"Didn't you know how bad things were up there? Don't you even care that the cops were using tear gas, nerve gas, and rubber bullets?" she exclaimed.
"Um, bad?" was the best response I could muster.
The truth of the matter was, I really hadn't paid much attention that 40,000 or more people had converged on a distant city to disrupt a meeting of businessmen who were hell-bent on exploiting the world. I simply didn't care. That's what people do: the Big-Wigs scheme to use others for their own gain, and the youth, influenced by those who claim to be in the know, gather en-masse and get the crap beat out of them.
"Jeez, no kiddin'? What a trip!" I responded honestly, but without much emotion.
I had to admit to myself, I was apathetic about WTO. From start to finish, it was just this thing that happened like many other things that happen throughout the world that I choose not to concern myself with. The list seems endless. Yet, apathy is a pretty strong word to use to describe myself. How then, knowing that my life is about activism, could I live with my apathy?
The world I was born into was out of control, in the grip of forces that were beyond my reach. I was ten years old when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. Daily, for weeks on end, we'd "duck and cover," practicing how to protect ourselves (!) in the event of nuclear attack. Once a week we'd have what I'd call "Hellfire Drills" where we'd be directed to silently file down into our concrete bunker-like basement and await an all-clear signal, which, depending upon the sadism factor of the nuns that day, would come quickly or excruciatingly slowly. Every day for years, the noon air-raid sirens wailed and the radio regularly blared out an ominous tone, followed, at its cessation, by the message, "The foregoing was a test. If this had been an actual emergency, you would have been advised where to seek shelter."
"IF!" One never knew. And I, who had little knowledge or understanding of the forces that placed my life in jeopardy, had to make a decision: How much would I be willing to allow things outside of my immediate environment to affect me? I opted to follow the directive of Alfred E. Neuman, the gap-toothed, floppy-eared, freckle-faced cover boy for Mad Magazine who exclaimed, "What, Me Worry?!" I figured if my life could be whooshed away from me in the blink of any eye, I might as well enjoy it while I had it. Let everything else take care of itself. Do you wonder for a second about my attitude about the wonderful fiasco past called Y2K?
Mass movements--which formed so much of the social environment that affected me--had a soullessness, mindlessness, and lack of personal connection to them that was stupefying. My observation was that protest against the status quo (which had once been a mass movement in itself, against the previous order) involved throwing waves and waves of largely nameless bodies against a foe, weakening it until a final ripple toppled it over and the organizers (who survived) basked in the glory and then became part of a new machine, but a machine just the same. Moving the world seemed such a strange enterprise.
Yet, I could not stand idly by. I chose to enter the human drama of people in need, right then, right there. There was something in me that called out to make my work personal. At first I worked in a nursing home, and then entered emergency medicine, which in the 1970s was in its infancy. Still, almost inadvertently, I found myself getting sucked in to a cause greater than myself.
At first, there was just me and my patients, yet I couldn't help noticing that there were people as close as the next block in neighboring, politically demarcated "service areas" who, trapped in an emergency, were dying needlessly because they received inadequate care. I found myself expanding my reach by influencing others in the towns nearby to support advanced medical care. I landed smack in the middle of such larger issues as status, economics, and race, and the venue to deal with those things was politics. As each year went by, I found myself taking larger stands amidst broader audiences in an attempt to standardize higher levels of emergency care.
In the process, I became more distant from the immediacy of the moment with my patient, as I became more and more absorbed and consumed by moving masses of others towards my perception of a Greater Good. After twelve years, I burned out--not on the work, but on the politics. I accomplished a lot, but I lost something important, too: the time and presence in the moment to sit quietly with a person in pain and help them to feel not so alone.
It was after this period of my life that I started to understand the difference between causes and people, and how, apathetic to a cause, I could still change the world a person at a time. How? I came to understand that destructiveness to ourselves, other people, or the environment was a by-product of lack of empathy coupled with lack of education. Without empathy, however, all the education in the world means nothing. The path that I took (or that took me, it's hard to tell) was in finding ways to ignite empathy in others. That could only be done person to person. The first individual to work on was myself. And the pathway to accomplish this was to learn to open my heart.
After about ten years of trial and error--and an equal investment in energy to become a person who could influence others without burning out in the process--this became a way of being, not a way of acting, moving, re-acting, changing, or affecting the people out of my immediate environment. It all had to do with my relationships in the moment--joining the people in my life in an experience of time that is vital and alive and not dependent on things over there or what happened or what will come.
The biggest gift of my life has been discovering that I can be a useful channel through which the healing process can express itself. The key to this has been to sharpen my skills by facing and working through my own pain and knowing my own universe intimately. My realization is that bringing this to people is about as high a form of activism as I can find in my life, because in order to do so, I have to invest everything.
Russ Reina is Lost Valley's Conference Coordinator. He assists regularly in Naka-Ima as part of the "Kipuka" program, which is focused on building mastery in working with others to help them remove blocks to their living fully in the moment.
©2000* Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2000
Volume 10, Number 2
Politics, Change, and Ecology