Staying Awake
March 30th, 2007
I stand before you most of all as a heartbroken human being. I cannot bear any more to hear all about it, read all about, to know all about it.
Every day the evidence mounts about how bad it is, how much worse it’s getting and how the truth is full of lies, distortion and deception. The litany of loss we are facing in our civil rights, human rights, earth rights, spiritual rights has grown so extensive that it almost feels as though we are being flung back in time to some regressive science fiction state where warlords reigned and the people huddled together in hiding.
The diabolic manipulation by the corporate power structure of the tragedy of September 11, and the subsequent war on Iraq, are so shocking and shameful that any words used to describe them are mocked into meaningless. A friend of mine said that when she tries to talk about how she really feels, she feels as though she should be grasping for a new language. A language that isn’t made up of words.
Her comments struck a chord and reminded me that my first real experience with intercultural cooperation was with a deaf man who could neither hear nor speak the words that create our familiar world.
One summer, years ago, in the midst of my playwriting life, I met a man named Jer Loudenback, who was born profoundly deaf. We were hired to work with a group of deaf teenage girls who were learning about video production. I was “the writer,” charged with teaching them about dialogue. Jer would teach them production.
Our cultures thoroughly excluded one another but Jer and I became buddies and hung out in each other’s worlds. He took me to real silent auctions, organized by the deaf community. All evening long, I’d hear nothing but the language of laughter unfettered by chatter.
And I learned something very interesting. When deaf people communicate they have non-stop eye contact. They use their peripheral vision to “read” the sign language of their hands. Some researchers even think they develop psychic communication. Without the distraction of sound they become fully present to one another in ways that my hearing friends and acquaintances would find disconcertingly intimate.
At the end of that summer, as we were sitting around a table with a few other people evaluating the program, Jer and I were asked if we would like to work on a play together. We looked at one another, laughed and shrugged, “Why not?” I asked Jer, through a translator, what he would like to write a play about. Without even stopping to think, he signed, “The deaf Jews in the Second World War.”
My world stopped in its tracks. Because Jer couldn’t hear and speak the way I did, I had assumed that his world was so limited that he would want to write about his own personal struggles in the hearing world, not about an issue too profound to be addressed out loud. I had never taken Jer fully seriously as a human being. I had to face the most unbearable prejudice of all—my own.
The truth was he was profoundly deaf and profoundly unafraid of being profound. We wrote that play together and called it “Sound Off.” In our research, we discovered that Hitler rounded up all the deaf people in Germany in 1933 and had them sterilized. Later, they were among the first to be taken to concentration camps.
After I’d known Jer for about a year, he shared something else with me: He knew how to read lips, but because of his politics, he didn’t. He believed that if someone was going to enter his culture, she or he should damn well learn his language. There are layers of customs and protocols and traditions in Deaf Culture. And there is noise—visual noise.
Often we would leave some place because it was too visually noisy—which usually meant a lot of social posturing, lack of deep attention and an atmosphere of interpersonal carelessness. I got very sensitized to this and realized that quite often I too got tired when he did. I learned powerful things that summer—about my culture, about Jer’s culture and about the ways in which I was so narrowly defined by my experiences.
Through deaf culture, my own was reflected back and it wasn’t very pretty. It was full of sound bites and disposable moments, of averted eyes and diverted attentions. It skimmed across the surface of experience, got lost in verbal cleverness and competition. It was a culture of quick takes and emotional convenience. Wordplay.
There was no language barrier between me and Jer because there was no language. We wrote back and forth when we had to but mostly we read each other’s hearts and minds. He was the embodiment of grace as he effortlessly moved between his isolation and his engagement, his holocaust research and his next opportunity to surprise a friend with flowers.
There was no contradiction. It was simply his story.
Our stories are nothing less than our lives; and our politics exist to serve and preserve our stories. Jer was one of the most political people I had ever met. His decision to not capitulate to Hearing Culture by reading my lips—or anyone else’s, was an exercise in Deep Democracy.
His scorn for a linear, spell-out-the-word, sign language, was an exercise in Deep Democracy. His fervor about, and freedom in, writing a play about the deaf people and the holocaust, was an exercise in Deep Democracy. When he guided deaf-blind people on summer horseback trips into the mountains, he was riding on the back of Deep Democracy.
Deep Democracy goes as deep as we are willing to go to honor, protect and share our stories. But first of all, we have to know what they are, who we are and where we came from. We have to understand our own hearts, make friends with our minds, and acknowledge our racism, our misguided judgments, our lost lives and our glorious stories.
And we have to accept that we can never ask others to live inside our story. Nor can we live in theirs. What we can do keep each others stories alive.
Deep Democracy means we get to make the deep decisions that reflect who we really are, not who we are circumscribed to be by a co-opted corporate media, a Gore Tex fashion moment, a business bottom line, a B-52, or somebody’s else’s version of the truth.
Deep Democracy means we get to live our stories within our own truth. I have a photo of Gandhi on my refrigerator. He wore his simple sandals, wove his own clothes, stood up for his story and liberated his country. It’s time to stand up for our stories.
On October 7th 2002, my birthday, I was part of a panel discussion at Hugo House, the writing center Seattle. As I was driving there on that quiet Sunday morning, the United States started bombing Afghanistan.
I’d just started reading An Unexpected Light by the British writer, Jason Elliott and had fallen under the spell of a country that was considered to be the spiritual heart of Asia. The Afghan people that I met in that book were extraordinarily generous, joyful, and hospitable and unrelentingly full of love and appreciation for their lives, as hard and painful as they were.
Elliot’s experience encompassed ten years during which time the country was invaded by Russia. A million Afghan men died fighting for the freedom they finally won.
A refrain throughout the book was poignant: Why wasn’t the U.S. impressed? Why didn’t they help us afterwards? Why didn’t our victory mean something to the free world? Questions asked, not by officials, but by the men in villages who gave Elliott the last food they had, their only blanket and always a traditional long, bone-crunching hug.
One Christmas Day he was rescued from the dark and cold of an isolated village by a kind stranger. He spent the day huddled in a room with many strangers. They talked of war. Elliot said every Afghan he met was tired of war. “Yes,” said the village teacher. “But other countries aren’t. Pakistan isn’t tired of it. America isn’t tired of it. Russia and Iran aren’t tired of it. What do they suffer from this war?” “The misery,” writes Elliot, “is fueled from beyond, by players themselves untouched by the catastrophe.”
Unexpected Light is a book of unexpected stories. And as word came through my radio that we were bombing Afghanistan—a place already stricken with millions of landmines and unexploded bombs—it was the stories that made the people real. And it was those stories that kept me from sinking under the detached inhuman language of policy-speak as we rationalized our way into a war so very far from our shores.
At Hugo House that day, sitting next to me was James Rasmussen, a leader of the Duwamish tribe, which was declared by the Bush administration to be extinct. Try telling that to Rasmussen. The reasoning, if one could call it that, is that the Duwamish have not exhibited continuity as a tribe. That’s because when the Ballard locks were built in Seattle and Lake Washington dropped nine feet, the Black River disappeared and the main Duwamish village was left high and dry.
So were all the salmon that sustained the tribe. Many members of the tribe scattered in search of other ways to survive and in doing so became guilty of “incontinuity.” It was the Duwamish who welcomed the first white pioneers to this area. Now they are in a fight for their lives—and their stories.
Rasmussen told his eloquently. He stood up and acknowledged his ancestors and all his relations. And then he answered the question we’d all been asked: Where were we coming from. James looked out over the room. “You are in my living room,” he said. “You are in my kitchen. You are in my bedroom. You are even in my bathroom. This land is my home.”
The Duwamish, in their fight for recognition, and James, in his unwavering loyalty to his story, are standing up for Deep Democracy.
Deep Democracy comes from deep respect. Which means we’d better damn well know our own stories first of all, and next, first of all, we’d better know our neighbors’ stories, those folks who live down the street and around the world.
On the streets of WTO Seattle, 1999, one of the most moving moments for me was walking behind a small group of Japanese rice farmers dressed in peasant garb. They couldn’t speak English, but it didn’t stop them from singing out joyfully.
Later, the irony was painfully clear. They had come thousands of miles to experience all the delights of deep democracy, only to end up being tear-gassed and terrified on the streets of Seattle.
But what if they had known one another’s stories? What if the police had known that those Japanese rice farmers were there because they were terrified of losing the rights to the very seeds that had kept their community culture alive for generation? What if the Japanese rice farmers had known that the police were terrified because they had been warned by Wash. D.C. that several of them were likely to be killed during WTO week?
Writing The Battle in Seattle took me into the heart of some heroic stories. When I asked Raging Granny, Carolyn Canafax, when she started her activist career, she told me it was when the Rosenberg’s were sentenced to death in 1953.
As McCarthy era took hold across the country, she started losing her jobs, a couple of them as a teacher here in Seattle. Bishop Vincent Warner was jolted out of his marketing job and into the ministry when he “accidentally” attended the funeral for Martin Luther King, Jr. He closed the Jubilee prayer around the WTO welcoming event on the eve of N30.
Ben White went to jail for trees and cut dolphins loose from their underwater jails. Vanessa Lee was politicized for life by the police action on the streets of WTO Seattle. She harkened back to her radical grandmother in Korea who went to jail for growing the national flower, the Rose of Sharon. Deep Democracy gardening.
The earth, too, has its story. And we can only talk about sustainability when we listen deeply to every nuance of the earth’s story, because its story tells ours.
It’s only recently, after a lifetime of searching out nature as solace, that I even realized that I could name it, recognize it, and be grateful for it. I was so oblivious to its constancy, its very essence of generosity that I slighted my own suffering by not acknowledging the healing I got in nature.
It was my friend Mike Cohen, eco-psychologist, folk-dancer, singer of many songs, and founder of natural systems thinking, who taught me to figure out what in nature I was attracted to, go there, and then ask permission to be there. At first it felt pretty weird. I’m wandering down trails trying to feel what it means to be attracted to a tree, a mushroom, a stone, the wind on the water, the smell in the air.
But soon I learned that certain things in nature did attract me and when I went there and said hello, may I sit with you awhile, I found that I actually got an answer. I not only got an answer, I got insight and generative metaphors with which to guide my life. When our relationship with nature is acknowledged, articulated and made intentional, everything changes. We are instantly incorporated into the deep fabric of creation where all is meaning. And that’s when we are sustained where it really counts—spiritually.
And in order to support the long road towards global economic justice, intercultural cooperation, sustainability and deep democracy, we have to learn how to spiritually sustain ourselves. And it isn’t easy.
Activist work is done through doing. To nourish ourselves spiritually we have to stop, get off the do-mobile and simply be. It’s a paradigm shift of the highest order because materialism, which has never answered our deepest needs and never will, is our medium, whether we like it or not.
The challenge is to make the best use we can of materialism but to always remember that it’s a spiritual revolution we are part of. Only 1 in 100 of us on this planet has a computer. Yet what the World Wide Web can do, through deep information, is link those of us online to those 99 out of a hundred people who aren’t, so that we can know and hold their stories—be they full of joy or tragedy.
Writing Battle in Seattle pushed me face down into my own spirituality. The book came out of the epiphany I had on the streets of WTO Seattle–the exhilaration I felt from being with my global family.
It was when I started interviewing the people who were there and researching the issues that the veil lifted and I had to really look at my own complicity in the messy state of global affairs. I discovered that even though I’ve long been on a spiritual path, it was very, very narrow with my own needs. I rarely looked up and out. I’d been living in a self-indulgent dream.
An activist friend, who’s fought the good fight for years, told me it wasn’t my fault. That we were all brainwashed by the corporate media and weren’t being told the truth. But later, at another rally for fair trade, there was a young man carrying a sign that said simply “Wake up.”
It rang with all the clarity of the 30 years of Buddhist teachings that I hadn’t heard. I knew in my heart that spiritually I hadn’t done my homework. I’d certainly woken up to what keeps me intact—spiritually speaking—but it was isolationist spirituality. Too much of the other stuff that keeps me intact—my clothes, food, fuel, all the techno toys and trinkets in my life, come at the direct expense of someone else’s suffering. That’s a hard one to wake up to, and there’s no greater wake-up call.
But what’s the pay-off? Why wake-up to painful truths when the other kind serves our needs so much more comfortably.
Simply because we are far too complex, too spiritual and too intelligent to know in our hearts that the things money can buy can save us. Throughout millennia we’ve been on an evolutionary path that supported our physical survival. Now the only thing that will save us physically is spiritual evolution.
So we have to wake up and stay awake. Waking up is the easy hard part. Staying awake means opening up to despair, hopelessness and rage. It also means connecting to one another and the interdependence that reflects the sacred symmetry throughout universe. It’s like being in heaven and hell at the same time.
The key to “keeping our spirits up” is to acknowledge our collective grief, to allow our hearts to be broken open, and to gently help each other along the way.
Every single person involved in the movement for global justice will have to face days and moments of despair. It’s the price we have to pay for waking up. But when we do wake up, we get to meet and greet one another. We get to know one another’s stories.
by Janet Thomas
Author of The Battle in Seattle –
The Story Behind and Beyond the
WTO Demonstrations in Seattle.
She writes, teaches and learns on an
island in the northwest corner of Washington State.
