“Action of belief created the action of accomplishment.”
In this episode, Nick speaks with Shel Horowitz about his lifelong journey of activism, from childhood to leading community campaigns. Shel offers practical advice on how anyone can start making a difference in their own way and how small actions can lead to big change.
Shel helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good—creating and marketing profitable products, services, and MINDSETS that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. He’s also a lifelong activist and is working on his 11th book for elders who want to be activists.
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelhorowitzethicalmarketer/
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Hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. Today on the show, we have Shel Horowitz. Shel, how are you doing today?
Great, Nick. How about you?
Good man. I’m excited you’re here. We do know each other from networking and having different conversations. And when we first started talking before we hit record, I was like, how long have we known each other? Because it feels like it’s been a little while, like maybe a year or longer, because we’ve had conversations, but I think it’s just because we’ve already had in-depth conversations. In-depth, excited that you’re here. Why don’t you get us started? Tell us what you do for a living and what’s one thing most people don’t know about you that’s maybe a little odd or bizarre.
Thank you. Well, I help people find their unique sweet spot where business profitability intersects environmental and social good. So I’ve braided together the two halves of my life, the marketer and the activist. And one thing that people probably don’t know about me is that while I if people say when did you become an activist, I generally answer: age twelve, when I went to a Vietnam War rally in
I heard a little piece of information that shocked me and basically broke everything I thought I knew about how our government worked, which was that the Vietnam War was an undeclared war. I’m like, holy crap! I didn’t know that. Bam! Checks and balances, you know, out, down it came. But the thing that most people don’t know is that before that, way before that, when I was about three.
I took an activist action without thinking of myself as an activist. My parents were throwing a party, and all their friends were in their living room smoking and leaving their cigarette packages on the cigarette and other things, and I, at three, knew that I didn’t want to be breathing that shit.
So I was crawling around under the table taking people’s packs of cigarettes and smashing the cigarettes in half. So that was my one toddler action, and then I didn’t do anything more as an activist until another nine years, which was still pretty early. I’m actually working on a book right now, and I’ve done talks about activism at any age. And the book is aimed mostly at people who want to be an activist when they’re 16 and above. But it’s gonna have older sections on youth activists and about how
age and youth can work together, and I have come across several activists who, sometime between six and ten,n got their start. So it’s never too early. And then on the other end of things, I have had the privilege of going to two different women’s hundredth birthday parties who were still activists and who used their birthdays to increase social change.
So awesome. I want us to pause real quick t, though. Let’s talk about it by itself, because people that listen to the show are smart enough to understand that they know most things, but we all kind of create our own definition of what that looks like. So somebody might think activism is just somebody out there yelling with a picket sign or something, or it’s somebody standing by a stream, or it could be something totally different. If somebody were to say to you, like, well, I don’t get what you’re saying, what really is activism? Like, let’s start at the core of that. What is it?
Well, it’s going to be different for different people because there have been at least three hundred and forty-nine identified nonviolent tactics of social change. The first one hundred and ninety-eight were by a man named Gene Sharp, and then somebody who I actually met this summer added another hundred and fifty or so. And so for some people it’s holding the sign, and that could be one person, it could be three people on a bridge brigade, it could be
A million people protested at Trump’s inauguration. There’s no definition. But the idea is that you are there; there’s an action that makes it better. And there are a gazillion ways to do it. As I said, you could be one of those people that writes postcards and letters or sends texts around to people to get them to vote, or you could be lobbying your elected officials, and I shouldn’t say or, I should say and because none of these things exclude any of the others.
And there’s just so much creativity in the movement. It’s really great. So the only thing they really all have in common is that you’re working, usually with other people, but sometimes alone, for social change and environmental good. And sometimes that takes the form, for example, of scientific research. You can be an activist in making the solutions possible that can curtail catastrophic climate change.
So activism can mean many different things to many different people because there are, you know, almost three hundred and fifty documented types of tactics that activists can use. And they range from holding a sign, or you can do that yourself, or you can do that with a million people,e or anywhere in between. One of the things that’s gotten very common in these last couple of years is bridge brigades, which you can really do with like two or three people and a banner.
I have done some actions where it was just me out on the street with a sign, but I’ve also been part of actions with a million people. I was a peacekeeper at one of those. That was really exciting. I got to help March turn a corner and watch a million people go by all for the same cause. That’s some. But it can also be writing letters and postcards, sending text alerts to get people out to vote, and doing scientific research to make solutions possible.
There’s no limit to creativity. The only thing they all have in common is that the purpose is making the world better. And that’s broad. And you know, it’s a long history, too. If there is a documented instance of nonviolent civil disobedience in the book of Exodus. I think there’s the very first chapter of the book of Exodus, where the midwives, Shifra and Puah, tell the Pharaoh.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s very broad.
Who has ordered them to kill the Hebrew male children as they’re born. We’re so sorry, Pharaoh. We just can’t get there in time. These Hebrew women, they give birth so fast, and then, you know, they’re already nursing the baby. We can’t just grab it out of their hands and kill them. So right there in the Bible is this proud history going back more than three thousand years.
Hmm. If only the people that say they read the Bible subscribe to that. So I think it’s interesting to think about activism just from that broad perspective, because and that’sSo I asked you to, like, just define it, because it is so broad in so many ways that I think sometimes we look at things where we think it has to be a certain way. Like,e I bring up creativity a lot, and there are different people that have told me in the past, I’m not creative at all; I don’t know how to draw.
Or I don’t play guitar, or I don’t do this. But then you watch the way they work, and they are just maestros when it comes to creativity in project management or whatever they do, even if it’s managing your kids. Like I see husbands and wives and, like,ke little families and stuff managing their little army of kids. And like three or four of them are like nine too many for me. So I’m like, what do you do? How do you do all that? But that’s all for sure. I’m sure it does. And again, like.
It does get better with practice. I have two who are now in their thirties.
In all reality, like one or two is fine. But also, like, they’re not mine. So somebody else takes your kids back, you know? But if somebody else has all this and they know how the creative process works, some of it is just like, I look at it this way, and it should be this. Like activism. It should be what I’m used to seeing in the movies or what I’m told it is. I should stand out there with a picket or whatever. And also, based even on this broad perspective of it, it sounds like it’s more of whatever you do at home.
How you do those little things, like taking the cigarettes from people and breaking their cigarettes and being like, you don’t need these damn things, or even just putting your foot down. So I think of people who are kind of working through differences within politics, let’s say, if they live in a house with certain different people and are trying to find a medium, or, like, a middle ground to be able to have a conversation with them. And this sounds like one of those things where that’s activism to them. They may not be going out and standing with a hundred billion people.
They put their foot down right there. So how, yeah.
It absolutely could be, especially if it’s done in a way that values the humanity of the person you’re disagreeing with. You know, nothing gets done by yelling at other people and calling them names. And this is something that, yeah, right, there’s that Monty Python skit from the Holy Grail. I just thought about that. But you know, anytime you’re in that situation, the more de-escalating you can do, the more listening you can do, the more you can find.
Common ground even with somebody who might be you’re not finding common ground with them about their racism, but you can find common ground about the class oppression that led to that racism, perhaps. You know, or you can find ways of building bridges. I’m part of an organization called Braver Angels; that’s a left-right dialogue group specifically. And I’ve done other kinds of initiatives like that over the years. As a Jew, I have been in dialogue groups with Muslims about the Middle East.
We do not have a lot of common ground in what we want to have the outcome to be, or even about the tactics, but we have a lot of common ground about what is wrong with that picture. And they’re very interesting conversations. And also it’s hard to keep hatred in your heart when you’re breaking bread with somebody and discussing things as two civil human beings. And that civility is something we
It seems to have gone away, and both the left and the right spend all their time screaming at each other, and you’re not gonna convince anybody by screaming at you. This is a very different kind of activism from the public protest. But as you said, living in a house with people who disagree with you, you could be an activist on a one-on-one basis. And that work is crucial. That’s the thing about all of it; it’s crucial. Yeah, you can’t do all of it. So you have to pick your own lane.
or lanes. It has been over fifty-three years since I went to that demonstration. Sorry, fifty-seven years since I went to that demonstration in nineteen sixty-nine. I have done a lot of different types. I’ve done electoral politics, I’ve done grassroots, I’ve done door knocking, I have done big protests, little protests, l letters to my politicians, letters to the editor, meeting with politicians, and meeting with news editors. On and on it goes. there’s
And there are plenty of things that I haven’t really gotten involved with, like I haven’t done fundraising particularly. It’s not where I want to put my energy. It’s an important piece. But one thing is looking. Sometimes you look for causes, a nd sometimes they come to you. I’m gonna just walk the computer over to my window for a moment and show you the view out my window, because you will see a little mountain there.
Very tall, just 942 feet. That is Skinner State Park, also known as Mount Holyoke, for which the college, three miles down the road, is named. And the mountain next to that one is where a developer in 1999 suggested to the planning board in my town that he be allowed to build a massive McMansion housing project going all the way to the top.
Visible from the top of that state park, ruining the view and ruining the traffic in the neighborhood, ruining a whole lot of stuff. And what got me to act was not actually the proposal. It was later in the article when they started interviewing some of the local environmental experts. And they all had variations on, this is terrible, but there’s nothing we could do. And like, what the F do you mean there’s nothing we can do? Of course there’s something we can do. So I did it.
I organized a movement. I called the first meeting. I flew around the neighborhood. I put press releases out in the local papers and local radio stations. And I thought, thirty people will come, and we’ll make, you know, a working group that’ll probably be five, maybe even ten people if we’re lucky. And we’ll make the developer’s life increasingly miserable until five years from now he’s gonna give up. Well
Seventy people jammed themselves into my dining room. I do not live in a McMansion. Literally, to get to the bathroom, I had to walk, you know, step here, big step there, not stepping on anybody, trying not to lose my balance. It was like 10 minutes to get to the bathroom because it was that crowded. People were sitting on my wood stove. Fortunately, it was a warm night. It was not running. People were sitting on my bay window ledge. and
35-ish people got involved. And another 30 called and said, I can’t make that meeting. I want to be involved. Over the course of the campaign, at least on the level of signing a petition, putting up a lawn sign or a bumper sticker, we had more than a thousand people involved. Now, mind you, I live in a town of 5,000. Okay, so having a thousand people involved, even the whole town has got like 200,000 people. So that’s incredible. And we
We won so fast that we were unprepared for victory organizationally. We won that campaign in 13 months flat. And I didn’t have a plan B for what to do if we won and how to keep people involved. And the organization withered and died. And I will never make that mistake again. But we still have the key contacts. I still see a lot of those people. I run into them at the farmers market or at concerts.
And I know that if I needed to mobilize them again, I could do it. Other than the ones who’ve died or moved away, they’d all be involved. Some of them might be in walkers or wheelchairs by now. But you know, it’s so, but the way we won was a complete surprise to me. It was not that we had the legal committee that we had organized kept saying, Trust us, we got this. And we said, Okay, we trust you. And the campaign started in November.
And the following December, and again, I had no idea as the founder and publicity co-chair of the organization, I had no idea any of this was going on behind the scenes, except that the legal committee had something they were working on. What they were working on was getting the state to take the land by a friendly eminent domain from the landowner, who had not yet actually sold it to the developer. She had a purchase and sale agreement. They had to figure out how to vacate that agreement and let the state take title. She was happy because they paid her double what the developer was going to pay.
We were happy because that land is protected forever. Basically, what was taking from March until December was working out how to do it legally. So our legal people and our lawyers were working with the state’s lawyers and this philanthropist lawyer who wrote a check for the state to buy the land. And she was attracted to us in March. The campaign started in December. So we were only four months in when we won, and we just didn’t know it yet.
So that’s, you know, the speed of that was just mind-boggling. I mean, you know, the Quakers decided in the seventeen fifties they were going to abolish slavery in the United States. When was slavery abolished? Eighteen sixty-three or eighteen sixty-five, if you’re waiting until Juneteenth came down to Texas.
Yeah. Yeah. And there’s still stuff that happens. And there’s still other countries. And yeah. my god. Yeah, absolutely. Some of them call their sons and daughters, you know. No, I’m just kidding. Like growing up, it’s like going out, and you gotta do all this stuff. I don’t mean to make a joke of that; it’s just one of those things where, lik,e we all have these little things that happ.en
Yeah, there’s still stuff there. Yes, and our own country too. There are plenty of illegal sweatshops.
And we have these little feelings and things that just then become what we’re used to, where people are used to doing a certain thing a certain way. And sometimes it takes somebody else to just step up and say, Hey, time out. Let’s actually look at this a little differently. And I want to point out that you said it was really fast. It’s been four months. The other slavery, just in general, too, ok I’d say 150 years, just roughly. So you’ve got four months and 150 years.
Both things took the time that it took. And there were movements and changes and all these things that happened, but it still started with somebody somewhere to say, hmm, something needs to happen differently. And what do we do? Most people, maybe not most people, because that’s a very blanket thing, especially for this. It seems like a lot of us, just in general, have a really hard time being that first one to just leave a party. We’re the first ones to go do a thing sometimes, like stand up and go do this or do that. Some people seem not to care at all, and they just.
Whatever, get up and go say, Hey, there’s a problem. We need to fix this. Other people don’t. They need that person to give them permission to leave the party. Like, I think that’s the most fun we can do because if somebody’s like, this is boring as hell, we all want to leave. Who’s the first one that’s going to leave? And then you see your friend go and go, Great, everybody’s by. All right, see you. And everybody’s gone in like 13 seconds. But it takes that one person to be able to start to make that trip. For you, it took you to say there’s something wrong with this, where other people said, No.
We can’t fix it. We can’t do anything. And it went so quickly because there was an aligned thought that other people had where they were like, we don’t want that. But because you stepped up and you stepped out to say something and to do something, they just all fell right in line. So if it wasn’t for you as the catalyst, yeah.
Yeah, it was a perfect storm. It was a perfect storm of, or really, a consensus movement. Consensus, not in the terms of organizational process, although we used that when we could, but in terms of the community did not want this project. And again, it was not the developer announcing the project that got me to start the organization. The red flag in front of the bull for me was the environmentalists who should have known better, saying there was nothing we could do.
Yeah. Yeah. And it still took you, then, going, I hear that, and I don’t believe it. And I’m going to step forward. Because if you didn’t, if you just bitched about it, you know, you just talked to your wife and you were like, Well, they said we can. I really wish there was something we could do, even like a week later out in the garden doing a thing, or like driving to the store, man, I really wish we could. How often do we as people do that? Where then, if we look and say, well, somebody else just stepped in and did it. The reason why I’m bringing all this up.
The whole point of the show is to be able to talk through how we discipline ourselves and how we find what’s aligned for us and pursue those. So if we think about this, this was aligned to you. When I think of activism, yeah, but even just activism in general, like some people are really heavy into, I have to go really deep and do all these things, and we have to go crazy, where other people will say that’s too much. I can’t do that. I have all these other things, or I don’t know how or what you have.
Yeah. It was very elastic. I’ve been an environmentalist since I was thirteen.
So the reason why I’m putting it that way is: how does somebody start small? How does somebody start with the activism even within their house or in their office with something that feels right to them or feels off, to make a change to that, to then lead them down the road where maybe at some point they’re leading, you know, that million-man march or something of that sort. But how do they get to the point where they start to allow other people to start too?
I think I’m gonna answer that question by talking about my journey around food, and then I want to go from there to the question of whether you take on the easy challenges or the hard ones at different times. So this will be a longish two-part answer here. So I became a vegetarian at 12. No, sorry, I decided to become a vegetarian at 12.
And I came home from this fishing trip where I did not want to kill the fish and came to the conclusion that if I wasn’t willing to kill my own meat, I shouldn’t ask anybody else to do it for me. And I said to my mom, I’m gonna be a vegetarian. Now I have to put this in the context that I was a runty kid; I was bullied a lot; I was not physically strong, and she said, No, you can’t do that; you stunt your growth. I didn’t have the internet to check. So I believed her. She was wrong, but I said, Okay, I’ll wait till I stop growing.
So four years later, I was 16, and I’m still very proud of myself that I kept this resolution that I made at age twelve and activated it at age 16. And I became a vegetarian. She’s like, but your cells are still growing. I said, That is not what I agreed to. I kept my part of the bargain. You’ll deal with it. She was never happy about it. She died in 2011. She was still never happy that I gave up meat. But too bad. And my my
Belly is clear evidence that she was wrong about the growth. It’s just in the wrong direction. But from there, as a new vegetarian, I went off to college a few weeks later. I was very young starting college and finished college at 19. And I didn’t really know anything about vegetarian cooking and not much about cooking at all.
So, I went to this school where my meals were provided by the dining hall. And I’ll come back to that in a minute. But first, two years later, I joined my first food co-op. And I didn’t do it because I cared about the food industry and the way it’s being perverted, and the way the foods that we eat are sometimes practically poisonous, and that this was just a way of getting good food cheap. So I had totally ulterior motives in joining my first food co-op.
But over the years, as I became versed in why those co-ops existed and what problems they were addressing, I became very committed to food justice. And one of the shapes that I took was at Antioch, where I went to college. One day the dining hall director put out the vegetarian meal of the day as baked beans with bacon. And so we vegetarians were quickly organizing.
To go into his office the next day to protest. And somehow the Trotskyists on campus got wind of it. And so they decided to join us. So you had, I don’t know, 15, 20 mild-mannered vegetarians, and then you had this loud bunch of commies yelling and screaming and, you know, carrying on about the working class. And we invaded the poor guy’s office. He was a good old boy from the South, and he didn’t know what had happened there, but he promised never ever to put meat in the vegetarian meal again. And so, you know, that was a situation where we were able to effect change with one action, one time. And I think we would have done it even without the Trotskyists, but it was certainly easier when this person was confronted with this extremely loud and unpleasant group in his face saying, You cannot do this. And some of them were big, burly people too. So, but I talked before about choosing movements not necessarily on the basis of how winnable they are. The Quakers probably didn’t perceive ending slavery as something that they were gonna accomplish in their lifetime, and they were right. And I have the Save the Mountain campaign on the one hand, where we won really quickly because we had the incredible support of the whole community. But I’ve also done a lot of work on immigration justice. For immigration justice work in the US in the Trump era, you don’t have victories. You have mitigations. You can make it better for a few individual people who are released from the hell holes. You can help provide support for the legal actions, but you can’t win this fight while Trump is in office. You can make life very difficult for them to do their jobs. You know, people, we saw in Minnesota how that resistance can really take shape.
But we also saw that ICE was willing to kill perfectly innocent people. And not everybody wants to put their life at risk. And I get that. I mean, to me, I figure I’m almost 70. I have done amazing things in my life. I’ve had a great life. If I die in the service of making a better world, I die. But I’m hoping not to. I would love to be in my hundreds and still be an activist like my two friends were. I would love to see my almost four-year-old grandson as a grown-up. I may or may not get to do that.
You know, I remember Navalny, the Russian who was killed by Putin in prison, basically said they might get me. But like many others before him, he said, but they can’t get the move.
And I think that’s a critical thing because it’s not always the stuff that we do right now, but we all look at it, and we want the immediate gratification of it. We want to know that we’re going to do a thing where we’re going to win. We don’t want to do a thing and get an L out of it. We wanna see it move; we wanna see it happen. And I know this is something I’ve actively struggled with over the past few years of, like, well, what if I just move the thing along and then die? And then somebody else comes along and picks it up at the right time with where things are. And yes, but that also, like, that’s separate from where we are as people to say, well, if I do a thing, I need to get a result out of it, which then ties back to the system that we talked about earlier. Because we’re all saying, well, we have to do and do and do, instead of saying, well, how do we just do with what we are, where we’re at right now, and just help with what we can and allow it to grow and see where it goes from there? Like you had no idea how quickly that thing was going to move with the mountain. And even for you to be like, I don’t think we’re gonna succeed. But what do you know?
Well, the mindset, like I know this is a show about mindset. I think what was key to our victory is that I went in with the mindset that we were going to win that one. I did think it would take five years and not four or thirteen months, depending on how you measure it. But I went in thinking that we could win. And I think because I went in with that attitude, we had better strategy and we had more participation and a lot of things fell into place.
Yeah. Well, that goes back even further, because that goes back to you going, No, I don’t believe that. When they were like that, we couldn’t do anything about it. And you’re like, No, that’s incorrect, because that’s where that happened. It was that catalytic moment where you go, not how I’m gonna handle this, and you marched on.
That’s correct. But that is interesting. Now I did have at that point twenty years of activism to draw on. But that’s still.
Sure. Yeah. That’s another beautiful point though, because a lot of people will say, like, how do you do the thing that you do? And it’s really based on all the time you spend doing these other things that cumulatively tie up to that. Like you know how to lead different groups because of the work you’ve done.
Yeah, yeah. But it’s not just me because there’s this long history. I mentioned the Old Testament before, but I was personally mentored by quite a few people who were activists in the nineteen thirties and forties. And so this was a tie to history that I happened to have. Dave Dellinger of the Chicago Seven was a friend of mine. Yeah, and I didn’t know who he was when he became my friend, and I researched him a little, like, my God, he’s a hero. And
He gave this incredible speech at a very small peace demonstration when I was living in Washington, DC. So that puts it in the spring of nineteen seventy-five. And I went up to him afterwards. It was a small enough demo that I could just walk right up and say, Man, that was great. And somehow we exchanged contact information, and he started a correspondence with me, sent me his most recent book, which is a very powerful book called Rev More Power Than We Know. And somewhere along the line I got his earlier book, Revolutionary Nonviolence.
And I was mentored by him; I was mentored by some people who’d been in the War Resistors League, conscientious objectors in the nineteen forties and World War Two. And that was an interesting war to be a CO because, like the Vietnam War, it was clearly an immoral war. But World War Two was really about preventing fascism; at least that’s what the message was that was getting to the people. There was a lot of stuff that you don’t hear about that was not so nice, and the way.
American corporations were not reined in in their assistance to the Nazis and the Italian fascists. And those are some ugly stories. And of course the whole internment of the Japanese, the whole, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff. Roosevelt was not a saint. I think Eleanor Roosevelt might have been. I wish she had been president. And if you ever are in the Hyde Park, New York area and you have to choose between going to her house or his, go to hers. It’s more interesting.
They’re right. They’re like two miles apart. You can do both in a day if you have enough time. It’s, you know, it’s just amazing. There’s such a rich I would strongly recommend people read a book called The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, who I met once, because he spoke at Dave Dellinger’s memorial service, and I was there. I think I spoke there too. And he died some years later. And
There was this other activist couple that you know, you talk about different ways to be an activist. One way I’ve done it is through my writing and speaking, exposing other people to what’s going on. So I had an assignment as a freelance writer for my local newspaper in Northampton, Massachusetts, to go interview this couple of old peacocks. He was, I think, in his early 80s at the time, and she was
about the age I am now, I think she was sixty-nine or seventy. And they lived in a one-room, unheated, unelectrified, unplumbed cabin on top of a little mountain next to a peace center. Their names were Wally and Juanita Nelson. They were an old black couple who had met because she was visiting conscientious objector prisoners in jail in World War Two. And he was one of them. And they kept their taxable income below, at the time, three thousand dollars, because that meant their
taxable income was zero because you didn’t have to pay taxes on the first three thousand. And so they’re living in this, and it was not a hovel. It was, you know, it didn’t have any modern conveniences. After Wally died, Juanita actually was pressured to get a cell phone so that she was not completely alone in the world, and she did. But you know, to go to the bathroom out there, you open the front door, you walk a hundred feet across the yard, and you use the outhouse. And if you wanted to see anything after dark, you lit a kerosene lamp. And that’s how they lived. And he was in his 80s, and she was my age now. They were not young. But they were lifetime activists and incredibly committed to the cause of peace and willing to make some personal sacrifices to further that cause. So I got to interview them for my local paper, and they ran the story on page one. So I got to reach the entire fifty thousand reader base or whatever it was.
Man. Wow. And just to think about those people, how long they did all the things that they did, the sacrifices, the things that they do. And we all have our own variations of that. Like it all looks different to each of us. It doesn’t mean that we all just have to end up in a cabin somewhere on top of a mountain with nothing. Or it, yeah, exactly. But it all depends on how we go about all that stuff. And it’s interesting to see how your path has worked out.
Well, I certainly don’t do that.
Even the other people I talk to who are deeper into activism, who are outside of, like, I don’t know, like the normal paths in a sense of, like, well, we go and do these big events, et cetera, et cetera. But they are activists in their own right. Like, even the conversations we’ve had, my eyes have been opened to see how people do that, even in the sense of they’re activists within themselves to say, this is a boundary I’ve set, and I want to keep the peace between us, but also make sure you understand that I have a boundary set.
That’s still, in my eyes, kind of an activist approach to it.
Yeah. And again, if you’re talking to people you disagree with, which is incredibly powerful piecework, you can respect the individual; you don’t have to respect some of the views they may have. If they’re espousing racism, homophobia, whatever it is, you can say, we disagree on that. Or you could say, gee, have you ever sat down and had a meal with a Muslim? I’ve done it a bunch of times.
Would you like to hear about some of those experiences? Or you could say, I wonder what it is that drew you to that conclusion, and let them probe all about what went on in their lives that caused them to hate another class of people. And I also think a big thing you pointed out, though, was a big point of being able to actually go have those conversations. Go sit down, have those meals with those people. And that’s an important part of all this, to be able to actually spend that time to do it on your own. So as we start to wrap this up, man, I really appreciate you being on the show. But what’s your advice for somebody that’s on their path towards self-mastery that has to do with activism?
Well, for starters, don’t let people talk you out of it. You know, you and each of us can make a difference. We’ve talked about some of the myriad ways that that can happen. Each of us will find our own way to do it, and it may be something that’s never done before. You could invent the next tactic. There are a number of them that have been invented in the last 10 years or so that aren’t even in that expanded list. Yeah, and the
Understand your strengths and your limitations and try to craft a path that harnesses your strengths and makes your limitations less important. You know, not everybody wants to do a hunger strike for 40 days, for example. Gandhi did them all the time. I don’t choose to do that. I’m terrible faster if it’s more than a day.
Yeah. I feel like I’m doing that right now. I need no, I’m forgetting. I need to vote. No.
Yeah, yeah, but we all have different things that we can do. I will say that not only are nonviolent tactics more ethical than violent ones, but the research has proven them more effective. So I would not recommend that you take up a gun and shoot some CEO. If you know, that’s not a good idea. It’s not even in my view.
A great thing to do is some kind of civil disobedience campaign that’s going to get you put away for 40 years. Although I understand it was a song that really made me understand this. A song was called The Hammer Has to Fall by Charlie King. And it was about the Plowshares Eight, who committed nonviolent civil disobedience by literally destroying a missile. And they got very long prison terms. And I thought that when I first heard about this action, I thought.
Well, gee, that’s useless. They’ve taken themselves out of activism completely for the next 40 years. They all got released sooner, fortunately. But that song really made me go inside their mindset in a way that I had not been able to do on my own. So the power of the arts, and many people do their activism through the arts. Picasso did some very serious, socially conscious paintings, the most obvious one being Guernica, which
Basically brought home how horrible a war is to a lot of people who maybe never thought about it. You see, you can have social activism in dance, you can have social activism in visual art, in poetry, in teaching, in architecture. I’m just producing a client’s book on sufficiency, and one of the people she interviewed was an architect who talked about how icky it made him feel to design holding cells that were related to a local native tribe having been stripped of resources, and therefore the young men had nothing to do but get in trouble. And then later he was able to find a project building a spiritual center on what turned out to be native Holy Lanbut, but at the moment was a parking lot facing an ugly strip mall. And so he put the building backwards so that the windows faced the creek instead of facing the parking lot. And you know, we all find ways to bring activism into everything we do.
I certainly write a gratitude journal every single day on Facebook. I post about what made me happy or grateful that day. And sometimes I have used it as a political forum. When Kavanaugh got confirmed to the Supreme Court, I devoted that day’s whole journal to thanking the resistance that almost won there. But it’s also very deeply personal. The day my stepfather was killed by a distracted driver.
I wrote about what it meant to have this remarkable man in my life for 40 years. He was not an activist, but he painted some very intense pictures out of his experience as a Japanese person growing up, actually being in the military and living through Hiroshima. He wasn’t in that city, but it was deeply affecting to him, and so was the bombing of the World Trade Center in his adopted city of New York.
He had moved out by then and come up to my area, but he had only been here a year and a half when 9-11 happened. So, you know, you would never see him at a protest march. My mom, yes, but not my stepfather. My mom actually was a desegregation volunteer for the Urban League. I’m so proud of her for this. When a black family was told the apartment was already rented, the sweet white lady mom would go try to rent it and see what happened.
Ha ha, nice. That’s so good. That’s so good. Man, it’s funny how we can all do our own little part, but we sometimes will think about, well, this isn’t good enough. And that’s incorrect. It’s for us to do. It’s for us to just do the thing that we feel led to do. And sometimes it takes us being in a situation to see somebody else doing something. We go, huh, you know what? I think I can do a little bit of that. So, man, I see it differently, or what have you. I really appreciate you being with us today.
He was a spy for the Urban League essentially.
It’s been a great conversation. And I should mention the website doesn’t talk about the Elder Action book that I’m writing, but it does have some great resources on green business. It’s Going Beyond Sustainability dot com.
Thank you just for getting in everything. So I was just gonna ask you where people can find you and connect with you? Anywhere else?
The easiest way is to private message me on LinkedIn or Facebook, especially if you’ve connected with me, so you don’t go to the little purgatory of others. Yeah, so friend me first and then send me a message.
Yeah, in fact, send a message with the request. So many people don’t do that.
They don’t. I do, but the problem is you still go to the other. So you send a message anyway with the request. And on LinkedIn, actually, they’ll let you see it with the request. On Facebook, not so much. But then once, you know, once I say yes, then you can send me a private message, and I do look at them. Maybe not immediately, but within a few days I will have looked at it.
Yeah. Awesome, man. Well, again, I appreciate you being on with us today. Thank you so much for your time.
And always remember you can make a difference.
