Who's racist or ableist: the Implicit Association Test

When you aren’t on a deadline or scrambling to get done the essentials (but your brain is too tired to either pursue your serious interests or get you moving toward something truly restful), there is something you do at your computer in that state of numb fog.

It might be browsing through pictures of cute animals on Facebook or playing Tetris or Solitaire. It might not always be the same time waster, but chances are you have certain habits. I wonder if those habits say something interesting about your personality.

My numb-fog habit is browsing through sociological and psychological statistics. If one’s numb-fog habit does say something about one’s personality, I am pretty sure mine says I’m a hopelessly weird variety of nerd. But there you have it.

Creative Commons image by Whisperer in the Shaddows photostream

Sociology and psychology statistics are like mental candy. I know that they don’t always mean what they appear to mean and they aren’t always good for me. But they strip things down to outlines and make the world appear much more orderly and predictable than it actually is, even if its predictability is in how absolutely nuts and irrational most people are.

This is why I’m the type of person who takes the Myers-Briggs personality test for fun and tries to get my friends and family to take it too. And yes, I got a very weird (or at least statistically uncommon) result on that test.

On one of the rare days when my kids were away and I didn’t have to work during the winter break, I indulged in my numb-fog hobby instead of either sleeping (which would have been the responsible choice) or doing something fulfilling or useful. And what I found was an intriguing online study out of Harvard called the Implicit Association Test.

It’s actually a series of mini tests that cover everything from your subconscious preference for light skin or dark skin to your preference for randomly selected previous presidents versus Trump and from your positive feelings toward straight people versus gay people to the degree to which you subconsciously view Native Americans as “American” or “foreign.”

If you’re curious, I turned out to slightly prefer African Americans over white people, have no preference on gay versus straight, harbor a moderately strong assumption of Native Americans as more American than white Americans and (weirdly) I subconsciously slightly preferred Trump to Richard Nixon.

Needless to say, my results on these tests tend to be on the minority side, with the exception of my subconscious lack of interest in the difference between gay versus straight people, which appears to be fairly common.

The results of these tests can be surprising, both on the individual level and when taken as an overall statistic. I went into the race test knowing that the vast majority of respondents present a subconscious bias against African Americans, including more than half of African Americans themselves who subconsciously prefer white people over people who look like them.

The test goes so fast that you can’t really try to control it or even remember much of it, but there was one of the black faces with big, beautiful eyes that looked kind of like one of my friend’s kids, and maybe that’s what tipped the balance for me subconsciously. I’ll never know because the test doesn’t explain why we have subconscious associations, it just ruthlessly alerts us to them.

Many people find that even though they state vehemently anti-racist views and truly believe they are “color blind,” they still have implicit, subconscious biases, even against their own group. This study is proof that we don’t live in “a post-racial world.”

It is one thing to fight discrimination and prejudice through equality laws, but what do you do when the people perpetuating problems of inequity and prejudice don’t even know it or condone it? It’s tough, but there are people whose test results come back without bias or with a bias in favor of those who have been historically marginalized, like mine did.

In addition, though society makes much of sexual preference as a scandalous personal detail, most people actually don’t much care about other people’s bedroom activities, according to the Harvard test results. So there must be some way to mitigate prejudice.

I am pretty certain that, if I had taken this test twenty years ago, the results would have been different. I remember how, as a college kid coming from rural, eastern Oregon, I was nervous whenever I saw a black person coming toward me on the sidewalk.

I had nothing “against” black people. And in fact, I couldn’t understand why they had faced discrimination “years ago.” I didn’t really know any black people, except for my mom’s college friend who died of cancer when I was a child, but I did secretly wonder if the continued ruckus over “race” wasn’t just coming from a few who wanted to “feel special.”

I report this all with a bit of shame, but I think honesty helps. This was my view around 1995. As hilarious as it may sound now, I thought that we were completely “over it” back then. And had I taken the Implicit Association Test on race at that time, I am sure I would have had implicit bias against black people, though I would have consciously believed I was unbiased.

What changed? Both life experience and conscious focus.

First, I spent four months in Zimbabwe as a student, almost always the only white person in a room or on a street. Even though most people were wonderfully kind to me, I learned what it is like to be a highly visible racial minority in a country with hot political and racial tensions. I then spent several years covering racial and interethnic conflict as a journalist, mucking around in every type of divide from South America to Eastern Europe.

Finally, I adopted children who are not white and we live in a country where racial boundaries and prejudices are deeply intrenched. When my children were little, I started to experience first hand how race is truly viewed in majority-white societies. And I started reading copious amounts both on race theoretically and from Black, African, Native American and Asian authors. I chose racially diverse reading and dolls for my children and spent hours to find them, not to mention several times the amount of money necessary to buy “white race” toys.

It has taken years, but now I have very different views than I did as a young student. Not only do I know very well that our society is far from a post-racial world and I am hyper-aware of things like police brutality toward black people in America, I also have gained enormous gratitude and respect for the persistence, courage and patience that so many people of color have given our society throughout history.

That last is what I think made my test result skew in favor of black faces. After two decades of focusing on the positive contributions and articulate stories of people of color, my subconscious attitude has shifted. It is that also which causes so many African Americans to harbor more negative views of black faces.

Most people in our society are not immersed in stories, media and images that present people of color positively. In school or in the mainstream media, one cannot help but absorb mostly negative images of people of color and mostly positive images of white people. But I do not consume much mainstream media and it has been a long time since I was in school.

After all that, of course I was curious about what the test would say about attitudes toward people with disabilities. Popular assumptions would tell us that most people do not really dislike people with disabilities but possibly pity them or objectify them. Despite the occasional discrimination and harassment I’ve encountered which was clearly due to my disability, I thought surely actual hatred was reserved for people of some marginalized racial group or non-standard sexual orientation. I assumed, before seeing the results, that most of my difficulty with inclusion in social groups has to do with my physical inability to make eye contact and read non-verbal cues.

Here again, the results upset my assumptions and those of wider society as well.

I wondered if I would personally have a slight bias against people with disabilities myself. I have a rugged, self-sufficiency streak and people with disabilities often do better in a more collaborative and mutually supportive community. Even I do, though I might wish otherwise. So, I was prepared for the test to tell me I am just as “self-hating” as all the anti-black African Americans.

But that isn’t what happened. I turned out to have a slight implicit positive bias in favor of people with disabilities or at least in favor symbols associated with them.

Only 9 percent of people who took the test share that implicit bias in favor of people with disabilities, while a whopping 78 percent associate people with disabilities with negative thoughts, including roughly half of that number who have strong negative associations with disabled people.

That left me gaping and shocked. The negative bias against people with disabilities outstripped racial or homophobic bias. The words associated with people with disabilities on the negative side were things like “selfish”, “dishonest”, “hate”, “anger,” “despair” and “disgust”. It wasn’t even primarily about pity.

Those results are deeply disturbing to me and my afternoon of casual browsing through statistics turned sour.

To be strictly accurate, let me emphasize that these were the views of nearly 80 percent of the people who happened to take the Harvard Implicit Association test, which is mostly something people run across online or are assigned to do for a class. That isn’t really very comforting, however.

It is likely that if the demographic of the test takers is weighted in some way it is skewed toward more educated and connected people. And these are the people who have such overwhelmingly negative implicit associations when shown images and symbols associated with disabled people. This wasn’t measuring a sample of mostly uneducated or isolated people.

It is particularly concerning given that people with disabilities are usually the last group added or are completely left off of those ubiquitous lists of people we should include and center in progressive circles. I always figured that people with disabilities got left off of such lists or added as an afterthought because people thought we were generally viewed positively and there wasn’t much need to emphasize non-discrimination against people with disabilities.

Now that dismissal takes on a different connotation. People with disabilities are often left out even in diversity culture and when they are added in, it is as a prop, never as a voice. At this point I’m still reeling from seeing these results and I don’t have any idea why there are such negative stereotypes about people with disabilities.

But my own experience with overcoming racist biases makes me think that what we need is a significant, pervasive promotion of the voices, images and stories from people with disabilities with an emphasis on our altruism, unselfish contributions, intelligence, helpfulness, capabilities, honesty and dignity. Without such promotion throughout society, I doubt these attitudes will change.

To take no shit or to tough it out - a rebel's view

I’m going to write about an incident here that I have never openly acknowledged before. I didn’t promise to never discuss it. There was no non-disclosure agreement, but I’m sure my high school principal assumed there was a gentlemen's hush-hush agreement.

He should have known. I’m no gentleman. Part of the point was that I’m not a man at all and was not a boy.

Creative Commons image by Craig Cloutier

I graduated from high school in a desert town so small that they changed the population sign when my family moved in from 150 to 154. My father was a rookie teacher and had to take whatever post came his way. The sophomore class I entered had six students. I got a study-abroad scholarship and spent my junior year in Germany, but I spent two years with them.

By the time I was ready to graduate I was also more than ready to get out of that tiny desert town. I had again lined up scholarships, this time to an exclusive, liberal arts school half a continent away. I had big dreams of international journalism—and more importantly—escape.

My grades and SAT scores were enough to land the scholarships. The other kids mentioned something about me being valedictorian and I was surprised we would have one with so few of us. Even so, I wasn’t without competition.

My study-buddy Faye, who was one of the best friends I had during my entire school career, was college-bound and savvier than me about most things outside of books as well. She would no doubt have had straight As, if her home life had been more like mine—i.e. stable, two-parents, and you know, a house with separate rooms for each kid rather than a tiny trailer.

But as it was, she wasn’t even in second place. I won’t pick on the kid who was by name because I doubt any of this was his fault, though his parents might have been involved.

In the early spring of my senior year, I was called into the principal’s office and told that I wasn’t going to graduate. I already had a college settled and full scholarships. The news hit me so hard it literally knocked the breath out of me. The principal said that, although the school had initially agreed that my credits from Germany would be accepted without any grades being counted against my GPA, he had determined that that wouldn’t be possible.

He gave me two choices. I could either repeat my junior year to make up the credits or take the grades given on my German report card into my GPA and accept that “pass” grades, of which there were several would be counted as Cs.

I had even gotten a real C on that report card—in third-year chemistry. I had never taken first- or second-year chemistry and it was in German. The teacher was a sour-faced traditionalist who probably was being “charitable” by her standards in giving me that C. I couldn’t follow the class at all and there were no accommodations for the fact that being legally blind I couldn’t see the chalkboards or read the tiny-print, light-blue-ink books.

If I accepted those grades I wouldn’t be going to college at all, given that my scholarships would evaporate. There was no way I could work my way through school without being able to drive or do the hurried physical labor of most minimum-wage jobs at fast-food restaurants. The principal maintained a level, uninterested tone as he delivered this soul-destroying ultimatum.

I went home in tears and was confused by my parents’ strange lack of concern.

Most of what they said was a blur to me, but I remember my mother at one point stating, “You need to stop grabbing everything for yourself.” Finally, I got what she meant. My mother was always fanaticly against selfishness and at one point she hinted that it was understandable and even justifiable for the town to want the son of a prominent local rancher to be valedictorian, rather than an interloper who had only been there for two years.

But it was my father who explained it to me plainly. I would not be allowed to graduate as valedictorian. It wasn’t actually impossible for me to graduate with a good GPA, but no one could say out loud that the issue was who would be valedictorian in our class of six. However, my father also didn’t seem to think that taking another year of high school would be such a bad thing, even if I had already taken every class the school offered and more than half of my senior year had been independent study and distance learning classes.

I was an emotional and loud-mouthed teen and I cried bitterly over it. I wanted more than anything to lash out, to go into the school yelling and demand justice. I wanted to talk to the other girls and tell all. This was what my parents made me understand I must not do. If I made any kind of fuss, I really would not graduate or would graduate with a GPA that would erase my scholarships.

It was my first major lesson in bowing my. head to injustice and keeping silent, and I think my parents thought it was a good and needful lesson in general, because I had given them a lot of mouth over the years and had a reputation for yelling, “It’s not fair!” at the slightest provocation.

They didn’t tell me exactly what to do or say, but I was actually a quick learner. Figuring out what to do wasn’t the hard part. It was swallowing the bile in my throat that was tough. I didn’t need the accolade of being valedictorian. That wasn’t really the issue.

I was a teenager and so at least somewhat selfish, but I think if someone had come to me and said, “Hey, you have your college thing worked out. Can we let one of the other kids have this valedictorian thing so that they have a fighting chance?” I would have given it up willingly. I just hated being scared out of my wits during that terrible moment in the principal’s office and bucked at being forced by authority to bow to something blatantly unjust.

Still I managed it. I walked back into the principal’s office a few days later, folded my hands in my lap and tried to put on a show of being a sweet and submissive young girl.

“I see that some misunderstanding has come up here, and I think we can solve it easily,” I said. “When I went to Germany, I agreed with the school that my grades would be counted as pass/fail, and clearly pass/fail grades can’t be counted toward someone being valedictorian. Having those pass/fail credits obviously makes me ineligible to be valedictorian, even if they don’t change my GPA.”

The principal was silent for a moment and then nodded and made a gruff sound of assent. It was settled and not a word was ever spoken about the matter again. I graduated with a 4.0 GPA and went off to college. I don’t know what happened to the kid who was valedictorian, but Faye, who wasn’t, became a lawyer for labor unions and did just fine.

A few more times in my life, I have had to formally bow to injustice. Once I was told explicitly by a hiring editor at a newspaper that I wouldn’t be hired because of my disability. I could have spent the best years of my journalism career finding a lawyer willing to gamble and suing the guy, and I might have won. But instead, I swallowed the bitter pill and went my own way.

Another time an editor insisted on switching the sequence of events in a news article I had written. I wrote that the NATO-led bombing of Kosovo in 1999 preceded the flood of Albanian refugees leaving the province, and showed that the newspaper’s own archives backed me up. But my editor stated that it was “policy” to say that the NATO-led bombing came only “in response to” the flood of Albanian refugees, “forced to flee” the province.

It was the clearest instance of political censorship I encountered as a journalist and I felt a bit like Winston in the book 1984, when he held incontrovertible evidence of vast lies in his hand for a brief moment. But I was a rookie reporter, scarcely more than a kid, and I was beyond grateful to have the relationship I had with that editor.

The bit of backbone I showed that time was to request that no false statement should appear under my name. I asked the editor to either remove my name from the article or allow me to rephrase that part vaguely enough to skirt the issue. We agreed on the latter solution.

Why am I digging all these skeletons out of my closet at this point? Mostly because I had pretty much forgotten about those incidents and when reminded of them, I realized that no one involved in any of those incidents has any power over me any more. I can say these things and any sanctions that might be brought against me can no longer harm me.

The same can’t be said for the situation I found myself in last fall with the climate action movement Extinction Rebellion. There, I was asked to keep silent about abuses of power and to accept being the only person explicitly excluded from leadership positions because our leader took a dislike to my questions and inability to swallow hypocrisy.

The stakes for me were emotional and social this time instead of the future of my education or my job. That’s a blessing of sorts. While the climate crisis threatens all of our survival, this exclusion and discrimination didn’t threaten my personal survival. It only threatened to cut me off from friends and a source of hope that the movement had become to me and many others.

Finally, the stress of being constantly blocked and excluded by those in powerful positions along with the demand of the organization to keep such issues quiet became too much. The impact on my emotions, physical health and even family life was getting out of control and after a particularly rough period of two weeks of daily harassment by one person assigned by the power clique to hound me, I did what they wanted and simply ceased all contact with the local Extinction Rebellion group.

I still text with friends inside the climate action movement and my friends have asked me to come to talks with the leadership. I understand why my friends ask it. I was a powerhouse of positive energy when I was part of the movement and my work involved supporting others rather than the power games that have poisoned our corner of this otherwise admirable movement. My friends who are committed both to real climate action and to a healthy internal culture in the movement want me back.

But those who excluded me have their own reasons for holding the talks. I was far from the only one to run afoul of them and they are understandably under fire for their unethical tactics in an organization that claims to be both supremely inclusive and non-hierarchical. I was one of the more prominent people to run into trouble, however.

The small group being paid “expense assistance” to run the “all-volunteer” organization would like to erase the stain on their reputations (and possibly even their consciences) caused by them hounding the only significantly disabled leader out of our national branch.

This is a current crisis and again I am being asked to bow to injustice and keep silence about it. The last agreement they pressured me to accept was that I would be considered blameless (since there wasn’t anything they could find to accuse me of) and yet I would be excluded from positions of authority. In exchange, I would not be openly harassed and the big autumn actions we had planned would not be disrupted.

As it happened, I was still harassed. And the exclusion was much more widespread than the agreement hinted.

What will their next “agreement” offer? I can’t really imagine. I think I will go to the talks for the sake of the friends who have asked me,, but I will make clear from the outset that I will no longer bend and bow to hypocrisy and exclusion. I will speak openly about harassment and abuse of power. And if I am excluded and harassed personally, I will simply leave.

I am glad that I am no longer a child or a young employee physically under the power of others. The ability to vote with one’s feet without being destroyed is the very definition of empowerment.

The sci-fi mystique of 2020

“It is the year 2020 and the first annual conference of sentient artificial persons is about to begin. One of the first agenda points is a resolution demanding that humans stop using the derogatory term “robot,” which comes from the Slavic word for “work” and gives the connotation that we should be the servants of humans forever…”

Wait a minute. That won’t work anymore. Sci-fi writers always have to push their stories ahead a couple of decades to give themselves enough room for imagination.

As a kid, I was confused about why George Orwell thought the year 1984 had a dire, futuristic feel to it. For me, it was just the mostly boring year I had our near neighbor as a second grade teacher, so that when my mom called me in sick so that i could go sledding in the first fresh snow of the winter, I got caught.

Photo by Arie Farnam

For my generation, 2020 was the year that sounded futuristic, cool and a bit scary. 2019 and all the other years since 2000 just looked weird written down and we had a hard time saying them at first. We were used to saying, “Nineteen ninety something.” So we naturally tried to say “Twenty” but then we had to say “Twenty O one” and “twenty O two,” so it just didn’t work.

But “twenty twenty” works nicely and it was safely remote enough that we could freely imagine a futuristic world, either utopian or dystopian. We were really expecting flying cars, robot soldiers and at least basic food replicators by now. Touch screen tablets actually turned out to be way cooler than our sci-fi could imagine and drones are a bit more boring than we pictured.

However, our sci-fi failed utterly to predict social and cultural changes. To be fair, sci-fi pretty much by definition has to go to extremes. Either the culture will be hopelessly jaded and cruel or we will somehow banish racism, ableism and bigotry of all sorts along with the common cold. Naturally, neither of those situations has fully materialized.

Sure, today’s culture is jaded and unhealthy in ways that we couldn’t have dreamed in the 1980s or 90s. The effects on general mentality and interactions that social media, nonstop video games and blanket advertising have had are way more depressingly banal than sci-fi authors of the past would have envisioned.

But I recently got a kick out of explaining to an ESL student studying professional English usage that the pronoun “his” is now simply considered wrong—rather than “politically incorrect”—in the sentence, “I’m the kind of employee who always stays late when his boss asks,” given that the student is female.

The ability to choose any music, video, book or magazine in a second and surround yourself with ad-free, thoughtful and wonderfully diverse voices (if you so choose) is also pretty amazing. The ability to buy almost everything online and rarely have to go to any store except the local mom-and-pop store on the corner is downright awesome.

Knowing that the casual homophobia my kids are exposed to in elementary school will be countered with a much more open-minded online world once they are a few years older gives me a little peace, while the continuation of deeply engrained racism and ableism in almost all social spaces fills me with despair.

Other than the touch-screen devices, the thing that is probably the truest to the science fiction and fantasy of my youth is the global disaster of climate change looming, while political and cultural leaders enact the modern equivalent of “the folly of Rohan”. Tolkien would only have been perplexed about how our Gandalf turned out to be a teenage girl with pigtails.

While it looks like life in 2020 is going to be just as mundane as it is every year while we’re living it, this coming year is the year we once envisioned as dramatic and decisive. And although it is just one more year in a series of numbered years, we could take that up. We could choose to make our resolutions less about losing weight or saving money and more about the kind of world we want to make real through our actions.

In 2020 Americans will participate in the election of another president, very likely the last president to have a real chance of averting catastrophic climate change. Vast numbers of people in Asia, Africa and South America are gaining a middle-class lifestyle, and through global interpersonal communication, we have more opportunity than ever before to expand our concept of “us.”

And yet many of us are struggling with personal lives that already feel survivalist, where every day is on the edge. My. hope for the new year is to find a clear path through the storm, a sense of direction.

May 2020 be a year to remember for much needed change.

Marginalized groups in XR: Will you come or will you go?

Macrocosm

Storm winds are surging within the climate justice movement Extinction Rebellion. Just as in a physical storm the clouds and waves are occupied with their own internal turmoil and any given droplet of water within them is both ineffective and blameless by itself.

In October, a small group in London claiming to be part of Extinction Rebellion mounted an unpopular action, blocking a subway station by gluing themselves to trains and climbing on top of trains during rush hour. The rationale behind such actions is similar to the actions blocking bridges and road traffic. The point there was not so much to be against cars as an unsustainable form of transportation. It was simply to sound a high, loud alarm.

The message of XR blockades is “STOP! Just stop business as usual! Pay attention! There is nothing as important as the climate crisis now!”

The reasoning behind it is that the warnings given by scientists, saying that we have a very limited amount of time left in which we can realistically avert massive disaster and uncountable deaths from hunger, storms and extreme heat, are real.

And we either believe that a consensus among ninety-nine percent of the world’s scientists is a serious matter, that facts are real and the laws of physics actually do apply to us, or we don’t. If we believe those things, there isn’t really any other common sense response than to do whatever it takes to bring about changes that might just be able to save millions of lives.

Photo by Arie Farnam

That’s the intention. Extinction Rebellion hasn’t distanced from the group of activists who carried out the London subway blockade because the rules of the movement are also real. If someone subscribes to the ten principles of XR, including non-violence, refraining from shaming, mutual support and challenging power structures, they can call themselves Extinction Rebellion. That is what the London subway blockaders did.

But the vast majority of XR members voiced vehement objections to the action. Some simply felt that the movement shouldn’t target reasonably carbon-light transportation alternatives, such as rail transport of any kind. After all, subways and light rail are the kind of things we need to be moving toward, even if Extinction Rebellion refuses to put out exact specifications for solutions.

The movement insists that a people’s assembly—chosen through a jury system, rather than through a heavily financed election—should decide how we move forward to solve the climate crisis. But rail transport is one of the non-controversial assumptions about what that solution will have to entail.

Others have more complex reasons for their complaints. The trains blocked in this particular action happened to come from some of the poorest parts of London, full of immigrants and ethnic minorities on the way to minimum wage jobs with harsh tardiness policies.

Extinction Rebellion is not immune to the accusations leveled at most environmental organizations that it’s a place for middle-class white people to work out their rebellious streak and generalized anxiety. Extinction Rebellion has made an effort since the beginning to keep a permanent focus on inclusion, but this action felt like a slap in the face to a lot of people of color.

One of the ten XR principles is “We accept everyone and every part of everyone.” It’s supposed to be inclusive and the small print talks about inclusion of every kind of vulnerable group. But some people of color have expressed that they don’t feel nice and cozy and safe when they hear this principle. Instead they immediately wonder if the white supremacist parts of some people might be included in that blanket acceptance statement.

There are other principles that point toward inclusion and much of the in-depth but technically non-binding structural documents that make up the DYI systems to set up XR branches in every city around the world go into detail about cultural sensitivity, inclusion and recognizing the different experience with police that people in vulnerable groups may have. Extinction Rebellion tries, but it is still an attempt at sensitivity by a bunch of white people.

“Rebels”. (as XR members call themselves) have employed a popular chant over the past year when police intervene to force an end to a blockade. “Police, we love you! We do this for your children!” has echoed in every English speaking country as well as quite a few where the words are foreign. In Prague, the Czech rebels at our October blockade yelled it in thickly accented English, while police hauled away 130 of our friends, injuring some.

And yet, black people back in the UK, where Extinction Rebellion started, and across the water in the US have said essentially, “Ahem, that’s not going to work for us.” Love just isn’t happening in the relationship between black people and the police in the UK or the US, where random police interactions with black people wind up with way too many black people dead. Most black rebels in these countries are not even sitting on the blockades and getting arrested.

While white rebels risk a night in jail, a fine and a misdemeanor record, black people risk their lives just walking or driving, let alone poking the police bear. It is less that black rebels don’t want to say the chant as it is that it sounds like white people wallowing in white privilege.

Now, after the Autumn Rebellion, many XR groups online and off are tackling the issue of inclusion. I’m glad they are because I see this as the Achille’s heel of this movement, which has achieved a great deal in one short year. If Extinction Rebellion fails to fuel massive public demand for climate justice at every political level, it will be because we fail the inclusion part.

That isn’t just because we should be good people or that we need the numbers that vulnerable groups could provide by joining us. It is most importantly at the core of what has made XR successful so far. We should include people of color, people with disabilities and all the other vulnerable groups not for their sake, but for everyone’s sake. Everyone has some vulnerability and it is when we see those more vulnerable than us truly included that we can fully commit our energy, time and resources to this kind of effort. Inclusion isn’t just for those we shouldn’t exclude.

When it is there, it permeates the entire culture. When it isn’t there, no one is safe, and social interactions are a constant battle of individuals trying to stay in the center of the herd, furthest from exclusion.

Microcosm

When I first joined XR, I was glad to find that no one made much of my disability. They were happy to try to accommodate my vision impairment by letting me know who was who, and I was so grateful to be treated a bit better than the immediate social stereotyping and dismissal that I encounter on a daily basis in society.

But as time went on and more and more people joined XR, I have watched that early focus on inclusion fade and thin. New people often come from a non-activist environment and they bring with them the exclusionist assumptions of the wider society. Those who have been there longer are tired and desperate to reach some kind of tangible goal. Inclusion starts to feel like a luxury we can’t afford.

I have been reticent to write openly about the difficulties I’ve run into with exclusion within XR over the past few months, because i too am focused on the ultimate goal. But the events of recent weeks around the world have convinced me that we must talk about these things openly. Because it is exclusion that will take us down.

It is not a luxury. It’s the heart of the matter.

There may be a few exceptions, but by and large the people who join XR are open-minded and informed. They are people who believe in science enough to put their regular lives on hold and do something about a crisis that for most of us—in white-majority countries at least—is still largely theoretical. They are also demonstrably people who take personal responsibility and eschew laziness, because rather than simply talking about the crisis, they are doing something.

These factors mean that even though XR has people from both the political left and the political right, most are already tolerant, nice people. They don’t think of themselves as racist, ablest or otherwise exclusionist. Many even consider themselves actively anti-racist or anti-ableist. And a lot of them feel like this should be enough.

But as with the London subway blockade and the police chant, it clearly isn’t. For me, as the only significantly disabled person in my local XR group, I have to agree. My group has been wonderful in consciously working to include me. I truly appreciate that, and yet I know that most people with disabilities in my place would have left long ago and I am constantly close to leaving the group myself.

I asked a friend who uses a wheelchair to join and she just laughed ruefully. I couldn’t really argue. The group says they want a person in a wheelchair at the blockades because it would make for good press photos, but no one has ever even mentioned the fact that we’ve never held a meeting in a place that was even remotely wheelchair accessible. They want a person with a wheelchair as a prop, not as an organizer.

There are two categories of issues I can identify that cause me to feel excluded in the group even without the issue of physical accessibility. which given the conditions isn’t really their fault.

First, there is a tolerance for intolerance, as that principle about accepting all parts of everyone implies. While most people are inclusive and welcoming, there are those who are not and the group not only tolerates them but insists that I must tolerate them. If I speak up, even very discretely about exclusion and hate directed toward me, I am told that the urgency of our goal demands that I tolerate it and don’t rock the boat.

Second, there is a lack of understanding about the effects that exclusion in the wider society have had on me and a marked lack of tolerance for any reaction I have to social exclusion.

In one prominent example, a person in a position of power in my group decided early on that she did not like me. Her explanation focused primarily on communication issues, specifically that some of my texts were too long. Being a writer, I can be a bit wordy, but when I can, I go back and edit. Written communication usually isn’t a problem for me.

But in this case, we were using a phone app for daily communication within the group. I can’t type on the tiny phone screen very well because it is too small for me to see, so I was dictating my texts. This meant that my texts were especially long. When we speak, we naturally use more words than when we write. To add to this, editing on my phone in extremely small print is next to impossible for me. Yes, blind people use audio interfaces that make it technically doable but it is excruciatingly slow. Sometimes i do spend literally hours editing a few texts for the group to make things readable. But most of the time, with my work, household, children and all, I didn’t have time. I just dictated texts and sent them, oral vagueness and all.

So, the dislike this person initially developed toward me was based on something that was a symptom of my disability. She is a person steeped in European good manners and social justice thinking. I am certain that she would never intentionally exclude a person over a disability or some other irrelevant trait. But she did—likely obliviously—develop her antipathy for me over something that was part of my disability.

She and the rest of the group chose to call it “a difference in communication styles,” and despite my explanations, refuse to see it as disability related or reconsider her conclusions. When she initially adopted her negative view of me, I was utterly confused. We had, only one day before, had a wonderful conversation in which she told me that I would be working with her closely and expressed a lot of support for my work in the organization. And then suddenly, I was cut off from communications and told that she no longer wanted to work with me.

She later said that my reaction shocked her. After a lifetime of social rejection and even complete isolation for years at a time, I don’t take abrupt, unexplained rejection well. My first reaction was to cry, then to try to defend myself and later to bargain. For so many people with disabilities social rejection is a real visceral danger and I am no exception in that.

It is understandable then that my reaction came across as out-of-proportion and overly pushy to someone who felt she was simply setting some boundaries with an annoying individual who writes overly long texts.

But here’s the thing. After many months of informal exclusion, I was forced to accept an agreement in which we would be sensitive in our communications with each other and I would stay away from powerful roles within the organization in order to minimize contact between me and this person in power. This was the only way i could stay in the group at all.

That may sound like a reasonable compromise, and it did to most of the local XR rebels. But imagine if this had been a black person instead of a person with a disability. Imagine that someone expressed dislike of a black person because of the way they spoke or dressed or some other cultural attribute and started excluding that person. Imagine then—it isn’t hard at all—that the black person got intense and up in that person’s face because they have been excluded and dismissed way too often by white people, and subsequently that the those in power limited the black person to low-level roles as a means to avoid further conflict.

Realistically, most black people—and most people with disabilities—would not get intense. They’d just leave. That is ONE of those reasons that there are so few people from marginalized groups in XR and similar organizations. But it is not at all difficult to imagine this scenario, because like me, some black people stay and fight.

Now, in the scenario with the black person most anti-racist white people are now educated enough to see the problem and to call this exclusion. We aren’t perfect yet and i’m sure this does happen in Extinction Rebellion to black people. But very few abled people are informed enough to see the same situation clearly when the issue is disability. For whatever reason, that’s just the dynamic.

The end result is that, if I want to continue to be part of Extinction Rebellion, I have to constantly bump up against the antagonistic walls set for me, where I am not allowed to take on national roles in the group. And I have to constantly see the XR messages urging us to put people from marginalized groups in positions of power and to feel their hypocrisy.

There are a very few people of color in our local group as well and none of them have significant roles. I don’t know them well enough to discuss the reasons why personally. But the fact is that our group has the option of putting people with disabilities or people of color in visible and/or powerful roles and it doesn’t. In fact, it has barred a person with a disability from national roles, based on symptoms of the disability and post-traumatic responses to social exclusion.

We’ve got a problem.

And I—like many other rebels from marginalized groups—now have to decide day by day if I stay and fight for the soul of this movement I believe holds our best chance for the future or if I let it go and take care of myself.

Remember why: A note from my past self in Extinction Rebellion

This post is time travel. It’s a message from the past.

Really. I am writing this in mid-August. The sun is hot. The days are slow and lethargic. The Czechs call this season “cucumber season,” because in our short growing season mid-to-late August is the only season when cucumbers are ripe and so many people spend their time pickling.

My pickling cucumbers all died of mold, so my children will go without pickles this winter. Such is life.

But the other thing about this season is anticipation. And this year that is more true than ever before. We’re working up to what we grandiosely call “the Autumn Rebellion.” It is supposed to be a massive worldwide uprising of people demanding truth, justice and action to avoid ecological disaster.

Creative Commons image by Carl Nenzén Lovén

In London, Paris, Berlin and other western cities, it is supposed to bring transport and industry to a screeching halt. It is supposed shake the major state and corporate structures to their foundations and wake up their CEOs and legislators to the crisis. In smaller and less progressive places, like my own Prague, it is supposed to be the first major rallying cry, the days of love and courage with crowds of protesters, arrests and media coverage.

That’s the plan.

In the midst of a cucumber season with no cucumbers, I am filled with a bit of trepidation. Every day brings a fresh wave of new Extinction Rebellion volunteers. More than anything else, I fear they will be disappointed. They have finally risen, most for their first time doing anything even remotely activist. It’s the first real rising of public demand for change in a generation here. There were small protests, sure, but nothing that captured the hearts and minds of regular people beyond a committed (eccentric) few.

Beyond that, I am putting in far too much time and effort, more than is good for me. And I’ve already encountered some of the social ostracism I dread in any kind of group situation. I can’t help but look ahead with hope and anxiety side by side.

What will the first weeks of October bring? Will our dreams be realized? Will real change come at last? Will it be worth all the effort and sacrifice? Will anything happen at all?

That got me to thinking about sending a message to my future self. Because I know how hard it can be—in the midst of things—to remember the most basic reasons why we throw ourselves into something like this. I could so easily get caught up in worry, get freaked out over failures or be torn up over social rejection. So, if that’s the case, I hope this may help.

Here are the reasons I am doing this:

1. All last winter I was so depressed I couldn’t move. Every day I took a nap for an hour and a half or two hours because nothing seemed worth it and my body and mind were saturated with grief and despair. When I found Extinction Rebellion that changed overnight. Finally there was something worth doing.

2. I wasn’t in it to win. When I first joined in April there were ten active people in the entire Czech Republic. They were nice people, but I didn’t really think they could have hundreds or thousands of people active by the autumn. Neither did they. They just said that because it was a sort of goal to put out there. “A thousand people in the fall,” that’s what they said. But I was in it for the moment, for those ten and for whoever came each day.

3. My role in Extinction Rebellion quickly became that of hearth mother. I am among the older members and that’s a new experience for me, the first time I’ve ever been considered “old” by any standard. I also know how to cook. It’s fun to bring cake, carrot sticks and homemade hummus to a meeting and hear the cries of genuine gratitude from a dozen twenty-something vegans who can’t get a decent meal most places in this city. All of my work has been about feeding the earth defenders, holding hands, nurturing, reassuring, even hugging, as well as teaching empathy and first aid. And no matter what happens in the end, that endless, nearly invisible work will have gone on the same way a mother’s nurturing work goes without guarantees, just because it is needed.

4. We knew that a thousand people wouldn’t change government climate policy, even in one tiny little Eastern European country. We were doing it because it was the only reasonable and logical thing to do. We did it to be able to get up, look at ourselves in the mirror and not sob with shame and rage.

5. So, now we have 250 active rebels and it’s August. While I was a raw recruit in April, I am now considered a hardened elder and as such I have to play politics and fend off criticism. But I still have to get up every morning and look in the mirror. So, my reasons haven’t changed that much.

Some people have great hopes for this fall. All around the world people are gearing up and hoping for a massive uprising to force governments and corporations into real action, so that we can survive climate change.

I am among those who hope. I cannot help it. But at the same time I know that no plan survives contact with reality and that things could go haywire in a dozen different ways. It could be far bigger than we expect. It could get ugly with police or football rowdies or impatient drivers. It could be depressingly apathetic and small. We don’t know.

I also know the foibles and imperfections of humans. Extinction Rebellion has built a structure meant to foster a regenerative culture with equity, inclusion and ethics at its core. But still the people running it are just as human as the rest, coming from and living in a society that is toxic, ego-driven and unethical. Will this structure, which looks so good on a flip chart, hold? Will we live up to our ideals?

This is my note to my future self. Keep to your values. Welcome each one. Defend the vulnerable. Stand in your own strength. Seek authenticity.

Remember your reasons. Remember that we do this beyond hope, not for what it might bring in the future but for our self-respect here and now. Don’t lose sight of empathy. non-violence and love.

I will publish this at the midst of it—just before the full moon—when I will likely be too busy to write. It will be a note from the past to myself and to all those working hard the same way.

P.S. This is present-day me again. I’m glad for the reminders. There are now 400 organizers. If they all bring a friend or two, we’ll have a thousand at the big event on Saturday. But the most famous Czech pop singer has died and his memorial service will compete with our actions for media coverage. A massive soccer match will draw six thousand drunk Brits and who knows how many drunk Czechs to the city. And the local Extinction Rebellion group is fractured by factions banning this or that person, including me, from key information channels. Much of it looks like utter chaos. And yet, I have vegan chocolate cake, a fresh batch of hummus, camping chairs, a tent and first aid supplies. Come what may.

You can't force focus, but you can nurture it

What would it take to realistically face the climate crisis?

I’ll tell you. Not that much and yet it would take a huge, unaccustomed effort.

It would take people who have a yard digging it up and planting vegetables. It would take going to massive protests demanding science-based energy policy after work instead of going home and kicking back in front of a screen. It would take riding a bike to work even in the cold autumn rain and sleet. It would take remembering to bring a cloth bag when you go shopping. It would take going back up the stairs to turn off the light you forgot… every time. It would take fixing that old heating system, not next week but right now. It would take researching new recipes that have more legumes than meat.

In short, it would take constant focus, a million small actions and talking about it with everyone all the time as our highest priority in all the small moments of the day.

This is our unavoidable reality. Only about a quarter of our personal carbon footprint (that’s basically your personal contribution to climate change from being alive in an industrialized society) can be influenced by our small daily actions. BUT constant focus on this crisis, talking about it and demanding systemic change does matter and does help.

Creative Commons image by Jumbero of Flickr.com

In five short years, Germany went from being a major coal country to having a full 40 percent of its energy come from wind, solar and water, pushing coal into second place. That was only achieved by the incessant and fierce demands of regular people who never became famous like Greta Thunberg.

It can be done and we know what it will take. The tough part, of course, is that pretty much everyone has to focus on this for it to work. And that looks like a very tall order when a quarter of the people in a lot of countries still choose to believe ads by oil companies over scientists, and even those who “get it,” don’t get it because they don’t think about it unless a pollster specifically asks and they certainly don’t act on it.

When have people ever focused on something like this?

They did during WWII. In fact, a lot of the things we need to do now would be similar to those civilian wartime efforts—conserve resources, redirect industry, create jobs through planful programs and grow food in every yard. People talked about it every day and thought about it most hours of the day. It was stressful. Focus does that.

The Civil Rights movement was similar for those who were involved or directly impacted. Humanity pretty much hasn’t achieved anything massive or worth having without that kind of focus by at least some people. But it has occasionally happened. And it could happen now.

Except… except that the focus isn’t there. Focus is a kind of energy inside human beings. When it’s there we do amazing things. That whole thing about a mother being able to lift a car off of her trapped child—superhuman strength and all that? All that is is extreme focus. Every fiber, all the energy in a body, focused with laser-like intensity in one moment on one thing.

And this is a matter of focus too, though a bit broader and definitely longer lasting.

So how do we get people to focus on the climate crisis? Obviously, one of the problems with it is that because most of the threat is a decade or two in the future and realistic threats of apocalyptic scenarios are a generation away. What we have now is mostly theory with a few examples of major weather disasters, which are mostly someplace distant (and if they aren’t distant then you probably have a lot of very necessary survival tasks distracting you). It’s hard to sustain focus on something that is distant in time or place and it’s difficult to focus on something that it takes a chart to explain.

But there is also the despair factor.

One of the reasons I became particularly focused on the climate crisis this year was that I discovered a reason for hope—a very specific and concrete reason, a local Extinction Rebellion group. When I found that group and saw that the members were serious and dedicated to both responsible action to bring societal focus to the climate crisis and to the kind of social inclusion that will actually make it worthwhile, I essentially stopped needing to sleep.

I wasn’t forcing myself to focus. It was easy. i had to force my body and mind to relax in order to make the effort sustainable. But the actual focus, the effort involved, felt effortless for months.

Then a strange thing happened. Whereas this group had begun as an oasis of positive focus, a thread of infighting, egoism and social exclusion entered into it. It happens in groups all the time.

Extinction Rebellion has safeguards against this sort of thing—conflict resolution mechanisms and decentralization to avoid power trips, but there were those who argued our group was too small and too fragile for these things to be implemented. In trying to protect what we had built, the safeguards were sacrificed, first for just awhile and then for months. Authoritarian methods were allowed, as a “necessary evil” and conflict resolution was put off indefinitely with vulnerable people being sidelined.

Most of the group is still going strong and still an excellent group. But the abandonment of these safeguards in those places where problems arose took the wind right out of my sails. I can already see the cost and I know what the eventual price will be, if this is not turned around.

I’m still involved, still keeping up the responsibilities I took on. But it isn’t effortless anymore. I have to force myself to do it. My focus is broken. I’m not entirely burnt out physically, just unmotivated.

I still have my personal focus on the climate and ecological crisis. I still do my garden and all the other little daily things that need to be done. I still talk about it and think about it most of every day. But I can understand why others don’t have that focus. A lot of people see no hope in the climate crisis or at least nothing truly useful they can do personally.

And I don’t entirely blame them. This is a massive problem and there is a lot of discouraging propaganda out there, either confusing people about the very clear scientific conclusions giving us existential warnings or pushing crippling despair.

I look at the historical accounts of times when large groups of people truly did focus on something important. There were exceptions, of course. There were people who didn’t pitch in or who took advantage, but vast numbers of people did focus. And I know we can’t force that kind of focus.

Sure, we need to eventually legislate conservation rules and we definitely need public figures, institutions and the media to start intensively telling the truth about the crisis. But we also can and must nurture the kind of focus we need.

That means acting with integrity. It means practicing the good things we talk about and following through with commitments. It means supporting one another and putting aside self-serving motives most of the time. It means, in short, being the people we always wanted to be.

Islands at war: Strong women in a sea of patriarchy

Behind every community organization there is a strong woman… but usually only one.

I started noticing this uncomfortable reality once I got to be about thirty-five. When I was younger, I saw strong women as my mentors and leaders. I looked up to them, especially those who led groups, almost worshipfully and they usually responded with a bit of motherly advice and a job for me to do. But once I became clearly middle-aged, I started running up against their hard edges.

I was probably a bit oblivious in the beginning. It didn’t occur to me that we should be in competition. I had my plans and didn’t have any designs on their jobs or positions, but let’s face it. I’m opinionated, loud-mouthed and energetic. Wherever I got involved a hot friction quickly ignited between me and any strong women in leadership roles.

Creative Commons image by Tee Cee

For awhile, I thought there must be something about me that simply irritates capable, educated and professional women, who I viewed as my natural peers and potential friends. But gradually I realized that if I was in an organizational role of authority above another strong woman, we were fine and often friends, and if I wasn’t part of their organization or social group, we were also usually fine. It’s only when I encounter strong women on a similar level or as a superior in an organization or social hierarchy that we run into trouble. And frankly, there aren’t any meek women in these roles.

I observe other women interacting. There are often smiles and hugs that quickly turn to vicious jockeying and betrayal that usually ends with all but one woman out the door and gone.

After I recently joined a group and quickly rose through the men to lead my city’s branch, the head of the national office (also a hard-working woman) called me to say we would be working together closely. But the close cooperation never materialized. A few weeks later, another woman started making waves in my branch with my support and the national head was telling her that she was the new “go to person.” And within a few days, the new girl was in tears and supposedly leaving the organization. I watched the same cycle happen with several others.

So many women leaders say they want to support other women, but they will only extend that support if the women near them have no opinions or gumption. Can we so quickly forget that you don’t get to be in leadership roles if you’re female and NOT strong, opinionated and feisty?

It is possible that we strong women rub one another the wrong way precisely because of the fact that we are pre-selected by the patriarchal system to be the competitive, enduring and assertive individuals of our gender. If we didn’t have these qualities, we wouldn’t be successful in a world run by men. And it is also these qualities that make us difficult to get along with.

But I doubt that is all there is to the antagonism between strong women. I see a lot of evidence that women in leadership tolerate opinions and challenge from male coworkers much more than they do from female coworkers. And apparently I’m not alone. When I finally decided to write about this, I googled “women leaders hostile to female coworkers” out of curiosity as to whether or not I’d come up with any random anecdotal hits. Instead, I got a flood of articles, studies and surveys including:

“Why do women bully each other at work?” a massively researched investigation from The Atlantic

“Female coworkers: Allies or Enemies” from Forbes

“The dark side of female rivalry in the workplace and what to do about it”

And even from the Yale Law Journal, “Hostility to the presence of women: Why women undermine each other in the workplace and the consequences for Title IV”

So, apparently this is “a thing” and not just my experience. Strong women fight one another, compete, undermine and bully one another and presumably also women who are not quite as tough.

Our feminist mothers didn’t tell us about this when they told us we could be anything and we were as good as any man. When I was a girl, going through a rare rite of passage with a supportive circle of older women I felt that i had been given a promise: “We will stand by you. The world may be made for men and men may still hold most of the economic and social power but you are the generation that will push beyond the barriers and we older women will be here urging you on.”

I went out into the professional world completely unprepared for the backlash from women. I saw women as allies and supports and some early experiences seemed to confirm it, possibly because I was nerdy and not sexually attractive to most men and as a younger, disabled woman I didn’t seem like much of a threat.

A male colleague recently told me that at least one woman higher than me in professional authority expressed feeling terribly threatened by me.

Threatened? By me? I am not only almost blind, I have a disabled child and I am socially awkward. I not only couldn’t be a threat to anyone if I wanted to, I don’t have any competitive designs on anything. I’m happy to be barely hanging on to my little bits of work and social engagement and have no intention of expanding anywhere.

And yet, the fact is that some feel threatened. That feeling isn’t nothing.

My first reaction is to think it is a byproduct of patriarchy. The over-competitive world of men has taught us to be this way. Or maybe it is that the tokenism of a lot of disingenuous affirmative action has forced us to operate in a world where most organizations would accept one high-ranking woman and one high-ranking person of color and that’s it. Maybe it is simply that the Old Boys Network lets only those women with very hard edges through.

I don’t know exactly what the reason is or even whether or not I am part of the problem. I don’t feel like I am competitive with other women. I generally feel safer and happier when I’m working with a lot of women… until the fighting starts, that is. I don’t tend to have conflicts with women who are below me in any formal or informal hierarchy. I am known as a good mentor. But then again I do have some hard edges and I can’t say that I didn’t get them the same way other women did.

What I do know is that only strong women can solve this. If we can look at ourselves and see what we are doing to one another and how it feeds into a system that is still keeping women underpaid and disempowered, we should be able to find a way to change it.

Let’s look for healing—for ourselves and for other women.

The kind of rite of passage to womanhood that I had as a young teen is crucial and it is sad that it is still rare. Let us openly express support for younger women, tell them we support them and then do so, even when feelings of insecurity creep in. Yes, sometimes they will be “too much.” They will be louder, more entitled, less self-sacrificing than we were at their age. It’s a good thing that they don’t have to work three times as hard and juggle both work and family without a hair out of place, as our generation did. When they look like a million bucks, let’s not forget that we support them.

And just as crucially, the next time we feel threatened, criticized or bossed by an older women, let’s stop and really think out whether or not the same behaviors and words would seem threatening, critical or bossy if they came from a man. Let’s slow down our judgement of older women and err on the side of compassion. When they look hard-edged or overdressed or frumpy or bitter, take a moment to recall that we are culturally conditioned by every Disney cartoon about evil queens and by all the social expectations of women to see their exhaustion, stress and capability as negative. And let us remember how and why they got to where they are. These older women who made it from generations past had to be tough and even ruthless at times to fit in a male-dominated world. Their gentler sisters often had to sacrifice their dreams and their very selves to have a family or a basic non-career job. And the patriarchal world taught all of us to be harsher than we would have naturally tended.

I don’t know how to heal it, not exactly, but I’m trying.

Strong women, you are sisters and you are needed—without perfection, without being goddesses, without winning—you are enough.

Courage from wherever you stand

If there is one thing I wish I could give my readers these days it is the feeling that the climate crisis is like a war.

For some it is easy to see it as a war of us against them—us, the ordinary people who mostly want to do something about it, against them, the greedy one-percenters who run most of the industry and make most of the political decisions. But it isn’t at its core an us-versus-them war.

It’s an us-versus-ignorance war. Slowly the ignorance is falling away and we will focus more and more on fighting to mitigate the collapse of our ecological life-support system. But still it will be an us-versus-ignorance war. It will just be against the effects created by the ignorance of the past.

Even the wealthy have to eat and even if they may have bunkers, there is no possible future in which climate collapse goes forward unchecked and they don’t seriously regret not paying attention earlier. It is still primarily about ignorance. “Ignor-ance” has its roots in willfully ignoring and denying reality. That is what we are up against—the denial ignorance of the wealthy, the misled ignorance of the poor and the despairing and apathetic ignorance of everyone in between.

Image by Arie Farnam

Plenty of people are saying that we need to respond to the climate crisis the way we responded to World War Two. It’s true on so many levels. The climate emergency is already claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and it will soon claim millions and then billions, if we do nothing. The scale is at least as massive as the second world war was and it will reach into every person’s life just as that war did. It will require many personal sacrifices, political focus, economic manipulation and social solidarity, just as that war did.

It already requires a great deal of courage.

Of course, there is the courage of people protesting and putting their bodies in the way of fossil fuel extraction, processing and transport. There are the people chained or glued to government or corporate doorways. There are those sitting down in front of police wielding chemical weapons and people standing in the middle of intersections, demanding that other humans do indeed stop business as usual, stop driving, pay attention and treat science as a real-world matter.

Some people look at these protesters, often dressed up or in a excited, bonded group, and assume it must be fun or they must be in it for the adventure. And there may be some who are in it for adventure the first time around. But a lot of people are doing it again and again. They are willing to be roughed up by irritable police on extra shifts and willing to spend long, cold nights in improvised cells. They know what they are in for.

That is courage. I’ve seen a lot of people grasping courage these days, more than I think I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.

There’s the courage of a young mother, so scared she’s trembling, who he accepts the role of press spokesperson for an action anyway, because all the people without babies are either on the blockade line or doing risky conflict deescalation work. There is no one else who can address the TV cameras. So she does it, even though she’s never been an activist before.

There’s the fourteen-year-old girl who signed up to learn to be a field medic with her parents’ consent, willing to wade into fields of tear gas and distribute clothes soaked in antacid to people gasping for breath. There’s the courage of those worried parents who know this is something she has to do.

There’s the woman who I watched stumble through a workshop presentation for new climate action volunteers in which two young men decided to pick apart her every statement. Walking to the subway together after I helped her lock up the office in the evening, she confessed that it wasn’t just her first workshop presentation but the first time she had ever spoken in front of a group of people in her life.

I have not chained myself to anything strategic or refused to move under police orders. Not yet at least. Some of my rebel friends are willing to forgive me this reticence because I have a disability and a disabled child. “Well, that’s why Arie isn’t out there getting arrested.” I’m the one teaching the medics and the deescalation teams. I’m the one holding the hands of new volunteers, giving a dozen pep talks a day.

But I’ve had to poke deep into my own reserves of courage. When I first signed up my family and close friends were all warning me to be careful, even asking me not to join Extinction Rebellion because whenever I have joined community organizations before it has always ended in pain, social rejection and deep depression. The fact is that, especially where I live in the Czech Republic, a disabled. middle aged woman with strange-looking eyes and awkward social communication is not well accepted. My family didn’t want me to go through all that again.

When I go into groups, I can’t make eye contact or play out the little exchanges of non-verbal communication. Mostly people don’t realize this or understand what it means. They just get the feeling that I’m aloof or uncool, or most oddly, calculating and competitive. The inevitable result has been a lot of social isolation. I join groups enthusiastically, get a lot of confused reactions and soon find myself mysteriously dropped off the invitation list.

So joining Extinction Rebellion, I was so scared that I lay awake all night shaking after every meeting in the beginning. But I knew I had to go anyway.

I wish I could tell you those fears were entirely unfounded. I will say that Extinction Rebellion tries hard to be open to all—people with disabilities, older people and people with children included. It’s a real topic of discussion and those discussions matter. I’ve never found a group where I did feel this welcome. But I have run into people who reject me out-of-hand, even in the consciously inclusive culture of XR.

Facing fears doesn’t mean facing down only illusion. Much of the fear is real. Those protesters in France really did get viciously attacked by police while sitting calmly and quietly. Some people really did needlessly torment that first-time workshop presenter. And every time I play the role of social greeter at an XR event, I will get some hard looks and some cold shoulders, which cut deep because of the social context of long-term ostracism.

It’s a time for courage. Whatever terrors you have to face, now is the time.

And there is another part of courage we all have to seize together. Not a day goes by when someone doesn’t ask me some version of the question, “Isn’t it too late and hopeless anyway?”

There are a hundred arguments why the key strategies to mitigate climate disaster won’t work. Most solar panels are made in China using minerals mined at great environmental cost and then there’s the methane in the arctic lakes, all the tipping points we may have already crossed, And that’s just the science part. We have only just begun to demand real political and economic change and those systems don’t want to change. We may well not be able to bring our society to change quickly enough. And if we manage it here, will we be able to get China and India to join us? The odds seem awfully long on stopping CO2 emissions in the time frame scientists have said we must, if we want to avoid global calamity .

In 1938, when the allies signed the Munich agreement with Hitler to allow the Nazis to take Czechoslovakia in an attempt to deny the inevitable, people who warned of the encroaching tide of fascism were called “alarmists.” And then when the allied forces did go up against fascism, it looked hopeless. It looked like we had waited too long.

That’s what Hollywood portrayals of World War Two don’t show. They say they’re showing courage, the heroic battles in which good conquers evil in the real world. But the reality is that those French resistance fighters, those nurses in Blitz-torn London, those teenage girls holding the Eastern front in some Russian town, those Romani prisoners rebelling in a concentration camp, those boys on the Normandy beaches, those fighter pilots over the North Sea and those victory gardeners on the other side of the Atlantic waiting for husbands, sons and fathers to come home did not have good odds. We look back at them through the lens of what did happen. They fought and they won, so of course they had the courage to fight.

But it wasn’t an easy choice for many of them. There were times during the war when it looked very bleak. In our struggle now, it looks bleak. It looks like the risks we take and the sacrifices we make may be for nothing.

In that too, we need courage—not because we know we’ll win but because the only way to live well now is to fight this war against ignorance,