[P2P-F] Fwd: Why the NSP?

[Michel Bauwens]

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From: Tikkun <info at spiritualprogressives.org>
Date: Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 3:35 AM
Subject: Why the NSP?
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com



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Why the Network of Spiritual Progressives?

Just 2 months ago, I was living in Bellingham, Washington working as a
collaborative divorce attorney, mediator, coach and trainer. I had a
successful business contributing in a meaningful way to my local community.
And I was engaged in local activism in various ways.  Then I was offered an
opportunity of a lifetime—to be executive director of the Network of
Spiritual Progressives. When offered an opportunity to try to build a
spiritually progressive social change movement for one-third the salary I
was earning as an attorney, mediator and trainer, I jumped at the
opportunity.  So why would I walk away from a successful and enjoyable
business contributing in a way I enjoy to take on a rather herculean task?

More about that in a minute. First let me explain the political landscape
as I see it.

Here in the United States, there are thousands of wonderful local
organizations focusing on either local issues or fighting against one or
another form of injustice. And often they make contributions and progress
to better the lives of some. But ultimately as activists spend hours and
hours on end struggling to take out a right-wing bill or policy or win a
lasting but limited victory (such as our gains in women’s rights and gay
rights), global capitalists and the U.S. government emerge unscathed and
continue to pound us with attacks that undermine all our efforts. Our
government and the transnational corporate forces with which it is allied
launch their attacks on social change struggles without any provocation at
all or any care for the casualties of human suffering here and abroad.
Meanwhile the tireless efforts of thousands upon thousands of people around
the world continue to try to poke holes in the defenses of global
capitalism—ultimately to no meaningful effect. Even when we win a few
battles or a few rights, we do not change the larger context in which
corporate power and right-wing ideology are becoming more abusive to the
powerless, the middle class, and the earth that sustains and nurtures us.
Choosing Hope over Despair

I recently spent one day reading enough articles to leave me curled up in a
ball on my bed feeling hopeless and powerless to change all the horror that
is happening in the world. I first read a piece in the *New York Times*
about prison guards beating mental health inmates while they were strapped
to a gurney, even as mental health workers in the prison begged the guards
to stop. Then I read about the Obama administration’s decision to send
children who are fleeing Central American drug gangs back to their
countries rather than accept them as refugees. I flipped through pages of
bad news about Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, and finally turned my attention to
the situation in Gaza. And none of this included pieces about the
destruction of the environment—a looming cataclysmic disaster.

And yet, staying in bed is not an option because there is work to do: work
to change the world, to put forth and bring into the mainstream a different
discourse—a discourse of love, kindness, and compassion rather than
separation, “other-ing” and hatred. With each story about suffering and
destruction, I am pulled to try to do something, and often when that
happens I think I might want to join a local movement that focuses on one
of the issues about which I am so deeply concerned (there are hundreds of
them). And yet I notice that as those issue-focused groups work to stop
some specific part of the harm that is occurring, things continue to
deteriorate and more new struggles and issues arise.

This is why I left the comfort and safety of my law practice to spend my
time, energy, and life work focusing on a broader agenda—the transformation
of our current bottom line to a new one, as put forth by the Network of
Spiritual Progressives (NSP). Unlike local or issue-focused efforts, what
the NSP offers is a worldview that promotes a New Bottom Line—one that
judges the efficiency, rationality, and productivity of our institutions,
government (and its policies), and corporations based not on the old bottom
line of whether they maximize money and power, but instead assessing them
on the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity,
empathy and compassion, social and economic justice, peace and nonviolence,
and environmental sustainability, as well as encourage us to transcend a
narrow utilitarian approach to nature and other human beings.

The reasons I am focusing my energy on this broad vision are many. First,
even as many wonderful organizations, activist groups, and communities
organize to fight against fracking, coal exportation, prison violence, and
environmental destruction, and to fight for immigrant rights, women’s
rights, gay rights, and more, things are only getting worse. The more we
try desperately to fill the holes in the dike, the more holes corporations
and the ruling class blast through from the other side. We are swamped,
overwhelmed, and drowning. We are losing the battle and need to join forces.

Second, all these fabulous efforts have failed to unite together and put
forth a different worldview than that promoted by the dominant discourse.
Instead of seeing themselves as part of a larger movement, they operate as
disparate pieces. It reminds me of imagining my body with all its parts not
being contained by my skin—how would I make any progress in the world? I’d
constantly be picking up the different parts and trying to get them to move
forward one at a time! We desperately need a skin, a container to hold all
these efforts together so that we can be more effective in our efforts.

Third, we need a massive, popular social movement that puts forth a larger
worldview of the world we want rather than reacting to what we don’t want.
Returning to my body image, this reminds of my consciousness, brain, and
heart. Sometimes my body reacts to attacks or threats, but often my body’s
response is not particularly effective and sometimes it is downright
inappropriate or harmful. But when I engage my brain, heart, and
consciousness, then I can slow down, breathe, explore the possibilities,
and see a larger perspective. From that place, I am able to envision in a
pro-active, positive way how to respond in the most compassionate,
empathic, powerful, and effective manner – not only in one area or on one
issue, but to see a broader perspective and solutions. Instead of
responding with hate or despair, I can offer ideas and solutions that are
inspiring, innovative and creative. As Rabbi Lerner has said, “Martin
Luther King Jr. did not motivate hundreds of thousands of people by saying
‘I Have a Complaint’!” King had a dream—and we at the Network of Spiritual
Progressives also have a dream.

We dream of a world where all human beings live in peace and harmony, live
in alignment with the needs of each other and the planet, and treat each
other with dignity and respect. We dream of a world where social and
economic justice are the norm rather than the exception, and where we
celebrate the awe, wonder, and radical amazement of this incredible
universe in which we are lucky enough to float for one century if we are
lucky. We can connect other disparate efforts with a unifying vision that
will make each one and all us of significantly more effective. Instead of
throwing ineffective stones or launching missiles, we can help people link
what they are doing with what others are doing and together put forth a
vision of a new society.
Pursuing a New Bottom Line

So what is getting in the way of this? Foremost, our own lack of belief
that a New Bottom Line is possible. We have internalized global
capitalism’s message that the only way we can survive is by looking out for
ourselves, but in fact, if you look around the world, it is pretty obvious
that we are not doing particularly well living in that paradigm. It’s time
for us to tell and live a different story—one in which we actually do look
out for each other, care for one another, practice generosity and love, see
each other as embodiments of the sacred, and respond to the universe with
awe, wonder, and radical amazement.

In addition to putting forth the vision of a New Bottom Line, the NSP also
has different projects that we are promoting:
1. Family Matters

We are tired of the Religious Right claiming to promote Family Values while
all the while creating policies and practices that undermine the security
and safety of families and that limit who are considered a family. The
ethos of materialism, selfishness, ruthless competition for scarce
resources, and a theory that in the pursuit of success any manipulation or
attempt to dominate others is legitimate - the lessons learned in the
competitive capitalist marketplace and inscribed as the shared assumptions
of most work environments - creates a mentality that inevitably undermines
our capacity to see other human beings not for “what they can do for us”
but rather as intrinsically valuable for who they are. It is this ethos of
the marketplace that undermines loving relationships. It’s about time we in
the progressive world became the real pro-family force, by exposing the
contradictions inherent in the Right claiming to be pro-family while
simultaneously embracing values that undermine rather than sustain love.
2. An Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA)

We are promoting a constitutional amendment that would ban all private or
corporate money from federal and state elections (making them publicly
funded and banning expenditures from any other source), require
corporations with incomes over $50 million dollars to obtain a new
corporate charter every five years, which they’d only get if they could
prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to
a panel of ordinary citizens, and restructure our educational system so
that courses on empathic communication, civic engagement, environmental
sustainability, and learning to live in harmony with each other and the
planet are required at every grade level k- through graduate school.
3. Generosity as a Strategy for Peace

Our Global Marshall Plan would seek to enlist the major economic and
industrial power-house countries in each year for the next twenty years  to
give 1-2 percent of their GDP to an international body that would seek to
assist the people in developing nations to develop local community control
of their own economic and political  systems to eliminate global poverty,
homelessness, lack of adequate health care, and lack of adequate education
once and for all, and to do so in ways that are environmentally sustainable
for the entire planet. It would also overturn economic arrangements and
treaties sponsored by Western countries that have in effect destroyed local
economies.
4. Transforming Work and Professions

Many people want their work and professional lives to be filled with love,
care, kindness, and generosity, yet again and again we see institutions,
workplaces, and professions focused on the bottom line of money and power.
As a result, consumers suffer and workers suffer too. The NSP is working to
help people in various fields come together to envision how they can bring
a New Bottom Line into their work and professional fields.
5. Peace, Justice, and Compassion for Israel/Palestine

Network of Spiritual Progressives co-chair Michael Lerner has been at the
forefront of those seeking to end the Israel/Palestinian conflict, and we
at the NSP continue to advocate strongly for an end to the Occupation.
Tikkun, the spiritual progressive magazine supported by the NSP, was one of
the first U.S. publications to expose the horrors of the Nakba and the
truth of what transpired in 1948 and since. The NSP is one of the very few
organizations that is interfaith, bringing together Jews, Christians,
Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and every variant of
secular-humanists, and openly pro-Israel and pro-Palestine both (because
the only way to peace is a way that provides security and justice for both
sides). The NSP seeks to affirm the humanity of both sides in face of the
understandable but politically destructive path of trying to make one side
the “righteous victim” and the other side “the Evil Other” (though
admittedly in face of Israel’s brutality in Gaza this summer this position
isn’t so easy to hold, yet we must if we want to actually change the
situation rather than feeling our righteousness at being able to denounce
“the bad guys” at any given moment). And the NSP has continued to introduce
new ideas on Israel/Palestine into the public sphere by generating
conversations in response to Michael Lerner’s book Embracing
Israel/Palestine, which is unique in its historical and psychological
understanding and explanation of the conflict and how best to solve it.
Recently we have held conference calls with leading peace activists in both
Israel and Palestine to learn about their efforts and to see how we can
best support them. From these calls, we are putting together an activist
training guide that includes steps that you can take to bring a new
perspective to the discourse in your home, your community and the media.
6. Helping Youth Become Transformative Activists

We believe that the youth of our world desperately want to be engaged in
meaningful efforts to create a future that allows them to have a good life
too, and we provide opportunities for them to promote the New Bottom Line
in ways they find engaging and exciting.
The Power Is In Our Hands

We have a clear vision for how to move our world toward a politics of love
and care, and we are already hard at work to turn that vision into a
reality. We invite you to join us in casting off the ethos of scarcity and
individualism that global capitalism requires and step with joy into a new
understanding of the abundance and power that is already in our hands.

To sustain this work, we do not need booby-trapped dollars from
mega-corporations, centrist foundations, or oil tycoons. All we need is for
the tens of thousands of people who already love and appreciate our
work—including you!—to step up and contribute the equivalent of one hourly
wage a month.

This easy sliding scale is affordable for everyone because it is pegged to
what you make. If you earn $10 an hour, then we ask that you donate just
$10.00 per month for a year. If you earn or bill clients/patients $200 an
hour (or the equivalent thereof), we ask that you donate $200 per month for
a year. If you earn an annual salary of $40,000 per year, then (if you
calculate a 40-hour work week) that amounts to approximately $20 per hour,
so you would donate just $20 per month. We request a minimum donation of
$5.00 per month for a year. (Of course you can donate a yearly lump sum
equivalent if that is preferable for you.)

In this way, without relying on corporate money, we can collectively step
into our power, shake off our feelings of despair and powerlessness, and
generate the resources we need to sustain this fight for a New Bottom Line
into the coming year.
Our Gifts to You

Anyone who donates a minimum of $5 per month (or yearly equivalent as a
lump sum) will receive the following gifts with their membership:

o   A yearlong subscription to *Tikkun*, an award-winning print magazine

o   *Radical Amazement*: a digital album of spiritual/progressive music
(available in Fall 2014)

o   Holiday Guides: resources for breathing activist spirit into the
holidays

o   The Network of Spiritual Progressives Songbook

o   Members Only Access Page

If you donate $10 or more per month (or yearly equivalent as a lump sum),
you will also receive a copy of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s book *Embracing
Israel/Palestine*. And if you donate $15 or more per month (or yearly
equivalent as a lump sum), in addition to all of the gifts above, you will
also receive a copy of a second spiritual and progressive book from
Tikkun. To join, click here
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.
Join Us

We will be grateful for whatever amount you are able to contribute, even if
it does not fall within this structure! But we would be deeply moved if,
after reflecting upon the world you want to live in, you decide to join our
collective movement to give up one hourly wage each month to sustain the
NSP’s work to build a better world.

Finally, if you are unemployed or otherwise genuinely unable to contribute,
we still want to connect with you! Please look at the projects above and
find one that interests you then email me, Cat Zavis, at
cat at spiritualprogressives.org
<cat at spiritualprogressives.org?subject=Re%3A%20Why%20the%20NSP%3F>, and I
will help get you plugged in to our work, including helping you build a
local contingency.

We really cannot do this work without you. Thank you for stepping up to
help us reach more people and do more wonderful work in the world!

In solidarity,

*Cat*

Executive Director


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