New Clear Vision

Can We All Get Along — and Learn From One Another?

by Laura L. Finley

Disagreement is an essential component of a healthy relationship, a healthy workplace, and a healthy democracy. Much research documents the dangers of surrounding ourselves with so-called “yes men” who always concur. Workplace echo chambers stifle innovation and reify bad policy decisions. Disagreement stimulates creative thinking and prompts innovation.

Yet, there is indeed a peaceful, even collaborative, way to disagree. And, I contend, that it never involves personal insults, ad hominem attacks, and strings of epithets and curse words.

Unfortunately, it seems as though few in the U.S are taught how to disagree peacefully and constructively. Instead, if we read, hear or see something that bothers us, we tend to get all pissy about it and, rather than present our case, resort to the lowest blows we can. This behavior is, of course, modeled at nearly every turn. (more…)

Can We Talk More About What Really Matters?

by Randall Amster

Sometimes it seems as if the dream of peace moves further into the distance with each passing day…

Outside the “radical fringes” of the political spectrum, the silence is almost deafening. This is despite the palpable and (by now) incontrovertible nature of the conjoined crises in our collective midst, as the nexus of economic, ecological, technological, and militaristic challenges before us deepens by the day. Drudgery, droughts, and drones, oh my! Reality possesses a “fantastic” quality that often makes it seem as if we’re moving through a colorized version of an old-school horror flick — a notion reified in the cultural near-obsession with trite invocations of the much-anticipated “zombie apocalypse.” (more…)

Real Connection Takes Work, and It’s Worth It

by Mary Sojourner

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Writer Hunter S. Thompson was a pro at weird. But he would find Facebook beyond weird. Even as tiny green tree frogs scampered around the edge of his tequila and there seemed to be an aardvark climbing up his leg, he would consider it surreal that contact with dozens of “friends” can morph into two at the click of Delete. That’s the rate of attrition in the five days since I left Facebook — and that’s just the people I shared messages and comments with. Yeah, I knew. Yeah, I’m not surprised. The more time goes by since I last logged into Facebook, the even weirder the few months I spent on it seem. (more…)

Social Awakening Depends on a Balance of Activism

by Jan Lundberg

Our tall ship inches toward Copenhagen where it will dock near Christiania, the semi-autonomous village in the Christianshavn quarter. Apart from the job of getting the engineless ship into port where we deliver 8,000 bottles of French wine, there is much for an ecological and social activist to reflect upon.

Sometimes when Nature’s energy is high on the sea, with a fury, or when we are in the tender embrace of the water, air and sun that calms and becalms us, we get a slightly new perspective on our place on the planet. I should not have to add: that place is not about money or other narrow goals.

That this crew is a tight community is food for thought. Besides the imperative of cooperation for survival, it is simply easier and more natural to operate within a collective. Yet, in that situation one still finds oneself in serious personal contemplation on one’s intentions, dreams, and grappling with vexing questions about modern living. (more…)

What Ecology Can Teach Us About Responsible Media Practice

by Antonio López

New media and cultural practices mirror each other in the same way that contemporary gamers now view the world differently than gamers of old. Consider how baseball evolved with radio. Its slow pace is perfect for the narrative storytelling style of the oral tradition. American football, on the other hand, is perfect for television, its visually impressive and vignette-driven coverage timed perfectly for the commercial break. In both cases, though, their dissemination requires top-down distribution and offers clear and definitive outcomes, making them excellent fodder for discussion, distraction, and catharsis. Not surprisingly, politics have come to mirror sports spectacles with teams (parties) and strategies (platforms) that have a way of eschewing actual discussion of issues, substituting real politics with horse-race-like coverage.

No wonder the native intellectuals of the colonial media system can’t deal with the open-ended politics of kids raised on “infinite” games. Infinite games are about keeping the gameplay going, not about definitive winners and losers. The goal of infinite games is not an “end game” — as so many corporate media pundits search for in the narrative of the movement — but sustainability. How do you keep it going? “It,” in our case, is just life for those of us who want to raise our children on a healthy planet and in a prosperous and just society. (more…)

How Do We Build Our Movements?

by Harry Targ 

Over the last fourteen months we have observed Arab Spring, the Wisconsin uprising, labor ferment throughout the American Heartland, and the formation of Dream Coalitions. In addition Occupy Movements last fall spread like wild fire all across the country and with the arrival of spring are resuming. Most recently anti-racist mobilizations have occurred in response to the execution of Troy Davis and the murder of Trayvon Martin.

In response, socialist and progressive organizations, single issue groups, political party activists, and visible pundits have called for or organized rallies, marches, conferences and other mobilizations in Washington D.C., Chicago, New York and elsewhere. Grassroots activists, motivated by a passion for change, and sometimes a sense of desperation, are on the move. While these are exciting times for progressives and lifetime organizers, it makes sense to take a deep breath, reflect on the concrete situations of struggle we face, and to ask ourselves how best to channel (and preserve) our energies and resources. (more…)

‘Heartstorming’ as an Antidote to Denial

by Priscilla Stuckey

We know it’s getting worse; we’re not climate deniers. We’re well informed and aware of the facts. And yet we go about our lives as if nothing has changed. We live the same way we lived five years ago, before the wealth of new climate science confirming that the situation is worse than first thought. Maybe we travel even more than before or live in a bigger house than we did then. (Guilty on both counts.) What’s wrong with us?

We’re obeying the hush-hush rule on climate change. When the President can’t even utter the word climate in his State of the Union speech, at a time when climate change presents emergency levels of economic, health, and national security risks — and that’s just in this country, never mind the millions of people in other parts of the world whose homes and lives are already lost and endangered — you know something is seriously wrong. Even Stewart and Colbert seldom devote time to it. (more…)