Good conversation yesterday with friends at Sweet Breads for lunch. Among the topics was how to communicate and bring disparate philosophies into comity if not agreement. I tend to agree that a culture is transformed gradually, one by one through discourse and likely fully by no other way. Simple oppression of one viewpoint is only to, in isolation, incubate its expansion to extremes and inevitably its resurrection.
As a citizen of the human community, I see my role, indeed obligation, to at the least be as a firefly among the millions; perhaps carrying the hope of my message being noticed by another to come together and separate, each changed by the experience.
Just the fact of being among the visible lights however not only succors loneliness but reinforces sense of community. I can’t speak for others, but my own experience when observing the first (and still now) images of the earth at night from space brings a deeply felt awe and comfort at the evidence of other life.
In our table conversation I think it was not altogether welcome when the suggestion of existence of powers opposing transformation and comity was introduced; the notion that conditions may dictate the need for bonfires also. I find myself awkward in trying to frame the language of “political” activism and movement and was grateful to find Kit O’Connell’s article on FiredogLake bringing clarity and affirmation.
3 Ways Movements Spread Nonviolent Civil Disobedience
It is really well worth the read
[...] noted in Friday’s essay, the topic of how to communicate with and soften fixed views, which can be called nothing other [...]