The Power of Visioning

The Power of Vision

I wrote in my MySpace profile that I no longer consider myself an activist or an organizer but a visionist. Activism and organizing have a place in our world and will continue to have a place as long as society is structured on oppression and inequality, racial supremacy, cultural hegemony and post-colonial imperalist ambitions of western nations. But in addition to folks being on the ground floor reacting to the on going ridiculousness of our every day situation, we need people that are proactively dreaming a better world. Folks that are able to articulate what can be and assist organizers and activists in the development of coherent, strategic, and cogent strategies for not only addressing the ills of the world but changing the fundamental fabric of our collective reality into something new...a co-existence on this planet based on justice, love, community, peace, and liberation.

I have many brilliant friends, but two in particular are writing and have done writing around the need for visioning work: Jeff Nygaard and Ricardo Levins Morales. Jeff wrote an awesome piece on the need for visioning that I would encourage you to read. You can reach Jeff at nygaard@nygaardnotes.org. And Ricardo is currently putting together a book on visioning (which when finished...will most likely become an instant staple of a new form of leftist organizing based on proactive visioning instead of reactive response).

Jeff writes in his article about the need for us to establish a value based system of pro-active visioning that allows us a frame work for basing our work. I absolutely agree. By articulating how we are going to do our visioning work and in what ways that work will be based and created...we allow others to engage with the expansion, development, and critic of ideas and plans for envisioning a new world. For me, the basic values that undergird my work are those I mentioned above...justice, love, community, peace, and liberation. Through my work as an artist, activist, advocate, community organizer...I have come to understand my work through the above lenses. Through my participation in the Visions Collective, a multi-gender/multi-generational/mutli-discipline/multi-sexuality based discussion group, over the last three and more years...I have begun to come to a basic understanding of how centering myself in these values and making my choices and decisions through these lenses allows me to break out of the mold that has been created for me...allows me to disect the rules that have been established without my consent...and gives me the fractional space necessary to begin to dream something different.

While centering yourself in your personal values and working from that place may seem obvious...I have found again and again that when working against the latest attack by the right...the latest constitutional amendment...the latest attack on welfare...the latest attempt to roll back civil liberties...or any other of a number of repressive and oppressive issues...I have often found myself attempting to refute the logic and values behind the attacks instead of acknowledging the attacks and proposing new and different solutions based around positive values that are based in a long term, strategic vision for the construction of a new society based on a new paradigm. I am not interested in fixing the current paradigm...as far as I am concerned the agreements that undergird society as it is now are agreements that were made without the consent, will or participation of most segments of our society (women, young people, people of color, people with disabilities, queer folks, the poor)...they are holdovers from a colonial era based in slave labor, racial stratification, economic and class inviolability, assumed Occidental superiority, and institutional oppression. The social contract, as it stands, has been violated by those in power so many times and in so many ways that to use the term "breach of contract" to describe the failures of that contract would be like using "oops" to describe Bush's election to the White House.

Great and admirable work has been done in the name of activism and organizing...enough work to get those of us that believe that the world needs to be imagined anew to the place where we can do that imagining...free of preconceived limitations...and begin the next phase in our own liberations. We claim to live in the land of the free...but I contend that no one...not the richest whitest man in America to the poorest blackest woman is or ever has been free. The oppression in which our world is based chains us all...in different ways...but the dehumanization of oppressor and oppressed are the chains that must be removed...and can only be removed through visioning and believing that a new world is possible.

Comments

[Justin]

i don't know if i believe in the idea of discrete roles, but i do find the idea of the 'visionist' very fascinating. i sort of think of scholars and academics as filling that role, but after reading this entry and having the word visionist added to my vocabulary i might need to rethink that. i like it.