Lost in a Swirl of Answers
“I don’t have all the answers. Probably none of us do,” Executive Director Rea Carey said in remarks delivered during the conference’s closing brunch. “I have struggled myself with how to lead in this moment.”
Until then, Carey had kept a relatively low profile during the conference, even abdicating the organization’s annual “State of the Movement” speech to a diverse group of lower level staffers as a nod to protestors who had heckled her the previous year. They had questioned how a “wealthy white woman” could speak for the movement and so she didn’t.
Carey’s repeated failures of solid leadership and direction are hardly unique. “Our movement, the progressive LGBTQ movement, is mirroring the tensions and conflicts of the larger society. Changes are happening in the world and Creating Change is reflecting some of those shifts too,” she told the audience in the weekend’s most truthful moment.
The progressive movement is suffering from the unseen blizzard of Special Snowflake Syndrome. A trend toward valuing the individual over the common good has resulted in unintended consequences. Pressured by academia, our method of organizing has gone from an assembly of individuals working together for the common good to a group of free spirits celebrating our collective individuality. Outside of academia, reality tells us that 108 billion people have lived on earth. You’re not that special, snowflake.
“Intersectionality” is celebrated as a new theory involving separate personal identities instead of recognized as the age-old wisdom of making allies based on mutual interests. “Microaggressions” require mega responses completely out of proportion to any perceived slight. Our movement has become martyrs without a cause. Instead of viewing the world as a place that needs fixed, the new breed of activist only sees it as broken.
The right wing has its own version of the ailment, best illustrated by the rise of the Tea Party, but American progressives have swirled around so much they’ve landed on the right. Activists demand those with opposing views be denied the ability to speak in both public and private spaces; universities have suffered through multiple campaigns to rescind the invitations of speakers who didn’t hew to an ever changing standard of morality. Respect for dialogue has been thrust aside in this polarized political environment as students proclaim universities “safe spaces” instead of an institute that challenges high school preconceptions and problems.
A cocktail reception for representatives for Israel’s leading LGBT organization was shut down by a couple hundred protestors, a few of whom were shouting a genocidal chant, as “intersectional” outside groups descended on the event bringing along a swarm of attendees. Obviously well used banners and placards were placed throughout the procession as participants tried to learn new chants like “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” While it sounded appropriately liberal to the folks caught up in the moment and puffed full of snowflake activist theory, it refers to the complete extermination of the Jewish state.
Musing shortly before the protest, pro-Palestinian organizer Eyad Alkurabi acknowledged the mistake of trying to shut down the reception instead of engaging in dialogue with the Jewish organizers. “You’re right,” he said. “It was the wrong approach.” Within two hours, he was at the forefront of the protest designed to do just that and any lessons learned were apparently forgotten.
The Most Radical Way of Organizing Is Teamwork
What the would-be queer radicals – at a conference that appeared to skew much younger than normal – ended up doing was predictable. The squall became a storm and finally a blizzard of its own. The Task Force has been accused of being anti-Semitic by several prominent community leaders and organizations; a post-conference feedback session turned into a circle jerk of amplified public chest beating and rending of fair trade cloth. The organization has put out their own flurry of press releases issuing multiple apologies, expressing solidarity with the Jewish community, and commitment to immigrant rights and reform. Flailing wildly, the Task Force wasn’t able to stand in the face of the storm and the wider progressive movement hasn’t battered similar storms any better.
The new tagline for a re-branded Task Force is “Be you.” They got what they asked for. The crowd of young activists, many of whom were emulating the citizens of the capital in The Hunger Games with bright blue hair and lipstick, couldn’t see that in the end they all looked the same. They were being themselves just like everyone else. As one veteran activist observed, “We cannot create change until we are able to accept change within ourselves and accept that we are not individual in our struggles.”
One blog post from Dean Spade, an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law, charging A Wider Bridge with “pinkwashing” blew this controversy into existence. Instead of dispassionately looking at the issue, the Task Force, knowing that a snowflake rarely falls alone, canceled the event as a knee-jerk appeasement only to reverse the decision after getting walloped by those who saw the cancellation as censorship based on anti-Semitism and then hit with the blizzard of further controversy and ugly accusations.
“We will learn from and build on this moment. I have a lot of fears about the direction of our movement,” Carey said during her short speech. “But I have a lot of hope too. In many ways, in the work that lies ahead of us as a movement, I believe we have the opportunity to be extraordinary. If we do this right, I believe we can make this next era of the LGBTQ movement our most dynamic, powerful, most inclusive moment for leadership and transformation yet.”
We won’t have that breakthrough moment until we remember that the most radical thing possible is to sacrifice for the common good. Compromise and dialogue form the backbone of civilization as we’ve pulled each other up to advance the human race. The ability to recognize you can support Israel’s pro-LGBT policies and the Palestinian fight for freedom has been blanketed with vitriol and the Bush-era doctrine of “You’re either with us or against us.” As the ramifications of the pro-Palestinian protest aimed at a group known for protesting injustice become clear, what’s still unknown is whether or not the actual opportunity will be grabbed or if it will melt away.
As the conference ended, Alkurabi stood in the hotel lobby yelling, “I don’t feel safe here. I won’t be coming back to Creating Change!” as if his safety was the only consideration. The safety of those who felt threatened with genocidal chants and anti-Jewish insults was forgotten in the feel-good heat of millennial mental masturbation. No one around him paid attention; his outrage was as brief and meaningless as a solitary snowflake.
