Patience

CONTENTS:
--Patience
--A Financial Crisis Coalition Proposal
--Links
--Message to Subscribers

Patience

As one who often tries to do too much too quickly, I’ve been thinking about patience lately. When composing “My Bottom Line” at the last minute I added “impatience” to the following list of bad habits:

After decades of activism, I’ve concluded that progressive activists, myself included, need to overcome counterproductive habits that turn off potential recruits and create disabling conflicts within organizations. These habits include arrogance, one-upmanship, withholding feelings, impatience, and not really listening to others. 

Then the other day I woke up with the issue on my mind and received the following tweet from the Dalai Lama: "Patience guards us against losing our presence of mind so we can remain undisturbed, even when the situation is really difficult."

Later that day I went jogging and my Ipod played the following song by Solomon Burke:

Sit This One Out 

…Love sometimes
Takes the form of frustration
A sad combination
Of emptiness and doubt
And our human connection
Is expressed with a shout
Well I think I'm gonna have to just sit this one out.
There was a time
When we could sit and talk about things together
No, we didn’t shout about things at all
We laughed and loved, we played
We said what we had to say
But there’s nothing to do now
And I don’t have a clue about how to rise above it all
…Don’t give up of everything that you’ve work for so long
Don’t destroy your self in a second of anger
Hold on. A change will come.

A classic affirmation on patience and acceptance is the Serenity Prayer widely attributed to Reinhold Niebur: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

But as the wikipedia discusses , Niehbur put into writing what had previously circulated in oral form, especially by women involved in voluntary social service.

And a 1695 Mother Goose rhyme expressed a similar sentiment:

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

An 8th-century Indian Buddhist scholar stated:

If there’s a remedy when trouble strikes,
What reason is there for dejection?
And if there is no help for it,
What use is there in being glum?

After describing the painful limits of human existence, Christian existentialists declared, “Nevertheless, I accept life.” The most influential modern-day Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, wrote, ““The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable”

More recently, in The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle recommended, “If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.”

In “Floater (Too Much To Ask),” Bob Dylan (in the Love and Theft album that was released on September 11, 2001 and prompted critics to rewrite their reviews because of its apocalyptic prescience) wrote:

They say times are hard, if you don’t believe it
You can just follow your nose
It don’t bother me—times are hard everywhere
We’ll just have to see how it goes

To declare “it don’t bother me” is quite a challenge. But the others quoted above also affirm a certain kind of detachment that transcends being “disturbed.” One can still remain even-keeled and grounded. Myself, when I confront a disturbing reality, I remind myself that more than 20,000 people are dying prematurely every day. Why do we get so disturbed about some crisis that is often inflamed by the mass media and forget about those 20,000 deaths? Can we face that reality and not be “disturbed”? Can we accept death itself?

I find these questions to be tough. I have no clear, definite answers. But those words of wisdom, especially Dylan’s “We’ll just have to see how it goes,” help me as I try to stick with my routines, my discipline, and focus on just doing what I can to alleviate and prevent needless suffering, remembering that I am not the point and anything I might accomplish is like a small leaf on an enormous tree.

And I remind myself that life is good and Mother Universe will take care of herself.

A Financial Crisis Coalition Proposal

NOTE: On May 15, 2012, I sent the following proposal to Conny Ford, San Francisco Central Labor Council Vice-President for Political Affairs. She replied by saying that she'd like to meet to discuss it in 2-3 weeks. Apart from the specifics, it presents some general ideas concerning one way that a strategic or tactical nonviolence campaign might be conducted. –Wade

+++++

Dear Conny,
I suggest that you and the San Francisco Central Labor Council initiate a new coalition to help prevent another major financial crisis. It could be called the Financial Crisis Coalition. Following and attached are some ideas about how to proceed. If and when I can assist with a project of this sort, please let me know.
Yours,
Wade

A Financial Crisis Coalition Proposal

Mission:  to help prevent another major financial crisis.

Possible Name: Financial Crisis Coalition

Methods:
· Form a small, inclusive organizing committee that is initially self-perpetuating in order to assure diversity. At each stage of expansion, the current members decide whom to invite to join, or they delegate that responsibility.
· Pledge to establish mechanisms to assure as soon as feasible the bottom-up control of the project by the active members.
· Operate in an open, transparent manner, including promptly posting minutes on the Web, largely conducting discussions on a listserv viewable by the general public, and openly posting our plan of action, including all of the following.
· Invite the CEO of Wells Fargo (the only large bank headquartered in San Francisco) to participate, along with two other individuals selected by him and three coalition representatives, in a three-hour community dialog on the question, “How Can We Prevent Another Major Financial Crisis?”
· If he agrees, stream the event live on the Web and during the last 90 minutes, allow randomly selected members of the audience to ask questions or make comments, either in person, by email, or via Twitter.
· If he does not agree, hold a rally, march, and picket line at Wells Fargo headquarters calling on Wells Fargo to participate in the community dialog.
· Take vigorous steps to assure that Coalition demonstrations remain peaceful. These steps could include having many monitors, distributing a nonviolence pledge specific to each event, reciting this pledge in unison repeatedly, asking demonstrators to raise their hand to endorse the pledge, respectfully asking those who do not raise their hand why they don’t, asking those who have no good reason for not endorsing the pledge to leave the demonstration, and perhaps photographing any who refuse to leave.
· If this action and a series of similar actions do not persuade Wells Fargo to participate in the community dialog and the Coalition garners sufficient support from the general public, then escalate with tactics such as sit-ins, “bank-ins” that would involve supporters going to tellers to apparently conduct business like asking for change but being unable to do so, and calling on depositors to withdraw all their deposits.
· If these tactics still fail to persuade Wells Fargo to participate, convene the community dialogue without Wells Fargo representatives with three empty seats to symbolize their absence.
· Following the community dialog, convene a series of workshops to develop proposals-for-action for how Wells Fargo and the other major banks can help prevent another major financial crisis and then convene a Coalition convention to adopt such proposals-for-action to be presented to Wells Fargo and the other major banks. Ideally, this set of proposals would be brief, clear, and easily supported by the general public.
· Each workshop might consist of 10-15 individuals who could meet in members’ homes and select representatives to the convention.
· The convention could select its governing board in a manner that would assure diversity and maximize prospects for having a compatible group that can work together productively.
· Proposals-for-action would be posted and discussed on the Internet beforehand.
· The convention would last for at least several hours and in order to participate in the final decision-making, members would be required to participate throughout the entire convention.
· One possible strategy throughout this whole process would be to focus on the lobbying activities of Wells Fargo (and ultimately all of the major banks). Asking any one of them to engage in business activities that would put them at a disadvantage with their competitors would not be realistic. But we could ask them to support legislation and regulations that would provide for a more sustainable industry (or perhaps as a fall back, at least refrain from pushing for unsustainable legislation and regulations).
· Once the Coalition adopts its proposals-for-action, then the Coalition would re-engage Wells Fargo and invite them to negotiate a settlement, while also seeking support from our elected officials.
· Any such settlement would be submitted for ratification to a Coalition convention.
·

Links

The 99 Percent Wakes Up
by Joseph E. Stiglitz May 2, 2012 5:15 PM EDT
Inequality isn’t only plaguing America—the Arab Spring flowered because international capitalism is broken. In From Cairo to Wall Street: Voices from the Global Spring, edited by Anya Schiffrin and Eamon Kircher-Allen, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says the world is finally rising up and demanding a democracy where people, not dollars, matter—the best government that money can buy just isn’t good enough….

***

Self-Interest Spurs Society’s ‘Elite’ to Lie, Cheat on Tasks, Study Finds
By Elizabeth Lopatto
Are society’s most noble actors found within society’s nobility? That question spurred Paul Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, to explore whether higher social class is linked to higher ideals, he said in a telephone interview. The answer Piff found after conducting seven different experiments is: no….

***

Politics: How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
By Matt Taibbi
Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history." This was supposed to be the big one….

***

California’s New Triple Bottom Line
Best in the world? Try best FOR the world. The Golden State welcomes a new kind of corporation.
by Sven Eberlein, Debra Baida
With the passage of AB 361 on October 9th, 2011, California became the sixth state to adopt
legislation allowing the formation of “benefit corporations”—corporations whose purpose is not just to make money but to make the world a better place....

A Message to Subscribers

Thanks much for subscribing to Wade’s Weekly. It’s heartening to know that 72 individuals find it sufficiently worthwhile to subscribe to the email version and that some 20 or 30 others read entries on the Web.

I invite you to help improve the blog by recommending links, books, quotes, other information, and comments (even brief comments are greatly appreciated and help give the blog credibility). And please consider “liking” and sharing it on Facebook and emailing it to your friends, relatives, and associates.

Knowing that 100 or so people at least look at each entry is enough to motivate me to continue. If there were even more subscribers, I might be moved to put more energy into making it better. And that could benefit you!

So maybe together we can improve Wade’s Weekly so that it is of greater benefit to more people.

NOTE: To post a comment, click on the link at the bottom of the email (if you receive it by email) and/or click on the Comments link at the bottom of the blog post.