A better world

A mixed bag of inputs this morning. I’m still knackered from all the 4 am wakeups lately, and I can feel my low tolerance levels.

Still, after bulk Ariane from Xanthe on the way to her very last high school exam (!), I neutralised the pop with a few good podcasts. Ever reliable Krista Tippet had someone new on (at least for me). Adrienne Maree Brown is technically an activist for a better world, but her thought patterns are far broader and wiser than just that.

Here’s the transcript:

adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life | The On Being Project

“…we’re in an imagination battle…and I think about it often; that we live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told it’s scarce. And then we’re given all these stories of scarcity. And because of that scarcity, we have to fight each other constantly. We live in a world where there’s actually no superiority based on what we’re born into, whether it be skin, sexuality, gender, any of that, but someone has imagined superiority, and someone has imagined it into a structure that we now all assuming is reality.”

“So, so much of the work for me, of radical imagination is: what does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there, not causing harm to each other, and experiencing abundance? And what — how do we make it compelling? Is it — do we tell the right kind of story?”

Later she speaks of fractals, as it relates to humans. The patterns high up (eg democracy in government) should be based on similar democracy at a low level (eg a household, a village); otherwise, it’s hollow and brittle, and people will not value it and care for it. Right now, that’s happening.

On Transformative Justice:

“It’s not the edges, it’s like what’s at the core, the root, the essence of it. And so for me, when I speak about transformative, it’s like, I don’t want to dance around on the surface, rearranging deck chairs. I want to get down into the root system and really understand what’s happening and what it would take to create a change if a change is needed. So for example, we have a crisis of sexual assault, a crisis of sexual harm. I don’t want to be in a situation where we punish one person at a time, which doesn’t seem to have worked at all, in terms of eliminating the problem, and yet we continue doing it and building bigger and bigger prison systems and jails and other stuff, but it’s not stopping the problem.”

Still processing it all….