Spirit in Action

Training for Change - George Lakey

George Lakey was a founder of A Quaker Action Group, Movement for a New Society and recently left Training for Change to do more direct action with Earth Quaker Action Team. With the experience & stories of 50 years of peace, justice and environmental activism, George is a treasure trove of inspiration.

Duration:: 56m
Broadcast on:: 19 Apr 2014
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one with every voice ♪ ♪ Every song we will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsby. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song we will move this world along ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be visiting the campus of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Our guest, George Lakey, graciously consented to an interview before a live audience of the Friends General Conference gathering being held there. George Lakey is a renowned activist of the past 50 years, still going strong on peace, justice, equality, environmental, all kinds of issues. He was a founder of a Quaker Action Group and Movement for a New Society, more recently with Training for Change, which teaches people in organizations how to bring change about. George has a wealth of experience, energy, and humor, and I'm so grateful he could join us here before this live audience at the FGC gathering in Bowling Green. Thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action, George. Very pleased to be here, Mark. I appreciate so much the wealth of experience and the spiritual sensitivity you bring to this work over half a century, I guess. What got you started, George? Was it just that you were raised in an activist family or... No, I wasn't brought up in an activist family, actually. I was brought up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania by parents who didn't think of themselves as being able to be powerful in influencing events. However, they were very religious, especially my mom. I went to church and became a very religious youngster. I was regarded by the elders of my church as potential child preacher material. And so they decided to give me a tryout, which led to my first bit of activism, actually. They gave me the pulpit for a Sunday morning coming up and said, "Prepare and be ready." And so I did quite a lot of praying on what subject I would preach on. So my sermon turned out to be that it seemed to be God's will that there should be racial equality. This was when I was 12 years old, so that would make it about 1949. At the end of the service, I was expected to stand in the back when people would be leaving and shake hands and so on. Basically, the message I got through body language essentially was, with regard to your future career as a child preacher, don't call us, we'll call you. So that was the first time that I got to take a public stand on behalf of something that now we would call activism. It led to quite a lot of reflection. I really had to think about, okay, so I'd done what I understood, God, to be calling me to do, and yet there's this distinct lack of interest out there. Isn't that an awful lot like what Jesus ran into himself, because I was so fascinated with the example of Jesus, and he certainly, at various points, said stuff and did stuff that wasn't appreciated. I thought, okay, so maybe that's what following Jesus means, that you might have good days, but you might also have bad days, and that doesn't mean you give up on it. You don't give up on activism, you just keep doing it. If it's not too intrusive, and I'm certainly not going to paint the entire religion by your initial experience, what kind of denomination or flavor of denomination? I know within denominations there's different flavors. I grew up Catholic, and in my small town Catholic church, it felt very different from the campus Catholic church as I encountered along the way. What was your experience? This was an evangelical fundamentalist church, kind of a sort of country Baptist slash Methodist kind of church, so there was that tradition of believing that the spirit could touch anyone and ask anyone to be a preacher, a woman could be a preacher, even a child could be a preacher. I love that about my religious background. It's just that the trouble with believing that charisma can touch anyone is that you never know what the message is going to be, and there is that difficulty then for the elders to get these surprising sermons. Where did you go from there? That's age 12, I think you said. Did you give up on religion? I don't think so. Actually, it was fine that I gave leadership to the youth fellowship of the church, and of course, I sang in every choir that was possible to sing in and so on, so they didn't mind my giving leadership of various kinds, but not this Sunday morning pulpit kind of thing, not real preaching leadership, because I was not really in sync with the social gospel that they understood. Well, they didn't really have a social gospel in the sense that Methodists say would use that term, and so no, there was no reason to give up on religion. No, in fact, that was why it was such an important informative experience was supporting me to identify more closely with Jesus, who I already identified with plenty closely, but it put me in the experience in a very small way that Jesus had experienced in a very large way of having ambivalent reactions to his ministry, and it wasn't until college, still going to college that I started to drift away from a fundamentalist and evangelical approach to religion. That was partly because I was wandering around among the various denominations that were present in the college community and ran into Quakers because I was sampling every group. The Quaker worship that I experienced reminded me actually of the Wednesday night prayer meeting that I had experienced as a boy in my evangelical church, which was a prayer meeting format in which we went into what was called a season of prayer that was based on silence, and that involved a lot of testimony giving and spontaneous gospel singing deep, deep prayer, both inward and outward prayer. I remember my grandfather who I was in awe of and who was a deeply religious man who when we would go into a season of prayer, and I loved Wednesday night prayer meeting. I was the only boy in my age who went through Wednesday night prayer meeting, but I just loved that. But one of the things that most impressed me was that when we would go into the season of prayer, my grandfather and others of the elders would go on their knees for that season. Because he was such a giant in my perspective for him to humble himself in that way, it was such a visible manifestation of the living crisis right here in the room, and we went to honor that. Well, I certainly know, George, about a lot of the things you've done over the last 50 years. What was that initial transition about you got involved with Quakers? Was activism immediate part of that, or were you already becoming a campus radical? I don't know. What was your beginning there with activism? I had a predisposition toward some kind of activism because of the working class character of my folks, and they're being very strongly pro-union. And so I didn't know that the world was set up in such a way that there was tons of oppression, and I had already spoken to that at age 12. In that way, I was predisposed, but I didn't have anything like an articulate ideology. And so I remember on that first visit to Quaker meeting, reading the bulletin board in the back on my way out, I could compulsively read bulletin boards of new outfits. And there I saw a flyer on the bulletin board urging people in the meeting to write their congressperson about military conscription, and it hit me that I had heard that Quakers were against the military and were pacifists, and I thought, "Oh, no." I was just so disappointed to read that, but you know how young people can be very, very righteous about things and quick to judge. And as I was walking home, I thought, "Well, even wonderful people can have their eccentricities, and I just have to be able to look past this and forgive Quakers for this lapse in common sense that would lead them to be pacifists." So I have to ask you, then, that's not your viewpoint now. Did you just, what, leap off a cliff and find out that there was a different way of thinking? What happened? Well, I did enjoy going home on weekends every once in a while and praying in my own church, you know, and singing in the choir and so on. During communion, we would usually have a fairly long period until everyone got served communion, and I would read in the back of the hymnal the scriptural passage is there to pass the time, and ran into the Sermon on the Mount one morning and thought, "Oh, I've read this a thousand times. Well, I'll read it once more." So I started reading the Sermon on the Mount again, and had what later I learned was what George Fox might have called an opening, because suddenly the words meant what they said, and that had never been true before, I was thrown into an existential crisis because the words suddenly seemed so clear about how we should respond to evil. And I thought, "I don't believe this. There's no way I believe that we should return good for evil and that we should turn the other cheek. No way do I believe this." And yet, I call myself a Christian, and Jesus is the most important force of my life, and this is what Jesus said, but how can that be? So that really threw me into a year of deep searching, deep searching about where I really stood. And this was the '50s, 1950s, Joe McCarthy, very pro-military in a political context. None of my friends thought it was sensible for me to spend a year trying to explore pacifism. I didn't want pacifism, I didn't think my family would support it, that turned out to be correct. So I fought against it, and I kept reading more and more widely. I read Reinhold Neibor's case against pacifism. I didn't think that stood up very well. I felt like I was on this slippery slope sliding toward pacifism against my will. And I was reading about English Quakers, 17th century, coming to the wilds of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and coming without guns, even though they were going to be encountering savages, quote unquote, and exposing their children to danger, but coming as people of faith without guns, ending up being the safest people on the American frontier. As a result. So the evidence kept mounting for how sensible, pragmatically, it was to be a pacifist. But I didn't want this. I ended up reading a book by John Lewis, who is the number one American Marxist theoretician at the time, a member of the Communist Party. I read his book called Case Against Pacivism, thinking, "Well, if the Christians can't make a really good case against pacifism, maybe at least this Marxist can help me not be a pacifist." His case wasn't very strong either. And so by the end of the year, I had to just acknowledge that I was a pacifist, a Christian pacifist. God have mercy on you. I guess it reflects again the way that I've seen you wrestle with things. You don't simply swallow whatever it comes. I don't think you probably by knee jerk do anything, which has led to you being a very powerful witness over the 50 years that I know that you've been a pacifist. Were you one of the founders of Quaker Action Group and then Movement for New Society? Talk a little bit about that history. How is it different than being part of the weathermen or being part of Campus Crusade for Christ? What's the essential part of those activist groups that you were part of founding? The context of the founding of a Quaker Action Group, the '60s, war against Vietnam, still being in the process of the civil rights movement, meant that those of us who started at Larry Scott being the main catalyst for it realized that there were political possibilities and responsibilities that were available to us that aren't necessarily available for every generation. The fact that African Americans had done such extraordinary work in pushing racism aside and expanding the available freedom for Black people and all people, not pushing it totally aside, of course, but opening some space, opening some space for Black people and calling their movement a freedom movement, a freedom movement, not just a Black civil rights movement, but a freedom movement that impressed us deeply. It moved us very, very deeply and it raised the stakes for what was possible to do when you're up against a structure that seems overwhelming because certainly racism seemed like an overwhelming structure. Well, so does the military seem like an overwhelming structure for a USer and it certainly seemed it like it then and we weren't quite ready most of us to call it an empire, a military empire and yet it was clear that militarism had been growing, growing, growing, growing and was deeply embedded in American culture. The fact that our Black sisters and brothers had the daring to go up against such an entrenched structure that made a real dent in it by using non-monod direct action was deeply impressive to us. By 1963, I was one of the leaders actually of the piece movement that we're saying, let's focus on Vietnam, but by '65, which is when we started a Quaker Action Group, there were many people then, agitating against the war in Vietnam, but it was the group that Larry Scott brought together, the Willoughby's and others, who sensed that the lesson of the civil rights movement for us to apply was to use non-monod direct action campaigns against militarism and so we started looking for, as Black people had shown us, how to do, looking for the points of vulnerability and what otherwise would seem to be an impossible daunting structure. One point of vulnerability that was available to us as Quakers was that there was a refusal on the part of the U.S. government to allow medical aid to be sent to North Vietnam for the civilian sufferers of the tremendous bombing attacks that were going on, launched by B-52s. Because we were Quakers then had a history of medical aid to all sides in a variety of struggles. We thought, well, this is a point of vulnerability for the American government, that they are telling Quakers, no, you are not allowed, and the AFSC had been around the barn on this and American Foreign Service Committee was being allowed to do medical aid in the South, but not in North Vietnam. So we thought, well, this is the place to push. This is the place where there's a crack in the edifice, so to speak. And so we started trying to take medical supplies to Vietnam, North Vietnam, by going to the post office and trying to mail them by part of the post. And of course, it was rejected here. But we did that quite ceremonially, of course, bringing media along. And then we started taking it to the Canadian border and trying to cross the border with these parcels, which made a bigger deal out of it, all the time building support among Quakers. And then we did the more daring thing, which was to take a sailing ship, which was based in Hiroshima and Japan. Our plan was to sail to North Vietnam through the seventh fleet of the United States of America and bring medical supplies directly to the Red Cross of North Vietnam. Well, of course, all the wise heads were telling us, this is totally ridiculous. There's no way that you can take a 50-foot catch-rigged yacht to North Vietnam through the seventh fleet with medical supplies. And we said that's exactly what we're going to do, though. So we went to -- we're very respectful of government because we think they have a right to know what we're going to do. They don't have a right to tell us what to do, but they have a right to know what we're going to do. So we went down to the Treasury Department, I was part of that, and the State Department, and explained, "This is our plan," and they said, "Well, that's ridiculous. You'll never get anywhere close, and besides, we should tell you you'll be violating the Trading with the Enemy Act, and we'll find you, we'll throw you in jail, we'll put a padlock on your office," and so on. And we said, "You can do what you want to do, but we will do what we feel called by God to do." And so we started putting this mission together. The extraordinary thing we later discovered was that Treasury Department, which was supposed to administer the Trading with the Enemy Act, and the State Department, and the military, those three divisions of government could not get agreement on what to do with this small group called the Quaker Action Group, and its little wooden ship. So finally, it wound up in the White House. We had no idea, of course, being on the outside. Would they simply contrive an accident, quote unquote, and somehow the Phoenix would just be lost at sea? The ship's name was the Phoenix, or would we simply be arrested on the high seas? That would be a convenient thing to do. And it was in the White House that it was decided that the Phoenix would be allowed to sail unimpeded right through to the High Fong Harbor in North Vietnam, and realizing that there would be trigger-happy people in aircraft carriers between us and High Fong. Walt Rostow, the National Security Advisor at the time, was given the express job of making sure that the Phoenix wasn't, quote unquote, accidentally bombed out of the water. We didn't know all of this. We pieced it together later, but one way we pieced it together was I was on a college campus in the Midwest about to go into the college chapel to talk about the mission after the mission was concluded. And this very irate man came over to me and said, "I read in the paper that you're speaking tonight, and you were part of the Phoenix." And I said, "Wow, what about it?" He said, "I was a Navy airman in the seventh fleet. I was on an aircraft carrier near you. And us guys who were pilots, we were laying bets about which of us was going to get the Phoenix. And then just as we were about to take off, word came from the White House that we were not allowed off the deck. And none of us got a chance to win a bet about which of us was going to sink you. And I'm still furious, and I said, "I noticed that." And I said, "How about coming on inside?" And during the question and answer, you can say whatever you want to say. Come on in. And he did come on in. And we had a lively interchange during the question and answer period. And I think he was a little less frustrated afterward. But anyway, it was pretty hairy. Nevertheless, the ship actually got through with medical supplies to the north. And then it was sent again to the south with medical supplies for the National Liberation Front and the Unified Buddhist Church, which is opposed to the war and to the Red Cross of the Saigon government, which was, of course, allied or a puppet of the United States government. And so we were able to follow through on this Quaker mission. However, as you can guess, this was not only you, humanitarian voyage. We were on Huntley Brinkley TV at night. We were on Walter Cronkite at night. We were a constant attention to the media because the vulnerability of the military was really exposed in this way. Being in the way of Quakers doing their Quaker thing. Well, a lot of people who were not quite sure what they thought about the war, maybe the war isn't such a great thing if the government can't even allow the civilians who are suffering as a result of this war to get the modest amount of medical help that Quakers can get to them. Maybe this war isn't everything, you know, that the propaganda says it is. Maybe we have to ask new questions about this. And so what we found in the U.S. public was many doors opening up. So what a Quaker Action group really grew to be for its five years of existence was finding those vulnerable points using nonviolent direct action to expose those points so that the public could see and then mount increasing pressure toward ending the war. And certainly you know, George, we have an audience here, we're at the Friends General Conference gathering. I've solicited some questions from the audience. And I have one here that relates to something you said earlier. The question was, how do you feel about using humiliation or embarrassment as part of a nonviolent strategy? Is it okay to use these? And I was thinking also about coercion. Obviously, when you're putting people in the spotlight of the press, when you're putting the government in that embarrassment shame, I mean, you're using some kind of coercion there. What do you feel? What's your response to that kind of tactic? I don't think humiliation is effective actually, and I'm not for it. I think it's too inconsistent with the loving attitude that we're bringing. It makes it hard even if by accident we humiliate someone. It still makes it very hard for people to see our action is in alignment with where we're actually coming from in our hearts. We are also coming from a place of anger in our hearts. I'm not saying that loving kindness is the only thing that was animating those of us on the crew of the Phoenix. We're also furious about the government doing what it was doing. I feel very much in alignment with Jesus' anger whenever I read about it in the gospel. He was a very furious man. He was absolutely outraged at the injustice that was perpetrated not only by Rome, but also by the power holders and the rich of his own society. And I mean, Gandhi got angry. I remember a journalist once asking Gandhi thinking, well, Gandhi after all is a great soul, a Mahatma of Asian persuasion. So he surely has this clever way of handling anger. So this journalist said, so how do you transcend your anger? And Gandhi said, why would I want to do that? He said, anger is energy. And we're up against the British Empire, the greatest empire the world has ever known. We need all the energy we can get. So my task and the task of any right thinking person is to channel their anger into more effective action, not to try to get rid of it, or transcend it. And I'm very much a believer in that. So I'm fine with anger, and I'm fine with expressing anger in particular contexts. But I want to do it in a way that the symbolic expression or the way it's read by the public and by the opponent is not to be read as an effort to humiliate, or an effort actually even to shame, but an effort to speak to their conscience, or as Quakers like to say, speak to that of God within them and try to awaken them to the implications of what they're doing. However, with regard to coercion, which is another word that you used, I am very clear that coercion is our obligation to do whenever possible. When we see someone perpetrating abuse and violence against someone, it is my job to force them to stop doing that. It is my responsibility. I have no question about that. I'm remembering in my own neighborhood a young woman with a gun pointed at a lover who she was having a big fight at. And I had no problem jumping between them, grabbing her and bracing her in such a way that the gun, she couldn't fire the gun because the gun was pressed between our bodies. I was definitely preventing her, preventing her from killing someone. If I had the ability to stop right now, the US government from killing Afghanistan people, I would do it this minute. And he's also an authority with regard to this. He said to his own people, make no mistake. The British Empire is here as a deadly commercial proposition. It says it's morally superior. It says it's bringing civilization to us. But actually, that's a big con game. And what it's really about is making money off us. And the only way we're going to get them out is by coercing them. And that will get them out. Afghanistan is what we have an obligation to do. No one should be allowed to hurt other people if there's somebody nearby who can stop them. And so I'm very, very happy to coerce. Mark, watch out. If you try to do something bad, I will be there if I can. Okay, I've been warned. Well this Quaker Action Group, as it was called, is it just that Quakers are incredibly non-creative? They couldn't come up with a better name than a Quaker Action Group. It was succeeded eventually by something called movement for a new society. Why did that transition happen? Well, one reason why we called it a Quaker Action Group was because we expected that since we would frequently be doing civil disobedience and the government would be very displeased with us, that they might very well shut us down. So if they shut down a Quaker Action Group, then we'd have to go across the street and start be Quaker Action Group. And then move on to see Quaker Action Group. So we created deliberately a very flexible little committee that could do these adventurous things, be able to do the things that, for example, the American Friends Service Committee didn't feel able to do that would put at risk many of its programs, that kind of thing. And after five years or so of extremely intense work, which as you earlier pointed out, involved comrades of ours who, you know, went off one cliff or another, like the weather people, or were burning out in one way or another. And the situation was so fraught that I personally was fortunate to be able to be sent off for a year to work for Britain Yearly Meeting, doing speaking and lecturing and therefore had a year out of the cauldron when I came back, I was asked to be the executive director to give Larry Scott a year off. And what I found was an organization that was so close to burn out, consisted of individuals who were so close to burn out that the organization itself was starting to shred. It's just very hard to keep going at that pace and with that intensity, without more support than it was getting. And so I was very open to listening, especially to the women who were involved with the Quaker Action Group, who had been meeting as a women's caucus and who were saying part of our problem in a Quaker Action Group has to do with not realizing that the personal is political, not realizing that there needs to be an integrity between care for others and care for ourselves, that there needs to be less of compartmentalization and that that needs to be reflected also in the family lives of people. Because a Quaker Action Group was very much in the '60s model of men running out around and doing adventuring and doing ships to Vietnam and so on. Women staying at home, taking care of the children and so on. There was a lot of that kind of consciousness that we were part of like everybody else. And thank goodness women getting together, figuring this out, doing deep discernment, were saying to me when I came back, things have to change in a very fundamental way. Another thing that was going on was the rapid radicalization of the political and economic views of people in the Quaker Action Group and a realization that however much we might wish that racism was something that was soon going to disappear and that the Vietnam War was a mistake of an otherwise well-intentioned government that actually this was a very, very, very deep and fundamental problem and American Empire is a pretty good way to capitalize it. Therefore, we needed ways of struggle that would be sustainable and therefore couldn't be just overextended, you know, this year, next year, next year and then things will be better. The U.S. will be out of Vietnam and racism will have been healed and poverty will be, you know, because there'd been the launching of the war on poverty and so on and so on. And there was enough momentum going on in the '60s that we could keep looking at the glass half full and keep saying, "Oh, you know, it's getting a little fuller now, it's getting a little fuller." So let's just keep being awesome heroes for another year and we're going to see a breakthrough and then another breakthrough and another breakthrough and we were realizing by 1971, "No, this is so endemic. Democracy itself is so corrupt in the United States that we need a long-run proposition and that means changing from the Quaker Action Group structure to a communitarian structure." And so we laid down a Quaker Action Group and started movement for new society as a structure that would be based on community, it would be based on sharing, it would be based on equal relations between women and men. It would be an approach that would value the personal growth and spiritual growth of each member as well as the political cutting edge that we would continue to maintain. So we would continue doing campaigns, but in this much more holistic spirit and we decided to throw much more into common together because part of our political action had been still in the context of the competitive individualism that afflicts capitalist societies, not only capitalist societies but is brought to a fine temper by capitalist society, competitive individualism. Of course, it's still around, I'm afraid. We were victims of it and realized we need to relearn the human capacity for solidarity and unity and sharing. And so we worked on that. One way you could say it was we were a bunch of lone rangers, at least the men were, and we learned that that's not sustainable. And so movement for new society became a context for experimenting. And so we then, because we so much valued, for example, the title of Condis Autobiography Experiments with Truth, we would create a structure that was a kind of laboratory in which we could try many, many experiments in community and action. And whatever worked, we could have a training dimension that would, therefore, make that available to others. And so we became the primary training resource and strategy resource, for example, for the '70s movement that stopped nuclear power in this country. We're a very important part of the early environmental phase. And we spun off a publishing company and a whole lot of stuff in movement for new society. And that was because we were being very self-conscious. In the same way that William Penn was, I was personally deeply inspired and still am by William Penn as a visionary, who said it's not enough to protest this out of control British empire that I was born into, in the elite of, it's not enough to protest that, although William Penn was proud of going to jail. But he said it's also valuable for us to create a holy experiment. And if we can get some land out of the king and set up a holy experiment, that will be an opportunity for us to be highly intentional in the way of creating new structures. We were trying to replicate that in the '70s and for love here. So since it was supposed to be sustainable, how long did movement for a new society sustain? And did it just live out of its importance in our society? Or did it morph into something else? We laid it down in 1988, so it lasted 17 years, which I thought was a phenomenal run. And it has had an inspiring effect on an amazing number of people. Just a few months ago, we had a two night run, one night in East Village in New York, a room chock full of young people eager to learn the lessons of movement for new society. I couldn't play in my eyes. How did they even know about movement for new society? Here were these young people, weren't born at the time, lining the walls. And then the second night we did it in Philadelphia. And again, I'm glad the fire marshal wasn't there. The place was so absolutely jam-packed with people, almost all of them under 30, very eager to figure out how to pick up the lessons learned from movement for new society and take them to the next level. So it's had that kind of inspiring impact. I have also written for Friends Journal and other places some of the lessons that we learned from are not being able to be sustainable beyond 17 years. We did run out of gas, and there were some specific reasons for that. Maybe the one in the Quaker context that's most on my mind and that I keep trying to bring to friends, and that is a kind of leveling phenomenon that happened with regard to leadership. But somehow people started to think of leadership because we were so fiercely egalitarian as something that also we needed to become level about, something like the same. So instead of the emphasis being we're equal and that means equal access to full development of our leadership, it became let's all pretend that we all have the same degree of wisdom with regard to the issue before us, and that turned out to be one of the primary reasons for our death, actually. We became lowest common denominator instead of able to benefit from the height of wisdom that was present in the room. You name one of my key issues, the least common denominator issue, leadership being part of the issue. How do you personally deal with the issue that our leadership, it was determined by the fact that people have white skin and white chromosome. And so in movement for a new society, obviously, we want a broader view than that. You kind of say, "Well, okay, you're developed as a leader because you were raised male, white, middle class, upper class, whatever. How do you get to the point where everybody's valued when they didn't get the previous experience, they weren't raised with the expectation of being leader?" Several things occurred to me about that. One is listening, really listening with huge curiosity, everybody's viewpoint. We were having trouble with the listening, we were having trouble with the listening. But part of the reason we were having trouble with the listening was that people who had more experience on a given subject, and there's many subjects, so I have it more experience than this subject, but you have more experience than that subject, right? But very often, people with more experience than whatever subject was on the table were holding back because of this norm of, "Well, we're all the same," or "We're all equal." So there got to be this whole back thing, which didn't actually free up people to express their viewpoints as much as needed. So we didn't have-- so the potlucks got-- the menu of the potlucks got narrower and narrower. We created, in the first 10 years, a phenomenal environment for women's leadership, phenomenal. But that was also a period when people were willing to be very open about the advantages that you talked about. Okay, so some people were set up to get head starts in this or that way. They now have skill sets, or they now have this or that. Let's get it. So, for example, during the first 10 years at one point, a group of women came to me and said, "Okay, George, you know a lot of political theory that informs the way you strategize, that we never got. Teach us." So I taught a women's class, women-only class, on political theory, for these hungry women who had every intention of becoming as awesome leaders as any men in the outfit and knew that it would be advantageous for them to have that particular batch of knowledge in order to do it. I realized what they were looking to me for was resource that, "Whoa, isn't that different." But a lot of our earlier anti-leadership impulse was looking at leadership as if it's power over or domination. But what if we looked at leadership instead as resource? And then when we attack a leader, it's not because they haven't know so much or this or that or they haven't had these skills, but we attack them because they're not really willing to share their resource enough and pass it on. Because as you know, the old game of dominators is to keep a lot of that knowledge themselves. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit and Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and this is part of a Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org. We broadcast locally out of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, but across the nation. You can go to our site and find the stations where we're broadcasting. Please drop us a note when you visit. We'd like to hear which programs are helpful to you and which ones aren't because we need to learn along with you. Our guest today is George Slakie. He's has a rich history of activism for more than 50 years, spiritually based activism. And more recently, he's been training people, passing along the resource, the education, the leadership. How do we do social change? But those are my words. How about in your words, what have you been doing, George? That has been your training gig. And what point are you in that at this point? The single most satisfying thing I think I've done in that 15-year stretch doing the Ministry and Nama training has been the countries where I've been able to, or the organizations where I've been able to return frequently enough to be able to share the skills with folks such that I've actually been able to work my way out of a job. It's been so deeply satisfying. And the two clearest examples of that being the former Soviet Union, where a young group of medical people, mainly medical people, decided to drop their careers and become trainers in the early '90s to try to give their country a chance for democracy. They knew it wasn't a great chance, but they thought if there could be trainings in the skills of democracy, then there's a better chance that we'll make it. These were people who didn't know anything about training. So I became their training mentor and went over time after time after time. So I was basically training that collective on how to be trainers. They were the first kids on the block. So they were doing great, and people were flocking to their workshops after people got used to how strange workshops are, because experiential workshops are so different from the old political commissar mold of, you know, tell people what to think. But as soon as people latched on to it, these young people were very, very happy. And then I said, okay, so how about if we train more trainers, because they're five of you, but they're 11 time zones in the former Soviet Union, and you're not really going to cover everybody. And they said, oh, and so the next time I really leaned on them, because we had that kind of relationship. And I said, you know, you really need to open up and let other people learn this. And they said, oh, okay, so next time you come, we'll set up a training of trainers and we'll invite people. And they said they did that. And we had a grand time training up a new bunch of people, Russians, they were watching this process and interpreting for it, because all this work was being done, interpreted. And so, shyly, after we were, you know, as we were debriefing the whole thing before I went home, they said, is there a chance we could learn how to train trainers? Yes, I said, oh, I'm so happy. So the next time I came, it was not only to train new new batches, but also to teach them how to be trainers of trainers. Finally after about 11 or 12 years of that, I went back to meet the third generation. That is people who they had trained, who in turn had trained others, who had trained others. And I was back in a room full of brilliant people, mostly younger people, who had picked up these skills. So that was just enormously satisfying. And I did the same thing in Thailand, completely different culture, completely different in so many ways, never been colonized, never tried to be, well, it's flings at empire, but not in recent history. And with a Buddhist base, you know, rather than an atheist base, just so different in many ways. And yet, again, after my Canadian colleague, Karen Ridd and I had gone several years in a row, the Buddhist organization that invited us would throw us at different social movements, whatever was hot. If it was farmers resisting dams that were going to mess up their farms, then we were working with them. If it was young people fighting for democracy, it was that. If it was women's movement, whatever it was, each year we would go back, we would do this. And then we again very cautiously raised the question, these interpreted trainings, they seemed to work very fine for you, you love us to come back. On the other hand, imagine what a workshop would be like if there weren't interpretation. Think how much you could do. We could actually teach you how to do what we do. And you can. And so again, we were off and running. And in that one, we were able to recruit women into the training corps. So we had to take a stand against the prevailing sexism of Thai culture, which expected us to only train men to be trainers in Thailand, which was also a big struggle for Karen and me because we don't want to be missionaries in the negative sense of that, you know, in their bringing exotic values and trying to impose them on people. But we also realized that since we were in on the ground floor for the entire country, if we trained a corps of male trainers, that that would set the direction for a very long time. And we just had to take a stand. So we said, if you want us to train trainers, it has to include women. And so they agreed to that. Again, by the end of a decade, we were out of there having trained people who could train people who could train people and just so satisfying. So what exactly are you training them about? I understand that you were writing a book on liberation pedagogy. What are you doing in these workshops? Are you just saying, here's how you're a good teacher? Or is it about techniques you use in organizational activism? One of the favorite tools that I've been able to teach around the world, I learned from a Thai trainer who came to our initial training. And then I got to watch her train as she was practicing. She said, would you sit in the back of the room while I do some stuff? I said, yes, she has. And she did this tool, which I think it's totally a response to your question of what does it look like. She passed out glasses to the group and had a picture of water. And she went around pouring water about half full in everybody's glass while she did a little commentary like, oh, I see your glasses empty. Allow me to pour you some water. Oh, yes. Oh, I'm so glad I have this water that I can share with you. Your glasses empty as well. Oh, yes. I'll put some water. Oh, yes. And over here. And until she had put some water in everybody's glass. And then she said, OK, everyone, please go inside and check out your emotional state right now. How do you feel? So people silently reflected. And then she said, OK, we're going to do part two in this exercise. Now part two will be that you all rise, so please get up. So they got up. And I want you to share your water with each other. Ready, set, go. So they all started mingling around, pouring water. You know, they were giggling and they were laughing. Oh, you don't know. And there was this got to be this tremendous energy of conviviality and sharing. And then she said, OK, stop. Now, please check inside again. What's your emotional state? What's going on for your inner soul? So they checked. And she said, OK, sit down. Now she said, what was that like? How was part one different from part two? Of course, things were just flowing with how much better part two was than part one. And after a while, she said, OK. And if this exercise had anything to do with education, what would it be? You should have seen their faces. They had been brought up with part one, empty glasses, lecture or so, please, the full water picture could be disposed, right? What they really valued was part two. That's what really was exciting for them. So during the break after that exercise, I was talking with her. I said, so you've used this before? And she said, oh, yes, now I use this all the time. And that's one reason why I wanted you to observe so that I could share this off to you. And I said, so what does it mean for you? She said, what you have to understand is that even though ties were never colonized, we have been culturally colonized by the West. And the West has brought this model of education, which is part one. And she said, I've been to the US. I know you folks lecture each other silly and send each other to sleep full of lecturing. And she said, that has been imposed on my culture. And that's what the name of the education game is in our universities and schools. And it drives people baddie because what people know on a village level in Thailand is we need to share knowledge with each other. That's how we survive. We know that instinctively, but we've been sold by the West as a top-down thing is what education is. So she said, when I tried to use the methodology that you and Karen taught us, this liberation pedagogy, when I try to use it with my people, they push back and say, hey, way porn, you're not doing this right. You're making us participate in all this and that. And you're not teaching us. Is that because you don't know? You don't know stuff? Because if you knew stuff, you would be teaching us like real teachers do. You're not a real teacher. So she said, now every single workshop I do, I start with a water glasses exercise. And then they get it. And then we can use participatory learning and they understand. This is actually the preferable way. And way porn is choosing this because this is the way of liberation. That's awesome. That's awesome. There's so much that you've done and so much that you're still doing. I want to touch on a few of those things. We mentioned the book, Liberation Pedagogy, coming out in October. I believe there's another book on the horizon, I think, about Norway. You've got a new job with Swarthmore. I think you're also getting more activists right now because you've just completed this training time and now you've got the earthquake or action team. Okay, you've got 25 words or less. Tell us all about all of it. Well, it's tremendous fun for me to be in an activist mode again. The problem with my doing a full out training thing and running a training organization was I didn't feel free to engage in nonviolent direct action because I just have to honor if some union is having its once a year workshop and I've agreed to go to it. I don't want to be in jail instead. I want to be a reliable trainer who will show up when I've agreed to show up. So it's great that I'm no longer doing most of these training gigs and therefore I have much more freedom to participate with my fellow Quakers and others in developing a nonviolent direct action campaign with regard to climate change. And that's been an issue for me for a very long time. In my 1973 book, in fact, I predicted that leading institutions would not be able to cope with the planetary crisis that was developing around the environment. That's why I said in 1973 hoping I would be wrong. Well, Copenhagen has shown how right I've turned out to be. The existing institutional leadership in the world is unable to cope with the scale of environmental challenge that has been gathering. It is unable to cope, which means that we at the grassroots have to do the leadership job. That's okay. I mean, that's happened before. It was not the leadership that took care of slavery there in the United States. It was not the leadership that took care of ending the slave trade in Britain. It was Quakers with some front people from the Anglican Church who did that. It's very often the grassroots people who have to make things happen because the leadership gets in the way. But I personally wanted to participate. Maybe it's a little bit of an ego thing. I just wanted to participate in this next round. And so I'm so happy to be part of this thing that we're calling Earth Quaker Action Team, hoping that there will be many such formations of Quakers and Methodists and Anglicans and all kinds of other people too who don't necessarily have a faith base, but who know it's time for us at the bottom to take charge because the people at the top either cannot or will not take charge. What's the work that you're going to be doing at Swarthmore? Maybe you've already started. The Swarthmore students are very excited about the opportunity to build a nonviolent database that is global in scale. What we're doing is gathering cases of people power, so-called, or nonviolent action, from around the world. And we're creating a database so that we'll be able to put it on a website so that people anywhere in the world, whatever, you know, maybe they're trying to save a rainforest in this place or maybe they're trying to deal with the toxic river over there or maybe it's a human rights issue or maybe it's a peace issue, whatever that might be. If they have internet access, they can go on this website and find cases that might be something like theirs that might give them some ideas, strategy ideas on tactic ideas. So because it's a database, you'll be able to type in particular things. For example, what if your group is tired of rallies and marches? I sure hope it's tired of rallies and marches. And you're wanting to get more adventurous and get into something else. Let's say you're talking about a sit-in. Well, you'll be able to go on this database and type in sit-in, and then, you know, 20, 30, 40, maybe 100 cases of sit-ins will show up where you can read about other people's experiences of sit-ins and you don't have to reinvent the wheel and you'll be able to refine some of the wheels that have been built already and also tweak it to see your own circumstances. So the students at Swethmore who are building this database, I'm running a research seminar and so I coach them to be able to write these cases are having a whale of a time because as you know, the students have to do research anyway. But they know that mostly what they do will never see the light of day. It's never going to do anybody. And you could accept it helps develop their own skills. But in this case, these students have the satisfaction of knowing that what they are writing is going to make a difference in wherever, Brazil, Romania, you name it. We already have 150 cases but we can't put it on the website yet, I believe, because we don't have every country represented. And I don't want somebody from, say, Albania going on the internet, typing in their own country, you know, expecting to find some cases from their own heritage that they don't know, and then nothing showing up and maybe making up a story about that like, "Oh, well, we need in Albania, don't do this stuff, we must be losers," or something like that. Because in fact, it's my experience that every country when we look carefully at its history has an abundance of cases, a non-violent struggle. And that's what the students experience is. One of my students is into Middle East history and he said he had spent time in Syria and the friends he made in Syria said, "Oh no, we don't do non-violent struggle," and he kind of wondered. So when he came back and started working on the database, he focused on Syria and he has a list longer than his arm. So that's what we're doing at Swarthmore and having a grand time. It's like a lot of fun. Could you tell us some of the websites that we should be looking toward, maybe training for change or elsewhere? Where should we be finding the resources that you've been developing and part of giving to the world? I'm so happy to say that training for change from which I retired four years ago does have a website that includes tools, training tools, because often teachers want to break out of the lecture mode but really don't know how. When we invent tools and find that they travel across cultural lines because that cultural diversity is so important to us, we put them on the website. So we're really trying to be an open shop and say, "Hey, if you're interested in animating your teaching and empowering people, then come to our website and find stuff." So just trainingforchange.org will get people there. There's also training reports and also upcoming trainings because we take very seriously, training for change takes very seriously the obligation to keep active in the field. And then Earth Quaker Action Team is reporting on its experiments and it is at an early stage in its development as an organization and therefore very experimental, trying this, trying that. So if people want to again go beyond the old March and rally approach and get more dynamic and relevant politically, then I think coming to Earth Quaker Action Team is one way to get more ideas of things to do and also more links to other environment organizations that do believe we have to get out of the box if we're going to get out of our jam. It's EQAT, Earth Quaker Action Team, EQAT.wordpress.com. I have to observe something about you and I'd like your feedback on it. I think you're somewhere in your 70s. What's wrong with you? Why aren't you burnt out? Are you just so filled with hope that nothing will stop you? You've got a bright smile, you've got just this boundless energy. What's wrong with you? I know my despair, I know my despair, I have this big batch of despair and I pay attention to it, I don't repress it, I don't ignore it, I cry a lot. Sometimes as I read the morning newspaper, I just sob for half an hour or more. I learned this party from Dr. King actually, who was much more up against it frequently than I was and who became very friendly with his despair. He got to know it very well, leaned on Jesus as I do, leaned on prayer and cried. He also threw pillows around a lot. He and his colleagues had some fierce pillow fights after they were out on the street dealing with police dogs and fire hoses. They had to go back to the motel and have a big pillow fight. I do that too. So I'm very much a believer in taking emotional and spiritual care of myself. One of my motto is, "Take care of yourself so you can take care of others." And I do do that and that's why I haven't burned out. You're still burning brightly, your witness is so important to us, you're making such importance to the world. It's just wonderful how you've passed on this gift of spirit that you've been bringing to the world. Thank you for joining us for spirit inaction. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Really happy to be here. Love your questions. Love your show. That was my spirit and action guest, George Lakey, interviewed before a live audience at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, in early July. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World," performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit and action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit inaction. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. [MUSIC PLAYING]