What to Do in the Wind
Lucinda Garthwaite - ILI Founder and Director
When the late civil rights activist and U.S. congressman John Lewis was four years old, a terrible storm blew in while he was playing with fourteen other children in his aunt Sevena’s yard. Lewis remembered a blackening sky and a fierce wind; he and the others raced inside.
As the storm grew stronger, the house shook and began to move. Lewis wrote, “A corner of the room started lifting up. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky.”
Lewis’ aunt was the only adult in the house that day. She told the children to hold hands and follow her. They moved in a cluster, Lewis wrote, “from the kitchen to the front of the house. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift. And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.”
Lewis offered this story as a metaphor. “Our society is not unlike the children in that house,” he wrote, “rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.”
Still, Lewis told his readers, people persist. In his experience, “People of conscience never left the house. They came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.”
Movements for liberation are dedicated to a future in which people can flourish as who they are and behave so that others can flourish as well.
Scholar and writer Erica Chenoweth is among those who present ample evidence that it only requires 3.5% of the population to make those movements succeed. And, Chenoweth suggests, joining those movements only requires “removing cooperation.”
What does removing cooperation look like?
It can look like organizing and protesting, and it can require that some engage in civil disobedience, but that’s not enough.
Repressive social movements are rooted in the belief that for some to thrive, others must not. Cementing that belief requires separating people from one another, advancing the lie that some are more worthy of thriving than others.
So removing cooperation from such movements means rejecting hate. Any leader or teacher who suggests or encourages hatred ought to be questioned and certainly not obeyed.
Removing cooperation means finding common ground and connection as much as possible. Connection’s not always reasonable or safe. But more often than not, aided by earnest curiosity and compassion, it is.
Removing cooperation means believing in truth. Historian Timothy Snyder suggests that “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
Removing cooperation means insisting on hope, not flowery optimism that all will be well, hope that it can be.
Snyder reminds the reader that nothing is inevitable. Chenoweth offers evidence that limiting movements can be overcome. John Lewis’s aunt Sevena could have made a different decision. She could have offered those children comfort in the face of their impending injuries or deaths.
Young John could see, he wrote, that his aunt was indeed afraid, but she chose to hope that moving that group of small children from corner to corner would keep them safe. They all lived to see other storms, and found ways to meet them together.
On this last day of a year in which real walls of real houses continued to fall to relentless violence, in which truth has struggled to stand, and hate has been proffered with smiles, I know that the storms will continue.
I will choose hope. I will not cooperate. I will join those who are holding down the corners. I hope you’ll join me.