"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."  Thomas Jefferson

Grounded, Stubborn Optimism, Lynne Twist, Pachamama Alliance 

At a time when everything is collapsing around us; at a time when the troubles in the world are so severe that it's almost difficult to wake up in the morning, I want to talk about grounded optimism -- something we need and something that everyone has access to. Grounded optimism is not stepping over things that aren't working. Grounded optimism is not being in denial. Grounded optimism is not fairytale thinking or Pollyanna thinking. It's not even positive thinking. It is looking for-- in the fabric of life -- that which you can affirm.

And grounded optimism takes a kind of character, a kind of depth of someone who knows that their life, what they say, who they are, the way they behave, makes a difference to other people.  So a grounded optimist is someone who can find the possibility in anything, who can find gratitude and appreciation in anything.

There are so many ways to find a place to look and see what's beautiful, what's true. What's working. What has integrity? What has love? What is growth? What is development? What is progress? And a grounded optimist is always looking for that so that they can affirm and point to and shine a light on the possibility of life.

One of the things that happens when you wake up is you realize you're swimming in negative conversations, you're swimming in what the media is feeding us, you're swimming in what social media feed you receive. You're swimming in people's complaints about the world, perhaps even your own. And those negative conversations, which are a dime a dozen and everywhere you

look are conversations and a story that keeps us stuck as victims, like we can't do anything about. It has us thinking that we're the victim of the circumstances of the pandemic, of the political system, of people's worries about the world.

And I learned some time ago that even worrying -- a wonderful phrase from Michael Beckwith worry is a form of negative prayer. When you think about what you do when you worry, you're actually praying for what you don't want. And so to begin to shift conversations that you are caught in and look for what you can affirm, what is actually working that nobody's pointing to.

What's easy is to fall into despair. What's easy is to think of yourself as a victim of circumstances. What's easy is to be upset and angry and, um, ashamed. What's difficult, what's challenging, what actually takes a kind of almost moral courage is finding what's there that you can use to empower yourself to generate possibility.

So to be someone who looks for possibility, who shines a light on what's being affirmed, who actually pays attention to progress when it's taking place and congratulates and celebrates progress is a very, very critical job. That's one of the things that people rely on the Pachamama Alliance for -- to see where possibility is and affirm it, shine a light on it, make it available.

A grounded optimist is someone who is willing to stand in the fray of things falling apart and find the way through. A grounded optimist is someone who can take whatever's going on and give people a ray of hope, an aperture, an opening, so they know how to go forward. A grounded optimist is someone who pierces through apathy and resignation and lifts the veil of disappointment so people can see that they have courage when they thought they didn't have any. A grounded optimist is someone who can always stand for the possibility, no matter what's going on. And that kind of stand people depend on, people are craving, and everyone has it inside of them. You have it. I have it, and there couldn't be a more important time for us to

express it.

Living the life of a grounded optimist takes, um, real skill and sophistication, even some real intellect and heart, um, because things aren't always going so well, as we know. It takes an authentic encounter with what is so. What is so even if the news is bad about what's so.

Every breakdown has the seeds of a breakthrough. If you know this, if you carry that knowledge in your heart, if you're someone who is committed to revealing those seeds in every breakdown, you will find them. We have this huge breakdown on planet earth right now. It's called climate change. It's called a huge climate crisis. We have a huge pandemic crisis, acute health, huge

health crisis. We have political crises all over the planet. These breakdowns are not happening to us. Maybe they're happening for us. Maybe in each one of these breakdowns -- And I assert that it's true -- is the seeds of the greatest breakthroughs that we've ever seen. We have the opportunity with the pandemic in particular to rethink, reimagine, recreate, reset, reboot life --

our health, our relationship with one another, our understanding of what it means to be at home, home in our homes or home in our hearts, home in ourselves. We have the opportunity to see how we want to be governed, how we want to be educated, how we want our children to live. We have such a huge opportunity in the breakdowns that are taking place now on this planet,

which are bigger than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, to recreate life.

The story underneath the story is a kind of epic beginning of a massive, massive transformation

of the human condition. And to see it, to foster it, to foment it, to empower it, to live into it is a job that all of us have. Those of us who are awake. Those of us who are paying attention, those of us who are living from intention, we have the opportunity, in fact, I think the responsibility, to foster, foment, encourage, point to, shine the light on and empower this extraordinary transformation that's taking place.

And the breakdowns are so vast that they're bringing us together. They're making us realize we are one biology. We are one family. We are one human family that can have a breakthrough all together collectively. And it will be led by people like you and me. People who are clear that in these breakdowns are the seeds for the greatest breakthrough we've ever had for the human

family. And that's what the Game Changer intensive is all about. And that's why you're here. And that's your job and mine too. So let's do it.

2025 Update – Stubborn Optimism

Without grounded optimism, there is no future. You can be really, really enrolled, sold that it's hopeless, that there's no way out, that we're screwed, that it's too late. All of that is very, very valid. I can see that I'm not denying that. I can see that that makes real sense to me. However, to buy into that narrative, to walk in the world in that narrative, has no future, has no, gives me and you, and all of us no power. It gives us no access.

But grounded optimism now, for me is, is, has become stubborn optimism. And I love the phrase stubborn optimism. That comes from Christiana Figueres, who with stubborn optimism, she and her colleague, Tom Rivett-Carnac, actually facilitated the entire world, every country in the world, signing on to protocols, Paris Accord protocols for 2015 – not most countries, every single country in the world signed on to climate protocols and measurements for 2050 way back in 2015. Yes, we're way behind on those commitments. Yes, we're not moving fast enough.  All of that's true. But if the whole world could agree on that, anything's possible.

And I see stubborn optimism as a beautiful act of moral conscience. I see stubborn optimism as an opportunity to kind of put some edge in what some people would call, I don't know, Pollyanna. I see stubborn optimism as creative, courageous, edgy, strong, deep, and really, really powerful. And more than that, absolutely essential, essential. And the word essential comes from essence, because the essence of life is that life gives life. Life promotes life. Life makes life happen. We are alive. We're all alive at a time when it's all threatened. And we have the privilege, the opportunity, I say the responsibility to have this life-giving energy that comes through grounded optimism, comes through stubborn optimism, comes through generating possibility, to be not only the narrative that we create for ourselves, so that we can stay in action and stay in the playing field, but the narrative that we promote in the cultural story. We need to live in the sacred story, the narrative that life begets life begets life begets life. We have been given life, and it's ours to be responsible for maintaining, sustaining, deepening, and regenerating the gift of life. Especially now.

5 Habits of the Heart, Parker Palmer, "Healing the Heart of Democracy" (2011)

1. An understanding that we are all in this together. Biologists, ecologists, economists, ethicists and leaders of the great wisdom traditions have all given voice to this theme. Despite our illusions of individualism and national superiority, we humans are a profoundly interconnected species—entwined with one another and with all forms of life, as the global economic and ecological crises reveal in vivid and frightening detail. We must embrace the simple fact that we are dependent upon and accountable to one another, and that includes the stranger, the “alien other.” At the same time, we must save the notion of interdependence from the idealistic excesses that make it an impossible dream. Exhorting people to hold a continual awareness of global, national, or even local interconnectedness is a counsel of perfection that is achievable (if at all) only by the rare saint, one that can only result in self-delusion or defeat. 

Which leads to a second key habit of the heart…

2. An appreciation of the value of “otherness.” It is true that we are all in this together. It is equally true that we spend most of our lives in “tribes” or lifestyle enclaves—and that thinking of the world in terms of “us” and “them” is one of the many limitations of the human mind. The good news is that “us and them” does not have to mean “us versus them.” Instead, it can remind us of the ancient tradition of hospitality to the stranger and give us a chance to translate it into twenty-first century terms. Hospitality rightly understood is premised on the notion that the stranger has much to teach us. It actively invites “otherness” into our lives to make them more expansive, including forms of otherness that seem utterly alien to us. Of course, we will not practice deep hospitality if we do not embrace the creative possibilities inherent in our differences. 

Which leads to a third key habit of the heart…

3. An ability to hold tension in life-giving ways. Our lives are filled with inner and outer contradictions—our own behavior sometimes belies our aspirations, while the world around us sometimes denies what we value and believe to be true. If we fail to hold these contradictions creatively, they will shut us down and take us out of the action. But if we allow their tensions to expand our minds and hearts, they can open us to new understandings of ourselves and our world, enhancing our lives and allowing us to enhance other people’s lives. We are flawed and finite beings whose understanding is always partial and in need of correction. The genius of the human heart lies in its capacity to use the tensions that come with our limitations to generate insight, energy, and new life. 

Making the most of those gifts requires a fourth key habit of the heart…

4. A sense of personal voice and agency. Insight and energy give rise to new life as we speak out and act out our own version of truth, while checking and correcting it against the truths of others. But many of us lack confidence in own voices and in our power to make a difference. We grow up in educational and religious institutions that treat us as members of an audience instead of actors in a drama, and as a result we become adults who treat politics as a spectator sport. And yet it remains possible for us, young and old alike, to find our voices, learn how to speak them, and know the satisfaction that comes from contributing to positive change—if we have the support of a community. 

Which leads to a fifth and final habit of the heart…

5. A capacity to create community. Without a community, it is nearly impossible to achieve voice: it takes a village to raise a Rosa Parks. Without a community, it is nearly impossible to exercise the “power of one” in a way that allows power to multiply: it took a village to translate Parks’s act of personal integrity into social change. In a mass society like ours, community rarely comes ready-made. But creating community in the places where we live and work does not mean abandoning other parts of our lives to become full-time organizers. The steady companionship of two or three kindred spirits can help us find the courage we need to speak and act as citizens. There are many ways to plant and cultivate the seeds of community in our personal and local lives. We must all become gardeners of community if we want democracy to flourish.

What Did You Do?  Drew Dellinger

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?

as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?

what did you do
once
you
knew?

People Get Ready, Rebecca Solnit

Even though large tracts of America and many old and famous red States have fallen or may fall into the grip of DOGE-MAGA and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in the Bronx and along the border, we shall fight in the national parks and forests, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the streets, we shall defend our nation, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the public beaches, we shall fight to protect the public lands, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this nation or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our teenagers and youth would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World that is our beautiful multicultural future, with all its renewable power and grassroots might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.

Who can resist rewriting Winston Churchill's best wartime rhetoric in a time like this? Okay, most of you probably can, but I can't. And I think all the bad news--and there's so much and it's so bad--is begetting some really good news. People are rising up. I feel a groundswell. There is a lot going on. There's a whole lot going on. And that's just what I can see, and I know that a whole lot of us are organizing, resisting, and not cooperating in a whole lot of ways we can't see yet. I'm horrified by what the Trumpists are doing and by the moral ugliness of it; but I'm moved and exhilarated by what a whole lot of the rest of us are doing, and the moral beauty of it. The horror and the wonder can coexist, just as the worst and best of us do.

Daniel Hunter, a brilliant strategist and analyst who writes regularly at the magazine Waging Nonviolence has a new piece there."We're seeing the beginning of mass noncompliance," he writes. And then he describes how first ordinary federal workers and then Trump cabinet members and heads of departments refused to comply with Musk's insanely demeaning "list five things you did this week" email directive. Daniel explains, "This is how noncompliance works. It’s a chain reaction of smaller to bigger dominoes — the smaller ones knock down the bigger ones and on and on until the bigger dominoes fall. What we just saw is the largest mass noncompliance with Elon Musk (so far).... This is the general direction we need to go. Musk says 'jump' — and we all say 'nope' and return to our lives."

Daniel is with Choose Democracy, whose mailing list is a great way to stay engaged with what's happening and what's possible (and I've had the good fortune to work with him a little lately). He points toward a crucial truth: the only power that Trump, Musk, etc. have is the power to give orders--they don't do much of anything else themselves. The other three hundred million of us have the power to not obey them and to support and encourage others who don't. Enforcement of those orders is mostly by threat, and we have seen people undaunted by those threats, at home and abroad (and some of those threats can prove to be empty, and some threats that can target a few people can't do much about hundreds of thousands or millions who won't comply; there's safety in numbers).

There is resistance inside the federal government, lots of it; we've seen the valor and defiance of workers keeping their integrity and doing their best to maintain the integrity of their work and their service to the rest of us. And of course the courts are the federal government and they are slapping down Trump-Musk overreach and illegality right and left. This is definitely not the glory days of the USA but it might be of the judicial branch right now, with even the Supreme Court saying its version of go to hell or at least five of the nine saying so (technically they declined to halt or reverse a judge's ruling that the Trump Administration had to immediately release almost $2 billion in foreign aid payments owed under existing contracts). There have been so many lawsuits filed, so many won, because so much of what Trump and Musk are trying to do is illegal overreach (and theft and grift and idiocy). This week Chief U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Beryl A. Howell declared, “A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution."

The most glorious lawsuit was filed this week--and even the parties filing it were thrilling to behold, because I never really thought I'd seen the Sierra Club and the Japanese American Citizens League (along with the Union of Concerned Scientists and OCA --Asian Pacific American Advocates) as suing together. It's a lawsuit against Musk, DOGE, and some Trump officials, which begins with pretty maximum boldness: "Defendant Elon Musk is not, legally, the President of the United States, nor is he a federal elected official of any kind. And Mr. Musk is not a Senate-confirmed officer of the United States. But he and his so-called 'Department of Government Efficiency' (DOGE)—not, in fact, a federal executive department—are lawlessly and unconstitutionally wielding sweeping power across the executive branch. As Mr. Musk and DOGE lawlessly seize power over large swaths of federal spending, decimate the federal workforce, and dismantle federal agencies, they are severely harming, and threatening further imminent harm, to everyday Americans."

The suit goes on to talk about the harm being done to national parks, including national historical sites important to Asian American history. We in this country love our national parks, which have sometimes been called America's best idea. They're maybe the most uncontroversial, most visible, most beloved part of the federal government, and they're under attack. People demonstrated at a whole lot of them last week--all over the country, including Arizona and Utah. A whole new group called the Resistance Rangers organized them (made up of, apparently, hundreds of former park rangers).

A whole lot more people are looking for things they can do – and if you don't join Indivisible (or organize your own chapter) or Third Act or look to Tesla Takedown or the Resistance Rangers or a local group, just remember a handful of people with a few signs in a public place is a protest, and the smaller your community the larger your impact is likely to be. And that pressuring elected officials, donating to groups like the ACLU, and other means of activism are also available to a lot of us, and just speaking up and not letting the truth get buried under lies matters. A huge percent– ultimately all of us--in this country are impacted by the destruction of a functional federal government and the attack on a whole lot of stuff we love and need, from reliable weather reports to public health to science research to sane international relations. In a way, Trump and Musk may be building the broadest coalitions this country has ever seen, or at least giving us the basis for such coalitions by injuring and outraging almost everyone.

Monday, I was at a Tesla protest on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, holding one end of my #defenddemocracy banner, when I fell into conversation with a retiree who'd come up from the coast to join in. We got to talking and he asked aloud what I've heard a lot of people asking: what will it take, how can we stop them, when will the tide turn? If I knew, if we knew, they'd know, and they'd know how to stop it. Well maybe they wouldn't because this is the stupid coup, headed by the declining Donald and the disordered Elon, who don't seem to get that their power is far from boundless and we have power too. They are already unpopular, and their actions have outraged and hurt huge portions of the population, so they're recruiting, but for the opposition.

Still, we don't know, and that's okay. We don't know exactly how much is enough, what outrage will light a fuse or what catalyst will civil society together. But we know a lot about how nonviolent direct action works and how civil society has, through largely nonviolent mass movements, toppled dictators and pushed back on coups successfully, again and again. Just last year we saw the Assad regime crumble after half a century of authoritarian and than a decade of brutal civil war. We saw what began in Bangladesh in June of 2024 as a protest of about 500 students led to a brutal government crackdown; the backlash against that led to regime collapse and the flight of the country's undemocratic ruler in August. We live in what has been an exceptionally stable country, but it's just been destabilized. In that instability is possibility--not to return to the world of January 19th, 2025, but to something other than this rampage of hate and destruction, this oligarchs against everything coup. If we seize it.

We know lots about how to prepare and build and organize and how important it is to do those things. We understand the physiology of blockades and strikes and occupations and uprisings, remember how and when they've worked before. But in the end, it's mysterious--somehow the situation becomes more intolerable or people become less willing to tolerate it, somehow people gather in larger and larger groups, somehow civil society acquires momentum and the opposition reaches a tipping point, somehow what looked solid crumbles, somehow the people in power become powerless, and the power of the public becomes irresistible. No one knows in advance how and when. We have work to do, and I see some of it being done. We have to do a lot more, and we have to do it wholeheartedly, and we have to do it not knowing exactly what it will take.

But we know how to prepare for it. How to form affinity groups or other tightknit in-person groups of people that trust each other and can support each other. How to build networks of such people. How to prepare for civil disobedience, for those of us ready to cross that threshold. How to think about where the pressure points are and how to apply that pressure. How to reach out to people who might not have agreed with us during the election but have been harmed or alarmed or outraged by what's going on now. How to build coalitions and invite people in.

How to hold onto our principles, to never lose sight of what we love and who we are and intend to be even if we're told we don't exist or don't have rights or don't have anything in common with others who are being attacked or face consequences for defending the vulnerable. I mentioned Syria and Bangladesh. Those people suffered far worse, far longer, than most of us in this country have or will, and part of what keeps me going is remembering those who kept the faith during dictatorships and death squads, from Guatemala to Czechoslovakia. I don't know when this regime will end or how, but I know that it will, and that we have a role to play in that and whatever comes after.

p.s. I might be showing my age, but "People Get Ready" by Curtis Mayfield turns sixty this year, and it's still a rousing song (and you can take its theology metaphorically; I did when I made it the title of this essay.). Here's a video of it and here's the opening stanza.

People get ready, there's a train a-comin'

You don't need no baggage, you just get on board

All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'

Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord

p.p.s. The War Resisters League published the classic handbook on nonviolent organizing and it's a free download (or a modest cost for the paper version) here (screenshot of part of the table of contents below): https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/handbook-for-nonviolent-campaigns/

True Joy in Life,  George Bernard Shaw

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature, instead of a selfish, feverish little clod of ailments and  grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me, it is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.