Where Are We Going Next?

“It’s a dangerous business, going out your front door…

…you step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” — JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Whew. These days are packed with emails, skypes, livestreams, and every possible electronic communication. Our cellphones ring and ring. There’s a request in every exchange. In between, C.T. and I talk and talk and talk about what’s coming next. What is coming next, you might ask?

Yeah, we don’t know.

The temptation looms large to just go back to New York, embed with OWS and get this consensus thing right. But the call of California hasn’t quieted. Lack of money limits our choices. Maybe we should just stay in DC and get jobs.

Conventional wisdom would ask, “What do you want?” But it isn’t that simple. We are the only people teaching what we’re teaching, Value-Based Consensus. So we can’t just tell people to get someone else to do it, nor can we quickly train other teachers.

Nor can we simply walk away from a direct democracy model which appears to be the one that truly does interrupt privilege and oppression and allow for all voices to be heard. It’s needed at this moment, more than ever.

Part of what we teach are paradigm shifts that support consensus, including a shift from, “What do I want?” to, “What’s best for the group?” The stakes are high. In this case, “the group” is the world, and particularly the activists who would battle economic injustice and climate change.

Strategically, we’d like to be writing books to help the teaching (and funding) go deeper. That’s a yet another direction.

These are baking days.