Walk Out Walk On

I have devoted most of my life to the quest for justice, the path has been beset by victory and loss, hope and frustration.  I often find myself contending with a deep awareness that too many of us – including the radicals and do-gooders that I count among my friends – including my own self!  All of us seem to be stuck in a paradigm that has reached a dead end.  And yet it is all we know.  And so we give our hearts and our passion, our energy and life force to a process that often seems doomed.

I have had the privilege of participating in some of the learning journeys beautifully described by Frieze and Wheatley in Walk Out Walk On.  I can honestly tell you that they bring us as close as we can get to the experience without actually being there.  What is beautiful about the book is that it brings the reader to that place of hope and upheaval that one experiences on a learning journey.  We get to witness phenomenally hopeful responses to injustice and despair.  Bold, autonomous, real walk outs from a system that is broken.

The reader is filled with a sense of deep human solidarity, a sense of pride in what these people can accomplish, a sense of hope in our shared capacity to walk out and walk on to something better, something new and something that is fundamentally good.  But this does not happen without being beset by the nagging questions of scale, questions like where is policy change?  Where is the state in all of this?  Isn’t all of this just quaint – cute, beautiful but exceptional – not replicable?.  We have to come up against the core assumptions of the dominant approach.  And if you are a do-gooder, you have to come up against the core assumptions of your own approach.

It is not an easy process, and the conclusion is not forgone.  But if you think that something is not working, not even with your own approach to change and social transformation, if you think that our humanity is in need of something else, then these walk outs are onto something, and they seem to be walking on to a very powerful place.

Read this book!

But WAIT!!! We are betting that there are enough of us to make this book a bestseller – we are organizing to get our copies on April 13 – write it down AND let me know if you are down.