ifill, former director of Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP: “I’ve read a lot of Black history in detail. I’ve read a lot of narratives of my people and how life has unfolded for them over the centuries. And never, ever at the end of one of those narratives have I seen the phrase or heard the phrase, ‘and then we gave up.’”