Walter Mosley (8 page)

What do you mean I can't have the drugs for my cancer? I'm worth millions. Keep your insurance, your Medicare—give me what I'm worth.

M
ost positions of power, influence, and importance in America seem to be out of reach of the Everyday Denizen. There are the Forbes 500, movie stars, political leaders of all stripes, and generals leading the vast armies of the volunteer poor. We live in a world of closed doors, secret headquarters, vaults, closed files, and covert actions. There are plots and counterplots, hidden enemies and terrorists who live up to their name even though they go undetected and seemingly take no action.

It seems as if we, the People, cannot seriously affect this world of secrecy and concentrated power. We cast our votes but the decisions that are made by our leaders remain unchanged. We do our jobs and are still laid off. We feel love in our hearts but still find ourselves alone.

And when hearing about the billionaires, film directors, and presidents speak to us we are often told, by their second and third tiers of acolytes, that they are geniuses.

Leave him alone
, they say,
he knows what he's doing
.

This phrase says two things: first, that the leader has Knowledge and, second, that we, the People, do not.

This is not a partisan argument. I'm not talking about Democrat versus Republican. I'm simply saying that the majority of our experts, leaders, and specialists over the past century have served to wound the world not heal it. Millions upon millions have died, have suffered torture, have been raped and sodomized, have been turned into killer soldiers at the ages of six and seven. With all the pomp and genius and holy secrets, the poor and moderately intelligent suffer in ignorance.

I take the above statements as facts. It requires an act of evil genius to slaughter six million in the camps,
to murder a million people a year in a twenty-nineyear reign of terror, to starve and otherwise kill fifty million in the paroxysm of decades that culminated in the Cultural Revolution. It takes a concert of minds in malevolent concord to maintain revolutions and covert military acts in Asia, South America, the Middle East, and Africa from the '50s until today.

Yes, he might be a genius, but so what? What makes a genius good or right or on my side? Indeed, how can a genius even exist without us? Could Mozart have made himself a violin at the age of two or twentytwo? No. Could Einstein have expressed his theories without the language in his head that had been forming for millennia? No.

We, the People, are the genius. We are repositories of thousands of years of language, wisdom, and hard knocks. When we come together in a sublime cultural epiphany: That's when there is potential and growth.

The old man, who has forgotten much, holding the young boy's hand and leading him to a lake of wonder that he knows: This is the potential for genius.

We need to know, like Socrates knew, that we are ignorant in the extreme and only through dialogue and respect for others can we begin to cobble out an understanding of the truth.

There might have been a different outcome if, before he stood in front of the assembled UN and damned Iraq, Colin Powell had shown us the yellow dots in the desert that his nameless experts claimed were weapons of mass destruction. Felicia Saunders from Cleveland, Ohio, might have spoken up and asked if there was any possibility that they could have been something else. Paolo Ein in Memphis, Tennessee, who has worked with septic tanks his whole life, might have come forward and said that he had seen aerial pictures of septic tanks that looked disturbingly similar. Ben Barcelona in East New York might have asked why one country could have such weapons but others could not? And Beverly Chin of Santa Monica, California, might have wondered if, even if these dots were WMDs, we might do a surgical strike against the dots and not the people of an entire nation.

This dialogue is genius despite Colin Powell's IQ. We, the People, are the genius. We, together, make up the mind, heart, and conscience of America. All these secrets and last-minute claims have nothing to with brilliance, leadership, or morality. Powell was wrong but, worse, we were wrong for listening to him. We have been disassociated by a system of separation
of labor (defined by the Joes) and then considered only when we have something to say about our little corner of expertise. We are effectively cut off from the mainstream of decision-making by experts who owe their bread and butter and jam and caviar to the Joes. And these Joes aren't worried about collateral damage or an eight-year-old girl being gang-raped by a troop of Congolese mercenaries. They have cell phones to move and Venezuela to reacquire.

The individual geniuses and the Joes are brutes and thugs who believe that they are right because they can get around us. And they will continue to get around us if we don't start demanding truth from our leaders and a willingness to listen too. Without our input and our experience, the experts' genius is nullified. Without collaboration politics becomes a high-stakes game where there have to be winners and losers—and the losers are almost always us.

 

So what should we do to pit our communal genius against their false claims?

Get together with a dozen people and ask a question, any question that brings to light a cultural or political conundrum. Let each member of the twelve make a brief comment on how they see the problem
and what they think might be a solution
⁴
—all this in statements as simple and short as possible. Do not argue about the claims but allow questions to be asked about the assumptions, the expected consequences, and the unexpected turns these definitions and answers might bring about. Do this all in a pleasant setting with food, maybe a little wine on the table. You might let the individual members of this group alternate as the secretary who puts everything down so that later on the members can go over their discussion.

This weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meeting will be an exercise in genius. No one will pay you for this conference. If someone offers to pay you—turn them down. If a joke comes to mind—tell it. If you have an unpopular opinion, speak it. In many sessions, maybe most of them, you will not come to an agreement but this is all right; the exercise of thinking outside the coffin-like box the Joes have built for you will open your heart to the confidence of participatory leadership. That is what America needs.

We all have a piece of the puzzle. Genius is a collaborative phenomenon. Yes, there are some amazing minds in the world but these minds are all just small
pieces of the Great Soul that we inhabit. The mere fact that someone adds faster or sees deeper does not mean that she doesn't need the trace elements of others' knowledge. And intelligence comes in all kinds of packages.

The exercise of the Meeting of the Twelve will help its members to begin to see the possibilities in us while at the same time reinforcing the notion of how cut off we've been from the real decision-making going on in our lives.

Coming together and discussing, digesting the opinions of our peers, readdressing issues and going over the possible answers again—these are the methods we must use to pass judgment on the modern world. We are the juries that must decide what crimes have been committed, what punishments must be meted out, and what payments must be made to make right what has been done wrong.

This short monograph has been designed to question the assumptions of and about our so-called leadership and to offer some alternative ways of thinking about the world that we have been tumbled into. There are probably many more steps that we need to take in order to arrive at a bus stop where there's a place for everyone, but this is a beginning. We start by defining ourselves and the inhospitable environment that encompasses us; then we take small, human steps to counter our vast opponents. Not to worry—viruses are the smallest lifeform we know of but they can fell the greatest of beasts. We need to become viral, to have many meetings of
The Twelve, to join unions and exercise real democratic processes. We need to define a twenty-first-century education and tell the truth at least once a day. We need to define
class
, place ourselves within that definition, and make our allegiances accordingly. Maybe we could benefit from the tool of psychotherapy and definitely we should work on our political convictions every day. We must resurrect the democratic process and come to an understanding of how the economic infrastructure creates our minds. We must know what the Cost of living in this world actually is—and also the value of our labors. We have to understand what we're worth as people and as citizens of this great land and, consequently, we need to see our interconnectedness as a kind of genius that trumps any Harvard grad or wealthy wannabe.

I believe that these steps will lead to others and that—as thousands and millions of us begin to tramp toward the goal of truth, liberation, and equality—a road shall appear beneath our feet that the rest of the world will have to follow.

Copyright © 2011 by Walter Mosley

 

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

 

Mosley, Walter.
Twelve steps toward political revelation / Walter Mosley.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-568-58667-0

667-0 (ebook) 1. Political participation—United States—Hand-
books, manuals, etc. I. Title.
JK1764.M695 2011
323'.0420973—dc22
2011003705