Art, Activism, Inspiration, and Muffins

Talk for Sidore Lecture Series at Plymouth State University, NH

October, 2008

 

How many of you guys played pattycake as a kid?  You know, hands clapping up down, etc…  Ok, well here today, we’re going to start off by playing a little pattycake.  And if you think that this is a game for 8 year old girls…think again.  We’re talking EXTREME PATTYCAKE here.

Rules:

  1. Everyone Participates

  2. No talking

  3. If all else fails, improvise

What if the goal of pattycake were to, say, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?  Think about that for a sec.  If we could get this pattycake right, we could reverse global warming.  Now try it. 

Obviously, pattycake won’t solve our problems.  But this little exercise mirrors the path we have to take in the work we need to do in the world. 

 

    • Get as many people as you can together for a common purpose

    • Have a strong investment in outcome

    • Overcome shyness, embarrassment, lack of rhythm

    • Crazy ideas and risks might net unexpected results and insights

    • Need to listen, look each other in the eye and work together

    • Work with what you have – even if you’re clapping in the air

 

At this point, you might be wondering: yeah, but where did the title of this talk come from?  Art, Activism, Inspiration, and Muffins?

 

Well, we’re a world that needs to see some action.  On a lot of fronts.  And action’s more fun when it’s fun.  I just saw

U23D up in Montreal, and THAT was a perfect example of the marriage of art, activism, and an insanely good time.  Although after seeing it, I have to admit that it is possible to get too close up to Bono.  At least when he’s 60 feet high in 3D. 

 

Now, I should back up a moment.  When you start talking about activism, it means that you’re talking about addressing some problem in the world.  And one of the hardest things to deal with in life is to take in the cold, bottom-line truth about how challenging most issues are, how many immediate crises need your direct attention, and how difficult it seems to succeed.  Particularly now, given the global scope of most of the challenges we’re facing.  And it’s important to know what’s going on and instill in yourself and others a sense of genuine urgency and responsibility.

 

But how do you do that without depressing people so badly they’ll just shut down on you?  What?  Global climate crisis?  Advancing tropical diseases?  Oceans rising?  Mass extinctions?  Hand me the Haagen-Dazs, I’m going to bed.  Overwhelm and burnout are very, very easy things to fall into. 

 

Perfect example of complete burnout was Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq.  She got involved in, and became a leader in the movement to end the war.  She bought a piece of land in Crawford, Texas, called it Camp Casey, and demanded to talk to Bush.  Ultimately, she ran out of money, damaged her health and her personal relationships, and gave up, very publically, in an open letter to America, where she said:

"I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

 

Good-bye America…you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it."

Nobody teaches you how to be an activist.  You get involved, like Cindy, because there’s something you care about, and you feel like you’ve got to give your whole life to the cause because it seems so urgent. 

 

But the world (and any cause) is far bigger and much more resilient than you are.  You’re quite small, and pretty finite in your energies, and no matter the urgency, if you give everything you’ve got, I can guarantee you you’ll have nothing left, and the need will still be there.

 

So what do you do?  For yourself and for anyone else you’re trying to activate?

 

You engage your imagination, your sense of fun/hope/creativity/possibility.  You learn as much as you can about the problem, but still try and keep the right kind of ignorance – you keep away from the knowledge that what has to be done is impossible. 

 

As Milo, the main character in The Phantom Tollbooth is told at the end of his unlikely journey:

“There was one very important thing about your quest that we couldn’t discuss until you returned…It was impossible.  Completely impossible.  But if we’d told you then, you might not have gone.  And as you’ve discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.”

Because who really knows what’s possible?  History is chock full of people – known and unknown - doing totally impossible things.  Revolutionary, audacious, transformational – and true.  It’s true that a slaveship captain woke up one day, realized that there were people in the hold of his ship, and turned the boat around.  He took them all home.  And then he wrote the hymn Amazing Grace.

 

It’s true that an Indian lawyer from South Africa peacefully freed India from colonial British rule (that would be Gandhi).  It’s true that Wangari Matthai won the Nobel prize for planting trees.  It’s true that a French tightrope walker, Philippe Pettit danced his way across a wire strung between the towers of the World Trade Center (which is not political, but it’s totally cool).  It’s true that a bunch of tree sitters in California saved a Redwood forest from being clearcut.  It’s true that after 20 years of military rule and two civil wars, Liberia just elected a female president, Ellen Johnson Surleaf.  

 

Now, I don’t want you thinking I’m naïve here. It’s also true that the world is complex and messy and full of rapacious,

dishonest, violent, and/or just plain stupid people who create logjams so choked and insane that it seems impossible to work your way out of them. 

 

So, it’s absolutely necessary that you cultivate healthy cynicism, a head for strategy, and a deep understanding of the world and its processes. But at the same time, you still need to figure out how to engage without becoming bitter, despondent, and so cynical that you’re paralyzed.  Or drunk. 

 

Personally, I think that means you need to become the most effective, creative, and – most importantly – hopeful activists you can [and to be perfectly honest, I don’t like being called an activist – I think of what I’m doing as responsible citizenship].  

 

And you can call me – as someone on my mailing list recently did, a Hopium Toker, but I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with hope.  I think hope is vital.  Hope is what gets you out of bed in the morning.  As the French proverb goes: “Hope is the dream of a soul awake.”  Or, as Goethe said, “In all things it is better to hope than to despair.”  And he was German.

 

Or a more muscled discussion of hope comes from the amazing Howard Zinn, who said:

 

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction."  

 

So what cultivates hope?  Art, for one. You tell engaging, inspiring, entertaining stories.  You create beautiful, disturbing, thought-provoking images.  You speak the truth of the world as it is, and then the truth of the world as you want it to be.  Or like I saw the boys do in U23D, you rock peoples’ hearts to a totally different vibrational level.  Really, whatever it takes.

Artists can be the living soul of a culture.  Though that idea can provoke an interesting debate when artists actually start participating in some aspect of the political process.  Like when movie starts get involved in a cause, the public reaction often runs along the lines of what do a bunch of dumb actors know? 

 

While, as an actor myself, this normally infuriates me, I will allow for making fun of Harrison Ford waxing his chest hair to demonstrate the pain of tropical deforestation.  That was just silly. 

 

But really, if artists are just dumb and harmless, then why, when fascism strikes, are we first up against the wall?  Why were so many actors and writers and musicians and painters vilified by the House on Unamerican Activities Committee?  Why was folk singer Victor Jara murdered during the 1973 military coup in Chile?  Why did Hitler ban van Gogh, Chagall, and Picasso?

 

The truth is, we’re not harmless, and we’re not dumb.  As Susan Sarandon said, “People should fear art, film, and theatre. This is where ideas happen. This is where somebody goes into a dark room and starts to watch something and their perspective can be completely questioned...the very seeds of activism are empathy and imagination.”  In other words, we’re potent and powerful and dangerous in a wonderful, world-changing way.

 

It’s something I became convinced of following my experience as Co-Founder of the Lysistrata Project.  In early 2003, right before the US attacked Iraq, my friend Sharron Bower and I organized over 1000 simultaneous readings of the ancient Greek anti-war comedy Lysistrata in 59 countries and all 50 US states, on 6 continents. 

 

Lysistrata, by the way, tells the story of the women of Greece ending a war by denying sex to their husbands until the men quit fighting.  It’s a tactic which has also been used in the real world to great effect, and the mere idea of a sex strike tends to freak out anyone suffering from what I call “Old White Man Syndrome.”  

 

The act of reading a play as a protest was important, in that it gave people who were disinclined to march in the streets or write letters to the editor or call their congressperson a means of expressing themselves in a way which felt both pointed and playful, but still entirely non-confrontational.  Lysistrata Project participants also felt their voice multiplied exponentially by the thousands of other people doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.  And, it was fun.  As our director in NY put it, “Nobody can resist an ancient Greek dick joke.”

 

Now, in a recent edition of Yes Magazine, the editors posed the question: “What happens when we throw off the invisible chains that keep us from realizing the world we want—when we, as they say in the global south, decolonize our minds?”  That’s a wonderful question, but we’ve also got to consider exactly how that happens.  How do we learn to see the invisible chains, rattle them, throw them off, and then how do we know what kind of a world it is that we want?

 

Here, I think, is the greatest purview of the artist.  And it happens on a couple different levels.  Art shows us the world as it is, allows us to see ourselves, our whole selves, in infinite shades of dark and light.  Art reflects ourselves back to us in an intense, highly concentrated, extremely potent, and sneakily digestible form.  Often, we relate to what we’re seeing and hearing in a work of art long before we recognize our actual selves reflected back.  We get surreptitiously trapped in a vision of truth.  And once we see, it’s very difficult to un-see.  It’s hard to walk away unchanged.

 

Beyond that, art allows us to imagine the world as it could be.  It’s vital to be able to do that, to give a hopeful, inspired vision to move towards, rather than just a raging, dark fear from which to run. 

 

That’s all pretty heady, so let me give you a concrete example, in the form of Edi Rama, Mayor of Tirana, Albania.  After the fall of Albania’s super-insane Communist regime, Tirana was destroyed in civil unrest, the people ruined financially in pyramid schemes.  The place was a bombed-out disaster zone.  Barely habitable.  Edi Rama, who happened also to be a painter, took a look at his broken, hopeless, beloved metropolis, and what did he do? 

 

He started painting blocks of color on the sides of buildings.  Primary colors.  Like creating a city-sized Mondrian.   And it started to change things.  He said that the colors weren’t dress, they were organs.  And they changed the conversations in the street and at the cafes.  Changed the level of responsibility people felt about their home.  Changed them from victims into…something else.  He said:

 “To go from a city of destiny to a city of choice is, in itself, a kind of utopia.”  Edi Rama, in an act of faith, bound by a covenant of love for his city, hit a home run miracle of hope with color. 

And there’s another important piece of information.  The best reason to do the work you’re doing is to do it for love.  You’ll be angry, you’ll be sad, you’ll be scared.  Those things will often get you going.  But the long term motivation ultimately has to be love because it’s the one thing which won’t burn you out, and which never runs out.  It’s the ultimate in renewable fuel. 

 

Speaking of fuel, I bet you’re wondering about the muffins.  Well, when Virginia Fisher first called and asked if I’d come do this talk, I told her I’d do anything, including making you guys muffins.  Because I’d just discovered this great banana muffin recipe and I was dying to share it with someone.

 

That’s another part about not burning out.  It’s about taking time to nurture and nourish yourselves and each other.  You can’t take care anyone else – at least not for long – if you don’t take care of yourself.  And you can’t take care of others if you don’t see yourself in them.  If you don’t believe with all your heart that they’d love your favorite muffins as much as you do.  Banana or wheat allergies aside.

 

You all know, deep in your soul, that we are all the same, that there is no fundamental difference between you and a Kung bushman or a Chinese factory worker or a Romanian orphan or a Saudi oil magnate or a Berkeley hippie or a movie star who thinks a public chest wax is a high form of political protest.  

 

It’s so easy to forget.  So easy to vilify someone who has become, for whatever reason, The Other.  So easy to allow ourselves to think that somehow, just because a bad thing happened to someone “other” than you, in another part of the world, that their pain is not as great.  Or that someone “other” than you who has done something you deem horrible is somehow less human.  Less deserving of compassion.  But it’s not true.  Nobody starts out wanting to hurt other people, wanting to rape and kill, wanting to blow up the world.  They get to that place from overwhelming despair, crushing poverty, lack of education, extreme ideology, lack of hope.

 

I don’t even think anyone starts out wanting to be, say, an oil executive raking in 10 billion in quarterly profits while most people can barely afford to drive to work or a bank executive who gets millions in bonuses while his industry crumbles around his ankles and thousands of people go bankrupt.  I think something happens along the way: a calcification of compassion and an absorption idea that the acquisition of wealth is, somehow, the noblest effort of all.

 

That doesn’t mean you don’t want a great life for yourself.  Of course you do.  You want some combination of love and peace and satisfaction and accomplishment and good friends and chocolate and mountains and football and yoga and sex and TIVO…

 

But at the same time, you have got to keep your conscience open and ask yourself if anyone is suffering as a result of your actions, as a result of you getting what you want?  Are you gaining success or joy or designer jeans or cool toys at someone else’s direct expense?  Or at the world’s expense?

 

If you are (and most of us are, because that’s the way the current system works), then it’s a problematic bargain to make – and it exacts a cost on all of us.  It engenders a kind of chronic, low grade fear that at some point, we might find ourselves on the wrong side of the equation.

 

And when you’re living in fear, you’re in a perpetual state of fight or flight.  You’re operating from your brain stem, your lizard brain, and when you’re in Lizard Brain Mode, you end up making fear-based, short-term choices, which you might not ordinarily make if you were operating from your higher, more mature self.  Like electing a lizard president.  No offense to lizards.

 

So, you have got to keep your mind sharp.  Your critical faculties polished and tuned.  And most importantly, tuned upon yourself.

 

You’ve got to ask yourself: What am I doing to alleviate suffering and to support the healthy continuation of all life on the planet?  Are you a citizen of – to be extreme about it – are you a citizen of your ego or are you a citizen of the world?  Are you driven by love or fear? 

 

And I know that most people are deeply uncomfortable with even considering, much less speaking up about their fears and their passions.  But quite honestly, I say unto you: fuck it.

 

The ice caps are melting and the number of dead zones in the oceans are increasing and 2.7 billion people in the world live on less than $2/day and animals are going extinct at a rate we haven’t seen in 65 million years and we’re just getting through eight years of an administration which will go down in history as one of the most criminally rapacious, amoral, and self-serving the country has ever seen, and who knows what we could be heading into.  We’re really long past time to worry about embarrassing ourselves in front of our peers.

 

But scary as this time is, also know this: as fast as things seem to be falling apart, exponential growth works both ways.  We can move from living deeply unsustainable lives to living in harmony with the planet and each other with blinding swiftness.  And the faster we choose sustainability, in all its forms, the sooner it happens.  As sustainability pioneer Alan AtKisson says:

“The real basis for hope lines in our willingness to take on this challenge – this responsibility – as one of the central guiding principles in our lives.”

So I want to hear from you guys right now.  Raise your hand, tell me what you're committed to working on, and I'll toss you a muffin.

 

And one last thing to remember: You might fail.  You might fail at the first try and the 10th and the 100th.  You might fail at saving the very thing you love most in the world.  But don’t stop trying.  Howard Zinn says social movements fail a lot before they succeed.

 

Or I think all the time about that moment at the end of The Two Towers when the Nazgul are attacking Osgiliath, and Sam says to Frodo that there’s still some good in the world, and it’s worth fighting for.  Or like they say in Galaxy Quest, “Never give up, never surrender.”

 

So find out what you love – figure out how to serve – and go for it with all the magic and determination in your heart.  Support each other.  Have hope.  Be revolutionarily creative.  And enjoy the muffins.