Freeport Climate Action Now Goes Live
On Thursday, January 20, at 7 pm, FreeportCAN went live. The moment of our Zoom Coming out Party, in the planning for weeks, had arrived. Thirteen FCAN activists, snug in their kitchens and living rooms, were poised in front of their computers, scripts before them, waiting for the moment when it was their turn to look into the tiny dot of their digital cameras’ and, first disquiet, then persuade, entice, beguile the audience to join our action groups.
In preparation, our team exchanged hundreds of emails, foraged for tempting slides which the technologically nimble Susana Hancock assembled into a slide show; rehearsed our lines; timed our presentations; sent out a crisp Mail Chimp invitation. When the wind gusted to 55 miles per hour a few days before, and it rained ice, and the streets froze, I envisioned our 20’ banner strung between wires out on Maine Street, shredded, a small fragment of canvas still attached to the lines, flapping wildly in the wind. When the storm abated, I got in my car and drove down Maine Street to check. Just as I arrived at the site, late in the afternoon, the sky cleared suddenly and the low sun burst into the moist air, illuminating the banner with light I associate with the light around the heads of saints on the holy cards I collected as a child.
I took this as a good sign.
In the final lines of the next to last chapter of his new book, “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis,” Amatai Gosh, the Indian writer concludes, it is not billionaires or technology that will save us, but instead a “vitalist mass movement,” driven by “the proven resources of the human spirit, (which) may actually be magical enough to change hearts and minds across the world.”
At 6:50 on Thursday night, the scene unfolding in the ten foot space around the three open lap tops laid out on the pine counter in my kitchen is anything but magical. Susana, our slide assembler and PhD climate science guru who is currently training for a 600km self-supported polar expedition as part of an international climate project is on the phone with the town TV tech guy. The button on the Zoom Webinar for streaming this event as promised on YouTube and the town TV was lost somewhere in the ether of digital space and they are frantically scrolling, opening pages, closing pages, searching for another app. All this is happening on my computer, which, in normal times, I would never surrender, for I treat my computer like an infant in need of protection and shelter from the evil forces around it.
As the clock ticks and only minutes are left, I have the vision of a launch at Cape Canaveral gone seriously wrong minutes before lift off: technicians scrambling under the rocket launcher with screwdrivers and wrenches banging the loose screws in place. I pace the room. “Let’s call it off now,” I say at three minutes. “Shh!” Susanna warns. “Don’t talk.” Polar expedition scientists don’t call things off that easily.
While the polar expedition scientist is wrestling with my computer, another Irish Kathleen Dougherty , a neighbor newly befriended through this work who heads an IT team at LLBean and is pitching in to support the tech part of the evening, remains preternaturally calm. “Don’t worry, if we can’t get it to stream now, we are recording it and we can put it up tomorrow,” her words enter the fracas of the moment like a soothing song. But I am by then too unbalanced to hear it. At 30 seconds and counting, the button not yet found, Susanna calls off the search. She slides my purloined computer across the counter towards where I am sitting.
By the time I press the Start webinar button, I am totally dissociated! I hadn’t planned on reading word for word my prepared introductory remarks, but my brain, never good at last minute crises, is fried. Meanwhile, Susanna and Kathleen are busy at their computers, putting up slides, letting people into the room, monitoring the chat box which, unbeknownst to me, is filling up with messages that some people couldn’t hear me. I am the child in my family whom people told to lower her voice. Out of the corner of my eye I catch Bob frantically waving his arms at me. I look up. LOUDER he mouths. I pull the computer closer, yell into it, pretend to be cool.
This is what local collective action looks like. It’s messy and ordered. It’s collaborative and conflictual, it’s frightening and uplifting. It’s exhausting and exhilarating. It is filled with unpredictability and uncertainty.
We had, amongst ourselves, differences about how to message the evening, differences about who we thought our audience would be. When I write these weekly essays I have control over every word, every sentence and I try to organize them in what I see as a coherent whole, a flow. What joy!!
But in this kind of collective work of organizing there are many people with their own sense of flow and belief in which sentences to choose and how the audience will react to those sentences. I believe my effort as team leader should be focused on creating the widest circle I can for our different voices. In that cacophony there is the great pulse of the razzle dazzle of life. A real community is not a place where everyone thinks the same things, feels the same way. It is a place where there is respect and room for each other’s differences. I hope my arms are big enough to keep the circle large and embracing!
Thank you, Susana Hancock, Anna Brown, Mason Morfit, Kate Olson, Kathy Heye, Margaret Morfit, Kim True, Suzanne Watson, Lyra Engel, Bob Stevens, Lee Chisholm, Jennifer Melville, Lucy Birkett.
You can meet all these people here, listen to their presentations, for, as Kathleen said, it was recorded on the Zoom platform and Susana was able to put it up on YouTube the next day. The word success is so braided with ideas around profit and expansion that I hesitate to use it to describe the evening. Let’s say I think all the people on our team spoke deeply from their hearts and wisely from their bright minds, let’s say we are lucky to have such talent and commitment here in Freeport, let’s say we are lucky to have so many in our community show up for our event and to have this work we can do together to address our fears about what’s happening to life on this planet.
The next day I am still somewhat rattled. 150 attendees showed up, yet I had seen not one of their faces, not even a digital face, as we’d presented on a Webinar platform. Without faces and real-life feedback, I felt as if we’d blown soap bubbles into the wind for all the lasting effect I could see. I daydream about the blessed day when we can interact with people in real bodies and contend only with the height of the podium and a microphone which you tap with your forefinger to be sure it works.
I open my newly rescued computer to read the morning New York Times and see there’s an essay on the Opinion page by Amanda Gorman about her experience a year ago as she prepared to read her poem at Biden’s inauguration. I am humbled by her story and gob smacked by her words about why we should be afraid at this moment in history and how we should lead with fierce love for what we fear we are losing.
To prepare for her reading on the steps of the Capitol, Amanda wasn’t frittering about her kitchen with two kind people at her side in the event anything as dangerous as a digital misstep occurred. Instead, she and her mother practiced bending to the floor so her mother could shield her with her body if someone began shooting bullets at her vulnerable black body. Friends suggested she buy a bullet proof vest. She was so nervous she didn’t eat or sleep for days.
But then she decided not to run from her fears but to listen to them. What she writes here is what I have been trying to put into words for months now and trying to teach and I hope enacting. Amanda does all this so beautifully, so deftly, choosing her words, arranging them on the page like the great artist she is. I have copied the last paragraphs of her essay below.
I’m a firm believer that often terror is trying to tell us of a force far greater than despair. In this way, I look at fear not as cowardice but as a call forward, a summons to fight for what we hold dear. And now more than ever, we have every right to be affected, afflicted, affronted. If you’re alive, you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, then you’re not paying attention. The only thing we have to fear is having no fear itself — having no feeling on behalf of whom and what we’ve lost, whom and what we love.
Yet while the inauguration might have seemed like a ray of light, this past year for many has felt like a return to the same old gloom. Our nation is still haunted by disease, inequality and environmental crises. But though our fears may be the same, we are not. If nothing else, this must be known: Even as we’ve grieved, we’ve grown; even fatigued, we’ve found that this hill we climb is one we must mount together. We are battered but bolder, worn but wiser. I’m not telling you to not be tired or afraid. If anything, the very fact that we’re weary means we are, by definition, changed; we are brave enough to listen to, and learn from, our fear. This time will be different because this time we’ll be different. We already are.
And yes, I still am terrified every day. Yet fear can be love trying its best in the dark. So do not fear your fear. Own it. Free it. This isn’t a liberation that I or anyone can give you — it’s a power you must look for, learn, love, lead and locate for yourself.
Why? The truth is, hope isn’t a promise we give. It’s a promise we live. Tell it like this, and we, like our words, will not rest.
When I finish reading her piece my morning slump has lifted. Emails come in from people who were moved by the speakers, congratulations are handed out like love letters. We have begun. The truth is, hope isn’t a promise we give. It’s a promise we live.