Endless Knots

Advice to Hillary; thankfully never sent #imwithher

I have six things in common with Hillary. Both our husbands studied at Oxford where each lived at 46 Leckford Road, a house mine originally rented (and moved out of when hers moved in). We’re both 69 (I’m a few months older). We both loved the teen idol Fabian (I met him in person and he kissed me on the cheek). We both spoke at our college graduations (she was filmed; there’s merely a still photo of me). We both have worked all our adult lives. And we both are grandmothers.

When she was still thinking about running (or at least that was the public position), her first grandchild, Charlotte, was born. I felt impelled to give advice about her impending political decision, which in a moment for me of “the world [being] too much with us,” was simply this: Don’t. My argument against her running for president was based on my (and many others’) opinion and experience as to where the deepest satisfactions in life originate—in accomplishments or in love. They shouldn’t be such binary choices but for women they are.

I never sent the advice or published the piece; she ran; and now we’re in the range of double-digit hours until we know whether indeed she will be the next/first-woman/first-former-First-Lady President of this continuous experiment in democracy called the United States of America.

For her sake, I wish she hadn’t run. Far and away the most abusive campaign in our history; far and away the most shocking, so appalling in its turns that we writers find ourselves saying that a novel following the plot of this election would never find a publisher due to its unbelievability; and far and away the most dangerous for what it could mean if she does not win (not to mention mounting fears if she does, c.f., the threats of armed insurrection).

For her sake, I wish I’d sent this advice and that she’d followed it, which my fourth-generation feminist daughters were shocked to see coming from this granddaughter of a suffragist (she marched until 1920), born to a feminist mother (who didn't change her name when first married and always worked outside the home), I, who was lucky enough to turn 21 in 1968 at the height of the second-wave of feminism, which I embraced.

But for our sake, I’m very glad she ran. Her example is straightening the spines of little girls, young women, and even women my age; her grit is as incomparable as any of our peers, male or female; her ability to think of her feet is as good as anyone’s; and her skill at throwing off the insults, dismissals, and now the very threats to her life is, how do I say this, incredible.

Having followed her more closely these past two years, I’m betting that she’s found a way to take those calls from Chelsea anyway (see below).

And I’m sure she’s going to win.

Here’s what I wrote--but never sent--on September 24, 2014:

Rock, Grandma, Don’t Run

In the constellation of unwelcome advice, none is less desirable than re: family. Young mothers are the unwitting recipients of bounteous bromides as per the passerby, who, touching your baby, which, first of all, why are you touching my baby, catalogues a registry of rebukes:

• Don’t you think you should have a hat on her?
• Why are you feeding him avocado?
• Shouldn’t she be in bed by now?
• What? She’s in your bed?
• You changed him where? On the hood of your car?
• Your three-year-old still has a bottle?
• Your four-year-old boy wears pink?
• Your five-year-old girl refuses to wear pink?

It’s endless and annoying and so, with this in mind, I offer the following unsolicited advice to a friend of a friend, a woman I have never met, one so famous that she’s in the single-name league of Madonna and Beyoncé, the rock star of politics and world’s most famous new grandmother, Hillary.

“I’m baaaack,” you sang to the steak-fry crowd in Iowa. ReadyforHillary—not to mention 656 pages of Hard Choices—seems to answer the question of whether you’re running. But all of that was pre-Charlotte.

Today you are now like me (sorta kinda: mine had preemie twins; no one can spell my last name while yours is all but a verb), Hillary, grandmother to the child of your daughter, who is setting off into the rainforest of parenting—unexpected showers, strange storms of illness, odd creatures (which is how first-time parents often feel about their quirky newborns)—with abundant resources but no experience, because you are not a mom or dad until you really are one.

Until you’ve done it a hundred times, you don’t really know how to change a diaper without really waking up, or how to swaddle a baby, or whether to call the doctor for the millionth time because this one might really be the really real thing and what if you don’t, who knows, your baby might be really dead before they call back?

Your daughter will be a natural, of course, because that’s what we all say—and feel— about our daughters because in the end it is a very natural human thing to give birth—i.e. how could 100 billion have made it out of the womb in the past 50,000 years unless it were relatively ordinary? But the data is incontrovertible: until you’ve done it, you don’t know jack—or Charlotte.

Which is why your daughter will be calling you every twenty minutes or so for the next several years, asking you questions that begin, “Did I…” at which point you will spiral down into The Abyss of Guilt Just Over the Cliff of Forgotten Memories. I’m sure you, unlike me, kept a daily baby book recording every one of your daughter’s projectile vomits and major accomplishments: first time sleeping more than two consecutive hours, first time unclenching her fists, first time rolling over. And you, being a strong global figure and role model extraordinaire, won’t be hurt when she yells at you for not remembering.

Even with a staff to help her because what new mother doesn’t need an overnight baby nurse, a daytime nanny, a cook, a housekeeper, and a personal secretary (if only! if only!), she will still need one particular person who can’t be hired: you.

Which brings me to the point of this unsolicited advice: You need not to miss this. You need not to miss the tiny advances, the first time Baby Charlotte does this, that, and the other thing, the first time your back aches from holding her because nothing hurts so good.

Yes, you can be president of the most powerful country the world has ever known. Yes, you can sit at the big desk and put Putin in his place. Yes, you can out-Kissinger Kissinger but you won’t be there for those first kisses. Might it be a tad awkward as president to take Baby Charlotte’s first phone call, which is not that long from now because just as you can’t comprehend that your baby has just had a baby, you will not believe how quickly the little twitchling goes from blob to blogger, if you’re in the Situation Room watching ISIS cowards being taken out?

Trust me: I want a woman in The White House. And I want you to have the same freedom to make the choice to run that your husband had. You do. And if that’s what you choose, you’ll probably win but what you’ll lose may well be far more profound.

Rock that baby, Hillary. Don’t run. It will make you all much happier.

Please keep shooting from the lip, Mr. Trump

Each time you open your mouth, you lose another supporter -- or maybe a thousand. It's hard to fathom that any decent people still are in your camp, any willing to excuse your latest unfiltered primitivism. But apparently there are still some whom you haven't offended. Please keep running your trap, blurting out whatever uninformed base thought crosses your mind. We knew before that you were uninformed and without scruples, without humility or empathy. Now we know you also had a heart removal along with an exorcism of your soul. There's not much left but please keep talking. By the time you're done, you'll have no boosters whatsoever. And then we can all move on with the important enterprise of being Americans.

Boston Globe endorses John Barros and so do I

In a rare full-page editorial, the Boston Globe today endorses two of the 12 candidates for Boston's preliminary mayoral election next Tues: John Barros and John Connolly. For those not in Boston, this is a run-off to narrow the field to the two candidates who will go head-to-head in November.

If I lived in Boston, my vote would go to John Barros.

I know John very well. I've sat in dozens of meeting with him, have spent many hours talking to him about strategy, have seen him present to large groups and small. John has vision, compassion, and intelligence, and, over the course of the campaign, I've watched his ideas about how to run one of the world's premier cities evolve.

It's very easy to idealize politicians and celebrities, even in this cynical world, and I can easily see John being lionized given his smarts, charm, talent, and good looks. But like all of us, John doesn't walk on water and, when you work as closely as we did (see below), you see "improvement opportunities," things that made me hestiate at first when I heard he was running. As I've watched the campaign (I went to see him talk at a friend's house very early on and fired off a note the next morning with suggestions for how to improve his pitch), I've seen him grow and become more clear about his plans, expand the purview of his concerns beyond education and the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and clarify what he means by "changing the conversation." I think he would make a very good mayor. 

Now, for those of you who don't know him...

Only 40 years old, John has seen a lot. The son of Cape Verdean immigrants, he grew up in the 'hood, went to the private Jesuit school, Boston College High, and Dartmouth, opted out of a career in New York finance in favor of coming home to work in his community. Anyone who's interacted with Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) knows the measure of its work: providing 225 units of permanently affordable housing on its 32 land-trust protected acres in Roxbury; working to create a charter school just a few doors from its office; helping engineer the turnaround of one of the city's most troubled schools; aiding scores of community residents with problems; and winning one of the US Department of Education's treasured Promise Neighborhood grants.

I first met John in 2010 when the Barr Foundation provided a grant to Interaction Institute for Social Change to hire network experts as advisors to three of its projects. Both Jeff Stamps and I were assigned to work with John at DSNI. I'd known about DSNI because I knew its first executive director, Peter Medoff. But I didn't know John until we started working with him. Soon I realized that this was a remarkable person, confident without being arrogant, warm without being fawning, and sought after without becoming a diva (what's a male, a divo?). He also has a great devoted family, including his wife Tchintcia, her siblings, and parents, and their growing family--two little sons and counting. (He once told me that they wanted to see a child in every seat around their large dining room table.)

It was one thing to be an external consultant to John, seeing him every couple of weeks, but after my husband died in June 2011, I was sitting in a meeting with John a few months later and impulsively agreed to be his "executive advisor," a fancy title for helping him with his correspondence and schedule.

Everyone who knows the work I do -- and have done over the years -- thought I was crazy to take this on, i.e. I essentially became his administrative assistant. The job itself was not the point for me. Although I had my usual roster of client engagements -- speeches, trainings, consulting -- I had a lot of time on my hands after Jeff died. Because we'd worked together for our entire lives with our home as our office and our schedules intertwined, I suddenly found myself in our life-long house alone day after day. I needed structure; I needed to see people; I needed a reason to get dressed. Anyone who's been through the death of a spouse understands.

So I took on this part-time job, which provided everything I was looking for, including learning first-hand about the nonprofit world in Boston, making some very good friends, and allowing me to have my Barbara Ehrenreich-like moment (see her book, Nickle and Dimed on her taking on menial jobs to write her book): I got to experience first-hand the difference between being regarded as a "world expert" and being someone's admin. (There are one or two people who've endorsed John whose behavior, I am certain, would have been quite different if they'd "known who I was." :) Another distinguished friend who works at Boston University told me that "most people wouldn't admit" to doing what I did.

Thus, this is how I got to know John -- very up-close. We didn't always agree. I've been working closely with senior executives in large organizations all my life so I had lots of opinions...but in the end (I left after nine months once I got my bearings), I came away knowing that he's a leader and he's a learner. Just right for Boston.

The photo here, courtesy of Travis Watson, shows Jeff and me at a meeting with John in January 2011. John and Jeff had special affection for each other and it's wonderful to be reminded of that in this picture. Thanks, Travis.

 

 

 

Here's a way to start the Peace Talks: See MetroPAL.IS.

On a recent road trip, we broke up hundreds of miles of driving by stopping at a few museums (including the admission-free/don't-miss-it-next-time-you're-there Cleveland Museum of Art) and visiting a few campuses we'd never seen before, namely University of Kentucky, Berea College, and "The" Ohio State University.

OSU has a little gem of a gallery in the Wex Center for the Arts. We didn't take to the current exhibit but the gallery itself is cleverly designed with skinnny hallways, short staircases that go somewhere and sometimes nowhere, and, in the vestibule, theatre/video/politics in the round so moving, so pertinent, and so poignant that I'm posting an abbreviated version of artist Shimon Attie's MetroPAL.IS., which is nothing like the experience of standing, turning, and turning again in the middle of this immersive performance to see who just said what. Everyone sitting at the Peace Talks Table (beginning tomorrow) should be required to see this piece.

 

 

What makes MetroPAL.IS. so remarkable? Simplicity and synchronicity. Attie takes two seminal documents, each belonging to the other's enemy in the form of its country's Declaration of Independence, and has them read by New Yorkers from "the Palestinian and Israeli communities." The eight characters read separately when the words are different and together when they're the same. The inevitable conclusion? The two independence declarations of mortal next-door-neighbor-enemies are pretty much identical. 

I don't think I've ever before recommended that anyone drive to Columbus, Ohio, to see a video. But now I am. If you're within a few hundred miles of this gallery, go. You will embed an unshakable idea in your consciousness: a work of art stitched with a conundrum and you may even become like me, wondering why can't we just get along again if our fundamental beliefs are identical, I mean, so similar.

Here's a description from the gallery's website:

Shimon Attie’s MetroPAL.IS., an immersive, multiple-channel video installation, dramatically tackles the complex and intensely problematic Arab-Israeli conflict with characters cast from the Palestinian and Israeli communities in New York City. Dressed in outfits that reflect their varied lifestyles and professions, each of the performers reads from a document created by Attie that combines sections of the Israeli Declaration of Independence (1948) and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence (1988). This hybrid document reveals a surprisingly significant overlap between the two original texts.

Eight 65-inch (vertical) monitors encircle viewers with one larger-than-life-size character on each screen. The characters appear in poses reminiscent of classical sculpture or baroque painting, with an almost orchestral flow of sound and text among them, enhancing the dramatic impact of the work. The complex editing and post-production work integral to creating this symphony of voices and the interaction among the individual monitors was completed during Attie’s residency as a visiting artist in the Wex’s Film/Video Studio Program in 2010.

[And from the artist himself] Attie notes that video, as a time-based format, “lends itself to the kinds of conflation of past and present which is central to my work. In addition, creating multiple-channel, immersive works allow me to activate a given space, which is also something central to my artistic sensibility.”

MetroPAL.IS., a video installation by Shimon Attie, with Vale Bruck, was commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

 

Roland Merullo: Importing common sense from Cuba

Roland, author of so many books including his recent Lunch with Buddha (as well as a novel about Cuba completely unrelated to this story, Fidel's Last Days), traveled "90 Miles From Home" (see Warren Miller's 1961 book by that title) recently on assignment for a golf magazine, picked up a few souvenirs (total value = $75), and had them confiscated at his port of re-entry, Burlington, VT. Irony aside that the only state with a "self-described democratic socialist" as senator should be the customs gate that enforces our antiquated embargo of Cuban imports, Roland, as usual, reflects thoughtfully on why it's time to change our policies in "A new path to Cuba: It’s time the US admitted the embargo doesn’t work." Note also that instead of doing what countless other visitors to Cuba likely do -- pretend that they were in Mexico or Canada, allowing custom officials to look the other way -- Roland went for the true story, which ultimately makes for a better one.

Here's the opening to whet your clicking:

On my way home from Cuba the other day — Havana via Montreal — I had all my souvenirs confiscated at the US-Canada border. I’d spent a week in Castro country and had loaded up on about $75 worth of T-shirts and small gifts. Instead of lying to the customs officials and saying I’d been in Montreal visiting friends, which would have been easy enough, I decided to tell them the real story: I’d gone to Cuba on an assignment for a golf magazine. Good-bye, T-shirts.

I’m not really blaming the rules-bound customs guys at the border checkpoint north of Burlington, Vt. US law says that any goods purchased in Cuba — with the strange exception of literature — must be confiscated. “You should have checked the State Department website,’’ one of them told me, and he was correct. But setting my own travel sloppiness aside, the law that says you can’t bring home a small bag of gifts from Cuba is absurd. If I remember right, we lost 58,000 good Americans in Vietnam, and 40 years later you can bring home just about anything from that nation. China, Russia, Albania, Burma, the dictatorships of Africa — please, spend some money there, bring home souvenirs for your kids.

But don’t spend a peso in Cuba...

PS: This makes me want to create a new category: Common Sense, but alas I fear it would lack for entries.

 

Bebé boomers: Mas Media's Raul Medina on America 2050

Fascinating thinking on what the 2012 election tells us about our changing culture in the US on boston.com, "We've come (and are going) a long way, bebé."

Here's a taste:

So if we circle back (or zoom ahead, as it were) to 2050 when Quinceañeras—fifteenth birthday parties—will certainly be as well known as confirmations and bat mitzvahs, what will that election look like? For starters, one in every three voters will be of Hispanic origin. Hispanics will be younger than the general population. The average Hispanic will be 31 years old. - See more at: http://www.boston.com/business/blogs/global-business-hub/2013/03/weve_come_and_a.html#sthash.roT2znc2.dpuf

So if we circle back (or zoom ahead, as it were) to 2050 when Quinceañeras—fifteenth birthday parties—will certainly be as well known as confirmations and bat mitzvahs, what will that election look like? For starters, one in every three voters will be of Hispanic origin. Hispanics will be younger than the general population. The average Hispanic will be 31 years old.

"Make bureaucracy sexy"

Give yourself the gift of 12 minutes listening to Jennifer Pahlka's TED talk, "Coding a Better Government." She knows. Jen founded and is executive director of Code for America. Simple description: "Helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web."

 

I met Jen about five years ago when she called asking me to participate in what became Enterprise 2.0, then called Collaborate 2.0 ... I think. Liked her instantly. Plus she gave her daughter one of the all-time very cool names: Clementine.

We'll be posting more on this shortly but in the meantime listen to what she has to say. This great quote is at about 9 minutes.

 

 

Occupying leadership #occupy

Without making the media the story here since the media has this recursive, repetitive pattern when it can't make sense of a story... a few words about leadership and Occupy.

Google "leadership occupy Wall Street" and you'll find thousands (6814 as of this moment) of articles like this pretty good one in the Washington Post, attempting to describe a phenomenon where something elusive is wrongly explained by its opposite.

If it's not in the article's headline, it's in its lede--and if not there, it's certainly not more than a few grafs down: The Occupy movement is leaderless ((e.g., the Post story, "What is Occupy Wall Street? The history of leaderless movements").

Many articles have grabbed this quote: "We are all leaders." And from there goes the faulty logic that if everyone's a leader, then no one is. Or, its converse by implication: Without a designated, authoritative single leader, then it's just a messy group with... and here we go: no clear purpose, no mission, confusing demands, etc and so on.

Is the Occupy movement leaderless?

Leaderless?

Absolutely not.

It's leaderful.

Many leaders, not none.

Many leaders, not one.

Years ago, University of Minnesota anthropologists Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine (see People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation) studied the social movements of the Sixties, which many writers in the past month have used as the explanatory vehicle for the leadership structure of this current global phenomenon. Most have gotten the interpretation of the Sixties wrong too, rehashing the old saw that there was no leadership in the anti-Vietnam War, women's, civil rights, gay liberation, and suchnot movements in which my generation grew up.

What Gerlach and Hine discovered (and supported with extensive research) is that social movements are networks. And networks have polycephalous--many headed--leadership structures.

Given our prevailing structures where one leader sits atop a stack holding yes/no power, we have a really hard time comprehending organizations where many people are making decisions. In Gautney's Post piece, she describes a completely different way of arriving at action: 

Occupy Wall Street’s organizational presence is the New York General Assembly or “GA,” which convenes numbers in the high hundreds at its squat-site in Zuccotti Park. Daily GA meetings are led by facilitators who rotate on a regular basis, and facilitation training is open to all. Specific issues, such as food, medical, legal, outreach, security and others are handled by working groups—also open and inclusive—that periodically report back to the GA. Instead of issuing top-down directives, Occupy groups use a consensus process in which anyone can join in the decision-making and propose an idea. Proposers must field questions, justify the hows and whys of their ideas, and engage a large-scale group discussion. Votes are then cast via an innovative system of hand signals, and proposals are revised until a nine-tenths majority approves.

How did this unelected, unhired, uncredentialed revolving band of disaffiliated thousands arrive at such a structure?

By dozens, if not hundreds, of articulate people stepping forward at different moments with good ideas about how to engage the commitment and intelligence of their peers. There is only one word for such people: LEADERS.

In the early 1990s, Andy Campbell, then an employee of the CIA who was working on the Clinton Administration's Reinventing Government program, said something to me that I've used in virtually every presentation since:

        "We can't solve 21st-century problems with 19th-century organizations."

Having studied and written about new organizational structures for the past 30 years with Jeff Stamps, I've attached a corollary to this:

    "Nor can we guide 21st-century organizations with 20th-century leaders."

"Solving" the "Wall Street problem" will not happen through traditional bureaucracy or hierarchy. As many a pundit has already said, the bureaucracies charged with curbing the abuses of greed are so tied up in their own knots (and such the beneficiaries either directly or indirectly of that greed) that they cannot disentangle themselves enough to even see solutions, never mind execute them.

We need to grow up. We need to recognize that networks--flexible, constantly-morphing, ever-linking organizations--are the structures we need to solve the phenomenal dilemmas in front of us.

Networks have many leaders. Some networks encase more formal organizations, like the ones we're all familiar with where people have recognizeable titles and clearly understood power structures, i.e. some organized groups are also showing up to "occupy."

Just a few ideas tend to link networks. As is the case with Occupy, a few simple phrases bubble up, even without the help of branding specialists: 99% for example.

Underneath it all is the thing that money can't buy (hello, Wall Street): commitment. Shared commitment was the energy field that Gerlach and Hine wrote about lo those many years ago. It's the gossamer thread that links all the Occupy sites, heaved from one to another by many many many many...

        LEADERS

Congratulations, Setti!

Photo of Setti and Tassy, Abigail (center) from his website

Our wonderful city of Newton, Mass., elected Setti Warren as our new mayor today. Several firsts here: Setti is the first African-American to become the city's mayor, the first Iraq war veteran, possibly the youngest person to ever win -- and also quite possibly the first twin to hold the post, a unique qualification that speaks only to certain people.

I originally met Setti through the Freedom House board, where we were both members (I still am). I liked him immediately: he's warm and thoughtful and inventive -- and I'm delighted to see him taking on this challenge.

What won me over to supporting him was an odd thing, really. A friend had made a video of one of Setti's opponents. After watching it, I wondered whether Setti had anything comparable so I searched and found this. Take the time to watch. And keep an eye on us here in Newton. The Garden City may become the Future City with Setti in the mayor's office.

Go, Setti!

The senior senator from Massachusetts

Once, at a memorial service for Irving, a shirt-tail relative whom I was quite fond of but in all honesty wasn't terribly close to nor had great contact with over the years, I became unreasonably upset.

Embarrassed, I said something to my cousin, who had been quite close to Irving (he was actually her uncle, not mine). "When someone dies, everyone you've ever known who's died dies again," she said, which immediately made me feel better.

Perhaps this helps explain how many are experiencing Senator Kennedy's death and why so many have made the trek to the Kennedy Library in the past 24 hours to honor him. Reliving other deaths aside, he was our senator (yes, I'm from Massachusetts), has been my senator for as long as I've lived here, and present enough that I can remember going to a meeting with him at the local junior high school about, guess what, healthcare as many as 17 years ago. Occasionally, I thought I saw him driving past my house on the way to the private school up the street that one of his sons attended (and which he did as well).

I've already told my favorite story about him here. Please see "Oh, hi, Ted" for a small peak at who the man really was in a unguarded moment.

And with his passing, may the search for the cure for brain cancer be amped up. It took the life of my best friend's husband in the same time that it did "Ted's."