• Stress is a necessary but not sufficient condition of change.

• Stress is a necessary but not sufficient condition of change.

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Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.
--M.L. King, Jr. (1963)
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Below I argue that we change because we need to. Necessity the Great Mother of all invention, and like that. Certainly I find it hard to change without a good kick in the behind. Likewise, the experiments about obedience, conformity, and emergency reactions suggest minority voices have their greatest impact when people see the need for these alternative voices; when there is an acknowledged problem with no established solution. First, there is some kind of stressor: the majority’s obvious misjudgment of visual information, a man falling down on the subway, the screams of the person you are “correcting” with electric shocks. A lot of what we do at political demonstrations is aimed at raising the stress level for the general public and for policy-makers. We want to make sure that abusers and polluters and war profiteers, and their apologists, understand that they will have to pay a price for killing our children. “No Justice, No Peace!” we warn.

But pain isn’t enough to establish a problem, let alone solve it. After all, my country tis of thee is a regular stress factory: our families, our neighborhoods, our jobs barely work, and we choke on lies on a daily basis. But as far as I can tell, while many folks freak out at skateboarders or images of guys kissing on TV, very few people are bothered by football games or Christmas carols. When even quite uncomfortable things, such as dying, are seen as part of the natural environment, they become less of a problem than the acceptable or unacceptable ways we deal with them. Then there's the whole category of unpleasantries the lords teach us are just as natural, like burning dissenters or wiping out whole ethnic groups for their property. These can only be controversial when we can imagine alternatives. We also have to be ready to direct our challenges to the real sources of our problems, rather than easy-to-slaughter scapegoats. So many of our complaints are directed to the easy targets, like immigrants or gay people or Big Government, when what hurts us most are the economic and cultural disasters wrought by corporations out of control.

Naomi Klein points out that people in power routinely manufacture crises to blow up our communities, disrupt our movements, overwhelm our abilities to think critically and plan ahead. I've also worked in places where people were at each others' throats all the time due to sheer mismanagement at the top.

By itself, stress isn’t enough to make us change our approaches to a problem, either. The bystanders who didn’t help injured people, or the obedient torturers in Milgram’s experiments, were clearly disturbed by their situations (Atkinson 731, 735, 738) without being able to change their behavior. I think that the confrontations over the war in Viet Nam did push the majority back (a step or two; without perhaps changing the underlying paradigms) from its active commitment to the war. That took many years, however, and Tricky Dick ruled with glee his deliberately polarized subjects.

In fact, intense stress may make us cling even more tightly to authority, even when it’s not working. That’s the basis of the Osama / Halliburton symbiosis, that exquisitely profitable partnership between religious and state terrorism: scare the heck out of folks, make us feel helpless, and we'll do whatever you say. According to one study, “groups were found to be more productive under autocratic leaders when they worked under stressful conditions. When stressors were not present, they were more productive under democratic leadership” (Cummins 27).

This creates a strategic puzzle. How can we challenge unjust policies and raise their costs without freaking out too many of our neighbors? During elections and issue campaigns we offer reassuringly ready-made remedies to counter those of the regime. But in the long run, we need very broad participation to fashion lasting solutions, and that’s hard to sell to worried folks used to glib, false answers. Somehow we've got to combine a sense of urgency with an accepting calmness that lets us hear each other, face the problems, and prepare for action. One of Obama's big assets is the apparent calm with which he acknowledges crises and conflict, instead of denying them.

I remember a class, I think it was math, in which I had students read statistics about African Americans in jail. I’d vaguely assumed that would prompt some interesting discussion, but I didn’t plan for it and in the event ran out of time. Bad teaching. I threw some unpleasant information at them (mostly what they already knew, far better than I), and gave them no chance to respond. Later I read what Minnie Bruce Pratt wrote about a somewhat similar situation: "What I learned was that these facts alone merely discouraged and depressed women who were already struggling with daily small-town repression as women and as lesbians, and that I needed to figure out positive reasons for our dealing with racial and cultural difference" (51).

Since then I’ve tried not to throw folks in scary positions and then strand them without maps and climbing tools-- in that case, I could have provided lots of information, from descriptions of citizen groups working police and prison issues, to excerpts from Malcolm X or other people in the system, to math exercises comparing education and prison budgets. We don’t really need the answers already worked out, but we do need methods and frameworks to help us move forward.

I don’t want to exaggerate the obstacle either. We show surprising reserves of patience with people we trust. Look how long it's taken for people to stop cheering for Halliburton's wars. If the left ever takes power, and begins to disrupt business as usual, we're going to have to tap into that possibility of patience.

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" . . . it was only after some crisis of trust in male authority in their daily lives, coupled with some confirmatory experience that they, too, could know something for sure, that women from these backgrounds could take steps to change their fate and ‘walk away from the past'" (Belenky (1986) 58).
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