What if a system, I mean the kind I can recognize; a workplace,  school, a faith community, a neighborhood, can be lifted out of the weight of its brokenness, by the sound of speaking in?

We don’t ignore root causes; We see the stubbornness of root causes and drive change right now, anyway…we catalyze change that will last over time, and lay ground in which new paradigms can grow.

I don’t care as much as I used to about what others think and believe; I want the experience of systems to change. I want anyone to be able to fully participate in schools and organizations, and to benefit from their purpose.

The human capacity for innovation is as strong as our vulnerability to causing each other harm. That capacity makes it possible to meet the next iteration of tyranny with new strategies grown in the soil of past failures and successes, informed by emerging knowledge and wisdom.

Sometimes calling the foul of white privilege lands with a thud. It does nothing to undo racism, or the wicked braids of systems, generational poverty and trauma that strangle so many lives.

Innovation reduces the risk of employing tactics because they worked in the past, without considering their unintended consequences and what the present might teach.

Backlash is more fearful than cruel. That’s an opening for change.

Something has to be done, but it cannot depend on or assume a collective emotional resilience that doesn’t exist.  “People cling to hate” James Baldwin is said to have written, “so they don’t have to deal with the pain.”  If fear of pain will keep them from behaving in ways that make it possible for others to thrive – if they really can’t deal with the pain, then maybe don’t try to make them.

Refusing to cooperate with cruelty, even quietly, without fanfare, is within almost anyone’s reach.

Shouting questions that only pretend to want answers will not defend the rights of all humans to thrive. The stakes are too high to waste time and energy that way.

Simply refusing to align with cruel limitation has changed systems—even the course of history—over and over again.

Compassion is not enough, of course, but without it, all other acts in the interest of a more just, peaceful, and thriving world are in vain.

These three famously admitted that they’d been wrong. Because they were willing to let go of certainty to attend to emerging realities and understandings, they found new ways to contribute to the kind of world they hope to see.