openpolitics.com

AMERICA FERRERA AND JOHN PAUL LEDERACH

.. I am deeply convinced that change must be relationship-centered. We don’t create change purely on the basis of the content of a policy. We don’t create change purely on the basis of winning an argument or, even, winning a particular vote at a given time. Change has something to do with who we’re going to choose to be, together, as the human family. And until we understand this — this is when I was working with that notion of the moral imagination — the imagination that you’re in a web of relationship that includes your enemy, because your grandchildren are gonna be mutually affected. So how to hold these two — I think it’s actually the art of everything.

.. In highly polarized settings, one of the ways I understand social courage is that it takes courage to reach out to things that are not known, not well understood; that may be threatening to you; that may, in fact, pose a threat to everything you believe. So there’s a certain kind of courage that it takes to reach into that unknown.

.. But there is also a courage that is required of us — that when we see our own community dehumanizing others, that we have the courage to speak to that dehumanization. So social courage cuts in both ways, and this is sometimes the hard part, is that we just would like it to be one way. But then we’re backing away, aren’t we, from the complexity? We’re not willing to sit with the mess of who we are in a way that finds a way to speak to that clearly.

The psalm that I ended up with that was most helpful for me was Psalm 85: “Truth and mercy have met together. Justice and peace have kissed.” You may be familiar with some of that phraseology — it was actually the psalm that was read over and over and over again to start the village-level negotiations in the east coast of Nicaragua. And when I was sitting in those locations, in bombed-out churches with people who were in the same rooms who had come from different sides of a war where they had lost families and had been shifted out of a country, and they’re sitting there, and the first words they hear are: “Truth and mercy have met together” — it sounds like truth and mercy are people. “Peace and justice have kissed” — it sounds like they’re people. So I began to ask, what if truth showed up here today? What if mercy showed up alongside of truth? And how in the world do you hold truth and mercy together, so it’s not choosing one over the other, but somehow, they’re there? I think that’s the real challenge of learning to live with that tension: not avoiding it.

.. I used to be really disturbed by all the violent psalms, and then I, when I studied theology, got behind that. I really appreciate that — that at the heart of the Bible, this, too, comes before God, and you speak this out loud. And also, when I learned that those are common prayers, and so you’re not always praying just for how you feel that day and that there is always somebody in the world, and too many people in the world, who are righteously full of rage.

.. something that’s been so on my heart this entire weekend has been our indigenous brothers and sisters. We so rarely ask our question: Whose land are we standing on?

[applause]

We think about reckoning with this country and the history and the past of this country, and we so rarely want to begin with the original sin of massacre and genocide of an entire indigenous population. And they’re so rarely evoked and called into these rooms that I think that if we really want to reckon, if we really want truth, we have to start there.

 

.. I feel like when you are talking about, like right now — this is a way you’ve said it — you’re part of these multiple, overlapping, converging initiatives, some of which are very well publicized now, some of which are more emergent — and that it’s essentially leaderless; there’s no great charismatic leader. It feels to me like a lot of what is brewing, and especially in Hollywood, among artists, is kind of new-form social innovation.

.. And so something beautiful emerges out of a moment, excitement — yeast, reaching a point where it explodes into something great.

But then our human instincts kick in, and we want to control it, and we want to define it, and we want to put it in a form that we recognize and understand. And so the instinct can be: Who’s the leader? And what’s the process? And who reports to whom, and what’s the chain of command, and who gets to use the logo, [laughs] and defining the “we.”

.. You can be angry, but don’t become bitter. You can be angry, but don’t refuse to talk. You can be angry, but don’t forget to love. And he’s slightly my elder, by about a five, maybe eight-year period. And there were periods where, to be honest, my anger was headed more for the bitter. I forgot to love. And then you have this extraordinary friendship of somebody who’s been through so much more, who just comes alongside — I love alongside — takes your arm, and says, “Let’s walk.”