Invitation | Common Good Collective

Pádraig Ó Tuama on Finding Uncommon Ground

Courtney Napier — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 18:00:41 +0000

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a calm, kind presence. He welcomes strangers like lifelong friends. The word I’m looking for is disarming. In this conversation, Pádraig sheds light on many things, including his peace-building work in Ireland. If you’re short on time, skip to minute 24 and hear his description of reconciliation.

Pádraig Ó Tuama on Finding Uncommon Ground

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Pádraig Ó Tuama, originally aired in September of 2019. The Isle of Éire (Ireland) is rich with stories held by the land, both ancient and modern, laden with both fierce culture and colonial violence. Pádraig Ó Tuama perceives these complex layers of history with acute insights into the lingering impacts of imperialism and sectarianism that have divided Ireland. By acknowledging deeply rooted cultural pain, Pádraig calls for Irish, English, and the rest of us to heal by reckoning with the past and embracing the creative potential held within our differences. Enter a poetic journey where the land awaits us beyond the divide of borders, history, and suffering. Ayana and Pádraig explore the language of uncommon belonging; how we must learn from our shame, the life cycle of violence, and how to confront the inheritance of privilege. Poet and theologian, Pádraig Ó Tuama’s work centers around themes of language, power, conflict, and religion. Pádraig presents Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and in late 2019 was named Theologian in Residence for On Being, innovating in bringing art and theology into public and civic life. From 2014-2019 he was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community.

I’m Making Real Change in My City

Courtney Napier — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 18:00:13 +0000

To make your town strong, build relationships. This piece is called a manifesto, and I think it’s actually a practical guide from someone who has laid a foundation of face-to-face community so that when conflicts arise, they lead to a better city for everyone.

I’m Making Real Change in My City
By Allen Alderman*

*Note to Readers: If you ever wanted to REALLY make a change in your town, instead of just starting a fight, consider this your manifesto. It was submitted by a Strong Towns member who represents their community in local government. The author, who wanted to write freely, requested we publish this column under a pseudonym.

I’m making real change in my city, with more exciting things to come. Do you want your city to be a resilient place built for people? Here’s what is working for me:

1. Get involved in local politics.

Your local government is run by hard-working nerds who show up to meetings. You can be one of them. But if that’s definitely not for you, you should at least be emailing your representatives every few months. You would be amazed at how much weight is placed on correspondence from constituents who speak up. You can do what I did and run for your City Council. But you don’t have to. Find out when your Planning and Zoning, Adjustment Board, and City Council meets. Email your representatives your perspective about specific items on the agenda. Volunteer to be part of a citizen review process. Volunteer to be on your town’s tree commission or whatever so that you start making connections and have a longer resume when there’s an opening on a Planning Board or neighborhood steering committee to apply for. Changing the place you live is incredibly rewarding. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had with a hobby. People in your town are going to accumulate power and then shape the way it looks in 25 years. Why not you? And your chances will be better if you…

2. Get informed.

Read books about development and the looming fiscal and infrastructure disaster car-oriented cities are headed toward. Learn what your city spends taxpayer money on (“What does it say about our values that we spend $4.7 million on roads and only $27,000 on sidewalks?”). Learn the extent to which quick-moving traffic and ubiquitous free parking make everything worse for people. The more you learn, the more equipped you’ll be to…

3. Learn to make your case.

If your goal is to get angrier and angrier alongside people who think exactly like you without ever improving things, then you can skip this part and stick to posting memes on social media. But for most of us, it is important to learn to persuade conventional thinkers. A radical is easily dismissed. It’s harder to dismiss someone who can appeal to perspectives everyone shares. When I try to persuade my progressive friends, I talk about pedestrian access for the people who can’t drive and the disproportionate burdens parking minimums place on the poor. Oh, and climate change. When I talk to my Trump-loving family, I say I’m trying to bring back the fiscally responsible, traditional building patterns that our forefathers understood. I’m bringing back the front porch and kids playing outside and knowing your neighbors and supporting local businesses. “Of course if someone wants a big house and a big acreage and to drive and park everywhere, that’s their right. I just don’t think they should expect other people to subsidize it, which is how things work out now.”

Remember that people don’t usually change their minds if you engage them in an argument. If your interlocutor says something stupid, ask them why they think that’s true. If they say, “why should we build bike lanes when hardly anybody bikes,” then you say, “That’s a good question, but in my opinion that’s like asking why we should build bridges when hardly anybody swims across the river?” The more you practice this, the better you’ll get at bringing people along, which means you’re starting to…

4. Build a coalition.

Asking most people you know to change their minds about auto-oriented infrastructure is like asking a fish to change its mind about water. So you have to meet them where they are. But if you can convince one person every three months that things need to change in your city, and then over the next three months you each convince a person and so on, then in 3 years you will have a coalition 2000+ strong. Unless your city is enormous, that is far more than you need to effect real change. Especially if the people you influence are involved in local politics (see Step 1). And while you’re building your coalition, you need to…

5. Patiently persist.

Stupid developments with too much off-street parking will be built and you won’t be able to stop them. Ask questions. Suggest alternatives. But don’t be the angry person everyone ignores. Be patient. Persist. Local government moves slowly. Even if the city staff agrees with you, that doesn’t mean they assign the same priority to things you do. So learn to send an email every six weeks: “Hey, where are we at on looking at parking minimums?” It’s satisfying to finally get something to completion, but it’s not like a race. It’s like professional kitten herding. And even when you get things done, it probably won’t be all you want, so you have to learn to…

6. Be content with incremental progress.

I’m on a city council with six other people and three of them are starting to come along. We just hired a Strong Towns-friendly city manager. Our engineer cares about pedestrian access and is open to learning. And in spite of all that, I still know that things won’t be completely different next year. I wish I could snap my fingers and pedestrianize our main street. I wish I could fund a pilot project running a frequent bus back and forth on a fixed route through our transit-free midsize town. I wish I could eliminate parking minimums everywhere tomorrow. But the hurdles to those achievements are high and if I attempted to do all of that at once there’s a decent chance someone who ran against me in the next election would win. What I can do (and have done) is help get our streets blocked off for evenings and weekends in the summer. Two years ago, we had a few restaurants do outdoor dining on city property where a parking spot used to be. It was highly contentious at the time, but now we have a lot more and they’re widely embraced! Local change happens incrementally and experimentally. And the obstacles and barriers will tempt you to cynicism and despair, but change does happen steadily. You can accomplish almost nothing in a year. But you’ll be amazed at how different things can be in five years.

It’s worth it. You have no idea how gratifying it feels for me to walk with my children along a sidewalk in our town that is there because I helped make it happen, protected from traffic by a boulevard that used to have an unnecessary lane of travel, on the way to an outdoor patio at our favorite restaurant that would not exist if I hadn’t gotten involved. And good design is contagious. I get that it’s not possible for everyone, but if you’ve ever thought about getting more involved in local politics, I strongly encourage you to do it. Somebody else is thinking about the same, and they’re probably wrong about how to build the urban environment. So why not you?

This article was originally published by StrongTowns.

On Choosing to Belong to a Place

Courtney Napier — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 18:00:16 +0000

Patterns of monstrous greed have set our species at war with non-human beings. In this 2020 letter, scientist and prose artist Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to Indigenous ways of returning to peace with the planet.

Greed Does Not Have to Define Our Relationship to Land: On Choosing to Belong to a Place
By Robin Wall Kimmerer

Dear Readers—America, Colonists, Allies, and Ancestors-yet-to-be,

We’ve seen that face before, the drape of frost-stiffened hair, the white-rimmed eyes peering out from behind the tanned hide of a humanlike mask, the flitting gaze that settles only when it finds something of true interest—in a mirror. Cruel eyes, a false face and demeanor of ravening hunger despite the unconscionable hoarding of excess while others go without. The spittle quickly licked away from the sly “fox in the henhouse” smirk that sends chills down your spine, a mouth that howls lies pretending it’s an anthem.

Americans keep acting surprised by the daily assaults on American values once thought unassailable. I can’t speak for all Native people, but we’ve smelled that carrion breath before. We know who this is, the one whose hunger is never slaked—the more he consumes, the hungrier he grows. We’ve met him on our shores, at the Thanksgiving table, at the treaty table, at the Greasy Grass, on the riverbank at Standing Rock, and in the courts. His mask does not fool us, and having so little left to lose and all that is precious to protect I call him the name of the monster that my ancestors spoke of around the winter campfire, the embodied nightmare of greed, the Windigo.

We know him. Perhaps this is why he has taken special efforts to poke Indigenous peoples in the eye, because we see him. He has proven himself an equal-opportunity offender to people black and brown. But with the spite of bullies everywhere, he has sharpened his stick with special vindictiveness for Native people from the first days of his administration, by reversing the glimpse of justice we held for one shining moment at Standing Rock, to dishonoring the Code Talkers, to undermining treaty obligations and threatening termination for our people, to casting Pocahontas’s name as a slur that manages to taint every stereotype across a range of Indigenous identities, to denying protection for Gwich’an livelihoods, to sending drill rigs to penetrate sacred land.

Americans are called on to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable.

He is the obscene of the Anthropocene, the colon of colonization, the grinder of salt into the original wound of this country, but lest I spend any more words on cathartic name-calling, let me say that Windigo is the name for that which cares more for itself than for anything else. It shrieks with unmet want—consumed with consumption, it lays waste to humankind and our more-than-human kin.

Windigo tales arose in a commons-based society where sharing was a survival value and greed made one a danger to the whole. But in a profit-based society, the indulgent self-interest that our people once held as monstrous is now celebrated as success. Americans are called on to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable.

The particular weapon of the Windigo-in-Chief is the executive pen, used against what has always been the most precious, the most contested wealth of Turtle Island—the land. With the stroke of that pen, he has declared that “oil is life” and that protecting the audacious belief that “water is life” can earn you a jail sentence. The same pen gutted the only national monument designed by Native people to safeguard a sacred cultural landscape, the Bears Ears. In opening those protected lands for uranium mining, he triumphantly claimed that he was re- turning public land to the people.

From his origins as a real estate developer to his incarnation as Windigo-in-Chief, he has regarded “public lands”—our forests, grasslands, rivers, national parks, wildlife reserves—all as a warehouse of potential commodities to be sold to the highest bidder.

Let us remember that what the United States calls “public lands” (and, if the truth be told, all of what the United States calls private property as well) are in fact ancestral lands; they are the ancestral homelands of 562 different Indigenous peoples. A time-lapse map of North America would show the original lands of sovereign peoples diminishing in the onslaught of colonization and the conversion from tribal lands to public lands, some through treaty-making, some through treaty-breaking, some through illegal sale, and some through what were termed “just wars,” by executive action and “encroachment.”

Not only was the land taken and her people replaced, but colonization is also the intentional erasure of the original worldview, substituting the definitions and meanings of the colonizer. That time-lapse map of land taking would also show the replacement of the Indigenous idea of land as a commonly held gift with the notion of private property, while the battle between land as sacred home and land as capital stained the ground red. Of course our ideas were dangerous to the idea of Manifest Destiny; resisting the lie that the highest use of our public land is extraction, they stood in the way of converting a living, inspirited land into parcels of natural resources.

You, right now, can choose to set aside the mindset of the colonizer and become native to place, you can choose to belong.

Native people have a different term for public lands: we call them home. We call them our sustainer, our library, our pharmacy, our sacred places. Indigenous identity and language are inseparable from land. Land is the residence of our more-than-human relatives, the dust of our ancestors, the holder of seeds, the makers of rain; our teacher. Land is not capital to which we have property rights; rather it is the place for which we have moral responsibility in reciprocity for its gift of life. Here is the question we must at last confront: Is land merely a source of belongings, or is it the source of our most profound sense of belonging? We can choose.

Our ancestors had a remedy for Windigo sickness and the contagion it spreads. Those who endangered life with their greed were banished from the circle of what they would destroy. They were cast out from the firelight and the bubbling stewpot, from care and community. You colonists also have that power of banishment. Will you use it? It’s not enough to banish the Windigo himself—you must also heal the contagion he has spread. You, right now, can choose to set aside the mindset of the colonizer and become native to place, you can choose to belong.

Colonists, you’ve been here long enough to watch the prairies disappear, to witness the genocide of redwoods, to see waters poisoned by the sickness of Windigo thinking. The Windigo has no moral compass; his needle swings wildly toward the magnetism of whatever profit beckons. Surely, however, the land has taught you differently, too—that in a time of great polarity and division, the common ground we crave is in fact beneath our feet. The very land on which we stand is our foundation and can be a source of shared identity and common cause. What could be more common and shared than the land that gives us all life? Rivers don’t ask for party affiliation before giving you a drink, and berries don’t withhold their gifts from anyone.

The moral compass guiding right relationship with land still remains strong in pockets of traditional Indigenous peoples. The sharp stick of the bully in the White House only hardens our resolve. The needle still points faithfully north, to what we call in my language Giiwedinong, the “going home star.” When we acknowledge the truth that all public land is in fact ancestral land, we must acknowledge that by dint of history and time and the biogeochemistry that unites us all, your dust and your grandchildren will mingle here. They will know what you do here, they will reap the consequences of whether you choose to banish Windigo thinking. You could follow the “going home star” and make a home here grounded in justice for land and people.

Colonists become ancestors too. The question is, What kind of ancestor do you want to be?

Sincerely,

Robin Wall Kimmerer

From Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, edited by Simmons Buntin, Elizabeth Dodd, and Derek Sheffield, published by Trinity University Press. Used with the permission of Trinity University Press. This excerpt was first published by Lit Hub

“More Heart, Less Attack”

Courtney Napier — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 18:00:49 +0000

Making peace involves mining the emotions that we may have learned to cover up. It involves paying attention and looking for language to map the impermissible feelings—anger, sadness, fear. This song calls us to excavate our hearts, which is harder work that detonating them.

“More Heart, Less Attack”
By Bear and Bo Rinehart

Be the light in the crack
Be the one that’s mending the camel’s back
Slow to anger, quick to laugh
Be more heart and less attack

Be the wheels, not the track
Be the wanderer that’s coming back
Leave the past right where it’s at
Be more heart and less attack

The more you take the less you have
‘Cause it’s you in the mirror staring back
Quick to let go, slow to react
Be more heart and less attack

Ever growing, steadfast
And if need, be the one that’s in the gap
Be the never turning back
Twice the heart any man could have

Be the wheels, not the track
Be the wanderer that’s coming back
Leave the past right where it’s at
Be more heart and less attack
Be more heart and less attack
Be more heart and less attack

I stuck my hat out, I caught the rain drops
I drank the water, I felt my veins block
I’m nearly sanctified, I’m nearly broken
I’m down the river, I’m near the open
I stuck my hat out, I caught the rain drops
I drank the water, I felt my veins block
I’m near the sanctified, I’m near broken
I’m down the river, I’m near the open

Imagining Peace

Common Good — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 18:00:11 +0000

Raised in Northern Ireland, Pádraig Ó Tuama has spent much of his life building peace in the face of conflict. In this talk, he celebrates the ways in which language and new stories can get us unstuck.

Imagining Peace
By Pádraig Ó Tuama

Zen Shorts: “The Farmer’s Luck”

Courtney Napier — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 18:00:26 +0000

Jon Muth is an author and artist whose Zen series introduces us to a friendship between 3 neighborhood children and a wise panda named Stillwater. Readers witness common childhood conflict, and marvel at Stillwater’s ability to share timeless stories that result in far more beauty and effect than any scolding or punishment could.

Undersong: To be free from unhelpful conclusions and verdicts

Zen Shorts
by Jon Muth
Excerpt: The Farmer’s Luck

There was once an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day, his horse ran away. “Such bad luck!” his neighbors said. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it two other wild horses. “Such good luck!” his neighbors said. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the wild horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg. “Such bad luck!” his neighbors said. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army to fight in a war. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. “Such good luck!” his neighbors said. “Maybe,” replied the farmer.

Liberation: Resilience Required

Courtney Napier — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 11:00:31 +0000

The struggle for liberation is not for the faint of heart. It is for the full of heart, faith, and resilience. There are many demoralizing moments along the way, and many opportunities for the accountability and lessons learned. This week’s reader is about this struggle, and the resilience that is born in its midst.

“Don’t Give Up”

Courtney Napier — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 18:00:18 +0000

There are times, like I feel today, when we don’t want to keep fighting. We place down our pen, our phone, our tools, and look at the unfinished tasks and chaos stretched before us with shear exhaustion and defeat. Sampa Tembo, known professionally as Sampa the Great, is a Zambian-born Australia-based rapper and songwriter who wrote the song entitled “Don’t Give Up.” Her message is simple, yet the composition of this piece is thick with uplifting power.

“Don’t Give Up”
By Sampa The Great