Tackle the trust issues

• Tackle the trust issues.
We live in a environment designed to feed distrust. We know from bitter experience the murderous intentions behind some honeyed words. Our dependencies leave us little margin for error and little patience with others’ mistakes. The stakes get even higher when the bosses retaliate against real or imagined resistance. Until the revolution, there’s only so much we can do to protect ourselves or gain wiggle room.

We do have a number of well-known organizational measures we can take to foster trust among people in struggle: set up accountability and dispute resolution structures early on, so we don’t have to depend solely on personal affection to get us through the hard parts. Make sure there’s broad buy-in at every big step, rather than expecting that a few enthusiasts’ energy will drag everyone else along. Be clear about what we want representatives to do in our names, and what they may not do. Rather than wrangle endlessly about the single correct course to take into the unknowable future, leave plenty of room for folks to try a variety of tactics, while holding them responsible for the results. Set aside time for reflection on a regular basis, so the simple act of raising questions doesn’t ignite a crisis of confidence-- and so that we get better with practice. Practice routines for dealing with grandstanders, not to punish them but to make sure they don’t take up more than their share of the group’s time and attention. Don’t act in others’ names without authorization.

We can also make boundary-drawing something we do deliberately and democratically, rather than leaving it to informal reactions. By boundary-drawing I mean both defining who may and may not be part of the constituency, and acceptable behavior with respect to our goals. For instance, we can decide ahead of time, or at the first questionable instance, how members should represent the group to the media. Is it OK for members to talk to police, earn money from political work, accept favors from politicians, inherit positions from relatives? How do we deal with someone who breaks the rules? Do we air our dirty laundry in public, as the saying goes, or try to keep all disputes in-house?-- given the serious risks with either approach.

What about people and groups who hijack our work to grab credit or media attention, without accountability? Do you remember the protests in city after city against corporation dominated trade policy? Instead of covering the substance of the debate, the media focussed almost entirely on a few demonstrators who took it upon themselves to trash local businesses. The organizers of the protest coalition had arrived at one kind of strategy, were elbowed aside by a few self-appointed stars, and had no useful response.

The external battles are hard enough. Let’s set up up some internal guidelines before we’re in crisis. The goal here is not set off witch-hunts, but quite the opposite, to build trust and strengthen our work. It took Old World immigrants almost two centuries to build up enough trust among themselves to undertake the first American revolution, and their oppressor was two months away.

Then there’s the contention over who rightly belongs to the group, or should not. Are we workers in X industry, residents of Y barrio, households of $Z,000 income, or do we embrace a broader community? Who qualifies as a member or ally-- or untrustworthy outsider? Sometimes we just assume everyone knows the answer to these questions, or fear the anger they’ll generate. But, rather than leave the answer to self-appointed gatekeepers who emerge from the woodwork at the first sign of heavy weather, discussing the questions up front can strengthen our understanding and strategies. I think of Marlon Riggs’ video, Black Is . . . Black Ain’t as the kind of reflection we can undertake to broaden and deepen our bases.

Formal accountability structures can only go so far. Unless folks grow up together, trust has to be rooted in shared values-- not just what we were trained with but what we develop from our work together. Payne wrote of civil rights activists,

Although not a proponent of nonviolence herself, Ella Baker noted with approval that in SNCC’s early days the kids ‘were so keen about the concept of nonviolence that they were trying to exercise a degree of consciousness and care about not being violent in their judgment of others.’ So long as significant numbers of members were making an effort to live their daily lives according to the dictates of stringent moral codes, there was something to balance whatever forces might have generated interpersonal bitterness. As organizers generally lost faith in American values, rejected the nonviolent, Christian tradition, and drifted away from their close contacts with the rural poor, they failed to create or find any functionally equivalent system for regulating their day-to-day behavior with one another (373).

We undergo all sorts of rituals at home, at work, and on public occasions, to reaffirm our shared values. By neglect or by design, many of our unifying ceremonies have been warped, sanitized, or otherwise drained of their original meanings, fossilized as quaint ornaments from an irrelevant past, or manipulated to exclude valuable members of our community. But if we think of rituals as a kind of group story, we take care to add new voices, information and interpretation with every retelling.


Just as important, we can check our expectations against the real possibilities of the world and our natures. The better we understand each other the more we can expect, without setting ourselves up for failure.


# First of all, let’s don’t sell ourselves short. If we experience conflicting aims, if we make lots of mistakes, those might reflect our strengths as much as our weaknesses. When we love more, work more, and understand more, we risk more, too. All the more reason to help rather than undermine each other.

At the same time, admit that our first motivation is to improve our own lives. We needn’t be ashamed of this. Our self-interest can also help us understand and stand with our neighbors.


# Don’t underestimate the neighbors. If I can be thoughtful, caring, and tough, they can too. This is not to romanticize each other, as if everyone had the same skills and readiness, but to see and put into use our actual and potential strengths.

Ella Baker and Septima Clark understood clearly that the matron in the fur coat or the self-important preacher were hardly models of progressive thought, but they still assumed that such people could be worked with and could make a contribution. This ability to see people in their full complexity was increasingly lost in the more dogmatic phase of the movement . . . (Payne 375).

We can’t operate the same way with our neighbors as we do with the rich and powerful. That is, without losing our habits of critical thinking, we have to temper suspicion with trust, our impulse to resist with the need to cooperate.

We can recognize our limitations without throwing up our hands. We can trust this person with this kind of responsibility, and that person with that kind; and give everyone a chance to reach farther-- under watchful eyes. Who was it who said?: You keep one eye on what people are, and one eye on what they can be. We can recognize the attitude of blanket distrust as an unacceptable excuse for inaction.

Especially we should not let our fear of the gangsters to spill over into fear of our neighbors. Just after 9/11 I talked with several people who were sure there was no way to engage folks about Osama and Halliburton. Once Halliburton went to war, they were afraid they'd be attacked for opposing it. So it shows their bravery that they went ahead anyway with prayer vigils and demonstrations, for years.

Still, for a long time the tone, and sometimes the explicit message was, we don't like the war, but there's nothing we can do about it. Almost everyone supports the war. We can't change their minds. We are on our own. Some of these demonstrations took place in circles. That is, people huddled together, backs to the street, to sing and testify to each other. The gatherings helped boost their spirits, but it looked to me like they had given up on the good sense of their neighbors.


# Make the rules we need; change them when we need to. We need rules because we need to know what to expect from one another and to hold each other accountable. We even need rules about how to set rules.

On the Planet of Right and Wrong, people serve rules and rulers. For instance, immigrants deserve to lose their jobs and homes because they didn't follow (impossible) rules to come to the U.S. Because of the way the Deciders jerk us around, and the very unstable lives many of us lead, a breach of the rules may seem like the prelude to catastrophe.

In a democracy, the rules serve the people. We make rules to help us reach our goals. So what's most important are the goals. When we shift priorities, or when our rules don't help us reach them, we change the rules. All along the way we are clear, clear, clear with each other about our intentions.


# Speak for ourselves. We really mess up when we appoint ourselves or others to speak for whole groups of people. It's very important to insist on diversity in our organizations, leadership and discussions, so that we can learn from a variety of experiences and perspectives. (The 2009 uproar over Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, when Republicans claimed that personal experience has no place in legal decisions, reflected dishonesty and/or ignorance on a scale that surprises even this jaded observer.) Sometimes we misuse the process, treating one or two participants as if they can represent a much larger group, under the assumption that everybody in that group (white people, old people, Gardeners of Gramble County, etc.) has the same ideas. That's not true, and it lends itself to a very nasty kind of corruption, by which people in power raise up stooges to speak for the rest of us. Moms For Carcinogens, and the like. The only way individuals can be said to represent a group is if they are elected.

So, for example, I can say, I'm an old white guy, and I demand a legal path to citizenship for immigrants. I can't say, Old white guys demand a legal path to citizenship for immigrants. That way we don't get into the habit of trying to fool ourselves and the rest of the community-- and we pay attention to the task of getting many many old white guys to say, We demand a legal path to citizenship for immigrants.


# Don’t blame others when it’s really our own fears we are acting on. Unless I have surveyed everyone I may not say, “The people are not ready for (a strike, gasoline taxes, gay teachers . . .) .” And when a group takes a risky path, so long as they’ve chosen democratically, more experienced activists can’t fret too much that they don’t know what they’re getting into. None of us knows exactly what we’re getting into; but the rank and file know certain risks better than any staff type or professional do-gooder.


# Examine the roots of our distrust-- both specific personal experiences and the ways we interpret them. Don’t mistake carelessness, egoism, miscommunication, and a hundred other failures for deliberate malice. Even those who really do kill us through war, pollution, profit driven health care, and the like, rarely regard us with any kind of animosity. We’re just suckers to them, pawns in a game. Most kinds of failures we can correct, circumvent or compensate for. We don’t have to sympathize with the careless, egotistic, or unintelligible people who make our lives miserable to see why they fail and what can be done (or not) to get them back on track.
At the same time, it helps to reflect on how much our distrust is a product of our training. Who tells us to despise our neighbors, and why? From Original Sin to gender roles, “reality” TV and the central axioms of capitalism, we’ve been taught over and over that ruthless competition is the natural order of things, tameable only by authoritarian control.


# Don’t assume gangsters will act as we would. People who have power without accountability act in their self-interest as we do in ours, but they may see their possibilities quite differently. Most of us would rather have joyful, creative partners than fearful servants, for example, but control freaks want us to be as fearful as they are. For most of us, peace is the rational choice, even for gangsters, and we’re unprepared when Dick or Adolf, with their eyes wide open, choose endless war. Remember, we understand self-interest as an expression of long term commitments. A few people are as committed to crime as we are to justice.


# Give each other one more chance.
Bulkin writes about heart-rending struggles over racism and anti-Semitism, "Within and without the women's community, we are faced with the question of whether we will, in fact, give up on each other, whether we will generalize from our worst experiences and proceed in a climate smoggy with a distrust so thick that effective political work cannot take place" (Bulkin 151).

This kind of work is so difficult. Political workers have to fight the gangsters and at the same time trust co-workers and allies. There is so much at stake, and the setbacks are so bitter.

But I don't see as we have a better choice. As a matter of policy, let's give each other one more chance.