inequality | The Direction of Intention

Make Sense [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on October 24, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

I told Kerri she was going to be fired two years before the ax fell. I needed no crystal ball and was not reading tea leaves. In my consulting life I’d seen it happen a few dozen times. When a not-for-profit organization promotes to leadership those who believe everything needs to run like a business, the people holding fast to the actual purpose and mission of the organization have to go.

It makes sense if you think about it. Profit is the purpose of a business. When profit is the purpose, the organizational structures and levers-of-power evolve according to the purpose: profit. People are expendable.

There’s a reason arts organizations, churches, educational institutions,…are called not-for-profit. They serve a different purpose. The organizational structures and levers of power evolve according to the central purpose: service. The creation of art. Learning. Health. Feeding the hungry. Helping the victims of disaster. Worship. The people, usually not well-paid, are dedicated to the deeper organizational mission. Not profit. The people are not expendable. In fact, they are the keepers of the flame. They are very hard to come by.

The quickest way to kill a service organization is to apply the power-levers of business. The purpose dies. The good people – the keepers of the organizational heart – have to be fired, whipped into compliance, silenced, or forced to leave. It’s not rocket science. That process takes a few years.

It’s sometimes hard for us to make sense of what’s happening in our nation and world yet the same principles that apply to organizations also apply to countries. The purpose of healthcare is not profit. The purpose of education was never supposed to be profit. We currently have in our vernacular phrases like “predatory lending” – people making millions from students who believe the dream is only accessible through higher education. It’s the message embedded in our mythology. The levers of business have twisted our vision. Just as prisons should never be money makers, healthcare-as-a-business obliterates the purpose. It profits a few. It crushes the many.

Apples cannot be oranges. Make sense?

What’s happening in our nation makes perfect sense. Big business, regularly bailed out or given tax breaks to the tune of billions of dollars, is protected. No questions asked. Yet, try to correct a corrupt lending scheme, a successful (highly profitable) application of business levers to education, built on the backs of working people trying to go to school, and the “it-has-to-run-like-a-business” crowd will move heaven and earth to keep profit at the center of the mission. Our education system, once the best in the world, is spiraling. Ridiculous. It’s inevitable when protecting the interests of business supersedes serving the purpose.

We may find our way through, we might return to our senses, when we stop pretending that business is somehow sacred, that the making-of-money is moral and a proper north star for all things. It is not. It is great for some things. It is devastating, senseless, for the most important things.

read Kerri’s blogpost about SENSE

Filed under: Merely A Thought Monday, Perspective | Tagged: artistry, big business, business, corruption, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, greed, inequality, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, levers of power, mission, north star, not for profit, predatory lending, profit, purpose, sense, sense making, senseless, senses, service, story, structures, studio melange, the melange | 1 Comment »

Walk With Samuel [on DR Thursday]

Posted on November 11, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.” ~ Samuel Beckett, Endgame

When is something finished? Beckett wrote Waiting For Godot in 1953; characters waiting for what will never arrive. A finish. A completion. Beckett’s life spanned both wars-to-end-all-wars, Korea, Vietnam. He wrote about humanity’s dedication to nonsense. His work has been called bleak and dark. His work is shelved with the canon of The Theatre of the Absurd. And, yet, given the news of the day, these days, who doesn’t feel as if they are living in a Beckett play?

What is often missed in his absurdist plays is the beautiful human capacity to keep walking, to keep trying. Waiting and walking through tragedy, mostly of our own making, with unwavering hope. We story ourselves with nobility even when wrapping ourselves in a lie. We make rules and laws that apply to some but not to all and then we set about to justify the inequality. Money and morality are not the same thing though there’s plenty of storytelling meant to have us believe that wealth only flows to the worthy.

Art is not supposed to make sense because life doesn’t make sense. We make sense of life through the stories we concoct. Emperor’s buried with thousands of statues to keep them company in the afterlife, an artist painting the ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel, gods and angels and saints. How many people died building the great pyramids, tomb for a pharaoh? Who would possibly spend their life in abject poverty smearing color on canvas? Van Gogh. A legion of others not known. Are we better for it? I cried the day the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, 6th century statues that I had not seen in person and was likely to never see. Were my tears more or less absurd than the Taliban’s animosity toward carved stone?

Matters of the heart. When are they finished? Where do they begin?

It was a gorgeous day, perhaps the last warm day of the season. We met our pals at the Chicago Botanical Gardens. Throughout the gardens, preparations were being made for the annual holiday light exhibit. A tree of shiny stars. Giant flowers. Faux candles floating in the waterway. Strings of colored lights were being placed along the walkways. Even during the light of day it was impressive.

In this time of transition, many of the gardens were being prepped for the winter, the pathways were packed with people cooing at the wave of the grasses, the shape of the trees in the Japanese garden. I was gobsmacked by the color of the moss on trees, the shock of red leaves against vivid green. No matter which direction I looked, someone, some special gardener and designer, had crafted beauty. They knew that their work would stop me in my tracks and allow me to whisper, “Unbelievable.”

Winding our way back to the Visitor’s Center, I told Brad that, seeing so many people out enjoying the gardens, excited to walk in beauty, filled me with hope.

To walk in beauty. Dollars and cents can’t reach the reason. Data can’t touch the impulse. There is so much light in this theatre of the absurd. Beckett knew it, writing about the stories we tell, the relationships we create, waiting for something – a beauty – that by definition, will never arrive because we are surrounded by it each and every day.

read Kerri’s blog post about RED SCULPTURE

www.davidrobinsoncreative.com

Filed under: Art, Creativity, DR Thursday, Identity, Metaphor, Seeing, Story | Tagged: aarp, absurd, afterlife, artistry, beauty, begin, Buddhas of Bamiyan, Chicago Botanical Gardens, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, end, Endgame, equality, funerary art, heart, hope, humanity, inequality, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, light exhibit, light show, pyramids, Samuel Beckett, sculpture, Sistine Chapel, story, storying, storytelling, studio melange, Taliban, the melange, Theatre of the Absurd, tragi-comedy, van gogh, Waiting for Godot | Leave a comment »

Pop A Cork And Ponder [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on November 3, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

It is, at long last, election day in these-once-united-states. If I had a wine cellar it would be stocked to the top with election night libation and reality-numbing assistance.

Through Kerri, I received a loving and gentle push back against my use of the phrase these-once-united-states. Our reader reminded me that these-states-were-never-united. Not really. Of course, there is the very real possibility that division IS what identifies us. In a stroke of planned obsolescence or perhaps a nod to the absurd, our forefathers wrote that all men are created equal while participating in and promoting slavery as the driver of the economic engine. They certainly knew what they were doing. It might be that division is what unites us.

Who would we be if we actually practiced equality and made sure that our institutions were not only the guardians but promoters of our central ideal?

Mostly, those wacky forefathers kicked the can down the road. They understood that the nation would one day have to reconcile its split-intention. We’ve made a run at it more than a few times and, like every good fractal, rather than deal with our shadow pattern, we manage to repeat it. Slavery becomes Jim Crow…and here we are. BLM meets The Proud Boys.

We are so far away from dealing with the can kicked-down-the-road to us that the mostly-men-on-the-red-team deny the very existence of systemic racism. That, too, is part of the fractal. Take note of how much energy has been spent making it hard for black Americans to vote. Right here in the year 2020. Some things never change. Some things need to change.

So, today we line up to cast our ballots. In this seemingly endless and ugly election season, we’ve been witness to an undermining of the postal service, the removal of ballot boxes, the stuffing of the supreme court, a president casting doubt on the very system he was sworn to support.

So much energy spent to ensure the continuation of the divide! Another squirt of glue? An organizing principle of negative and positive charges? Opposite charges attracting?

We need a new organizing principle. Division is a threadbare story and, as we know, can only run in a vicious circle. I hold little hope for it but wonder what might come about if we attended to a simple basic, just like the sign says. “Be Nice. Say Hi!”

In the absence of general kindness and courtesy, something every mother teaches and every grandmother upholds, I will pop a cork and ponder what we might have been if the system had been set up and penned by our foremothers. I suspect we’d all know how to play nice by now.

read Kerri’s blog post on BE NICE. SAY HI!

Filed under: Pattern, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: BLM, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, division, election, equality, forefathers, foremothers, fractal, inequality, jim crow, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, organizing principles, pattern, red wine, slavery, split intention, vote, wine | Leave a comment »

Turn Around And Look [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on October 5, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

A few years ago, while swimming in the world of entrepreneurs, I wrote a short book entitled The Seer. It was in many ways a process summary of the work of my life to that point. All of my work – whether in the visual arts, the theatre, diversity and intercultural facilitation, systems change, teaching…driving a bread truck, shoveling dirt…all of it, has in one way or another orbited the moon we call ‘story.’ Occasionally, I pull my little book from the shelf and read what I once knew because it seems more relevant now than when I wrote it.

For instance, the white house recently pulled the plug on all diversity training in government agencies. The reason is simple and explicitly stated: they do not like the story it tells of these-once-united-states. The story, they claim, is “anti-American.”

I structured my book around 9 Recognitions. The first is this: You do not have a problem. You have a pattern. We don’t have a problem. We have a pattern.

Our pattern, generation after generation, is the lengths we will go, the violence we will suffer, to ensure that we exclude a significant part of our story from the national telling. It is untenable to maintain a nation-story built on the ideal of equality that began with, among other things, the institution of slavery and the annihilation of native peoples. To avoid the full story guarantees a schizophrenic national persona. It perpetuates division. Ours is a pattern of adamant story avoidance.

The story works well for the white aristocracy that created it. It’s an exercise in celebrating Doctor Jekyll while denying the existence of Mr. Hyde. Those good guy settlers had to eliminate those pesky “Indians” because they stood in the way of a destiny that was manifest. What is the story as told from the Native American point of view? Or from the point of view of the black American that, to this day, everyday, navigates institutions designed to repress them? They have lived this history – this story of slavery, Jim Crow, and new forms of institutional violence. They are located in the story as the obstacle or the bad guy. The less-than-human.

Diversity training is nothing more than an attempt to tell the full story from all points of view. It is only made necessary because we have a deeply ingrained pattern of either dismissing the full story or pretending that our inequality is in the past.

We cannot become whole until we look in the mirror and reflect on the full picture. It is as ruthless as it is hopeful. It is as dark as it is bright. The path to health for any individual is to first admit that they have a dis-ease. The same is true of a nation.

In the recent actions of the white house, the response to the BLM movement, we are witnessing the latest in our pattern to severely edit our story made the more violent because diversity is percolating its way into the halls of power.

The slogans “Keep America Great” and “Make America Great” only make sense or have appeal to those committed to the Jekyll part of the story. They are the pattern. They are a rally cry to those who feel that in real equality they have something to lose. It’s an “all hands on deck” siren that will tolerate all manner of violence, ugly rhetoric, shaming, dereliction of duty, undermining of judicial integrity to avoid admitting the full story entrance into the American narrative.

The good news is that it is possible, once the full story is realized and the pattern is seen and told, to change the story. The tension is, after all, between conserving what was and progressing toward the ideal.

America may one day become great.

First, we must tire of our schizophrenia, our commitment to division and a system that works for the few. Doctor Jekyll must turn and take a good honest look at Mr. Hyde and stop pretending that the horror that follows him isn’t really there.

read Kerri’s blog post about GRRRREAT!

Filed under: Edges, entrepreneur, Merely A Thought Monday, Metaphor, Pattern, Seeing, Story | Tagged: america, Black Americans, complex systems, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Diversity, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, equality, inclusion, inequality, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, narrative, National narrative, Native Americans, story, story. sense making, storying, systems change, The Seer, violence | Leave a comment »

Ask The Essential Question [on KS Friday]

Posted on June 19, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

in transition copy

Quinn told me that there are really only three questions: Who am I? Where am I going? What is mine to do? All other questions can be boiled down to one of these essences. All stories can be reduced to one of these questions. And, the real kicker? There is never a single answer to these three essential questions. Life is always moving so, the moment you think you have an answer-by-the-tail, you’ve moved to a different place. You’ve changed. You will change again. And again. The story evolves. The long body of a life is rich in transition. Life is transition.

Change the pronoun. Who are we? Where are we going? What is ours to do? These are the questions beating at the heart of the American experiment. Our rhetoric is out of alignment with our reality. It turns out that our hero tale has a matching anti-hero story. We know it but do not deal with it. The shining city on the hill was built on the backs of slaves and sustains itself on a rolling subjugation of the latest arrivals. We revel in inequality while proudly pronouncing that all are created equal.

As master Shakespeare reminds us, “…but at length truth will out.” Our truth is out. We are a festival of inequity. There is a yawning maw between the haves and the have-nots. It is by design and not by accident. It is not our problem as much as it is our pattern. And so, we ask one of the essential questions: Who are we? And, in asking it, we must first look at how we define the pronoun ‘we.’ WE. The people. Who are WE? White male land owners? The one percent? Or, many diverse and rich origin stories come together in a promise of one nation, a nation of equal opportunity for all devoid of exploitation? It is the ideal. Is it the intention? Who do we want to be?

WE, as I understand it, is all inclusive. Multi-cultural as one. Both/And.

I take heart. Every caterpillar has a melt down phase en route to becoming a butterfly. The mush phase is necessary to fulfilling the mature promise, the expression of the ideal. In transition.

IN TRANSITION is on Kerri’s album RELEASED FROM THE HEART

read Kerri’s blog post about IN TRANSITION

waiting and knowing

in transition/released from the heart ©️ 1995 kerri sherwood

waiting and knowing ©️ 2015 david robinson

Filed under: Identity, KS Friday, Language, Perspective, Possibility, Uncategorized | Tagged: david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, design, diverse, Diversity, equality, essential questions, immigration, inclusion, inclusive, inequality, inequity, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerri sherwood on itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, pattern, questions, shakespeare, slavery, subjugation, we, Who am I?, Who are we? | Leave a comment »

Face Them [on KS Friday]

Posted on June 5, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

hope copy

The dream was vivid. I was being chased by a pack of very large demons. Terrified, I was becoming exhausted when I saw a door into a warehouse. I quickly jumped through the door, looking for a place to hide. To my chagrin, the warehouse was empty. Swept clean. No walls. A vast, open and exposed floor. The demons came through the door behind me. There was no other door. No way out. My only option was to turn and face them. So, I did.

They rushed me. But, to my surprise, as I stood my ground, facing them, as they raced snarling toward me, they began to shrink. The closer they came, the smaller they got. By the time they reached me they were no larger than ants. They had no power over me at all.

All along, all I needed to do was stop running from them. All I ever needed to do was to turn and face them. To see what they were, not what I feared they were.

This dream – so many years ago – helped me understand hope – a word that is both a verb and a noun, a thing and an action. A wish and a want. Hope, like happiness, ensues. It is not found up front, it follows. It is meaning that becomes available when a choice is made.

This nation, running so long from its demons, is once again, standing in a vast empty warehouse. There is no place to hide. When we recognize that all we can do is turn and face our demons, our racially divided path, the inequity-demons plaguing us may grow smaller. They may lose their power over us entirely.

The choice to stop running and turn. The choice to face the demons. In that moment, hope will arise.

HOPE on the album THIS SEASON is available on iTunes

read Kerri’s blog post about HOPE

held in grace series: pray now

Filed under: Identity, KS Friday, Language, Metaphor, Seeing, Uncategorized | Tagged: choice, choices, courage, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, demons, dreams, fear, hope, inequality, inequity, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerri sherwood on itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, meaning, meaning making, racial divide | Leave a comment »

Don’t Go Home [on DR Thursday]

Posted on June 4, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

House on Fire. 2004-ish. Watercolor. And, yes, I was all over copying Guernica.

“The continual retreat from the discomfort of authentic racial engagement in a culture infused with racial disparity limits the ability to form authentic connections across racial lines, and results in a perpetual cycle that works to hold racism in place.” ~ Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility

I confess to rewriting this post. What I wrote initially was pedantic and preachy. So, this is a second go-round.

We’ve been hearing this question much in these past days: why don’t things ever change? Here’s an answer I learned in school: a society is a living system and, like all living things, it will fight to the death when threatened with change. Why we can’t seem to “solve” our problem with racial disparity and the dehumanization of black people? It’s built into our system. The system, a complex and living thing, will fight to the death to keep the injustice securely in place.

That’s a heady answer and somewhat hopeless. Its abstraction makes it a safe and somewhat antiseptic response.

I lived in Los Angeles in 1992. My apartment was in the hills so I had a good vantage point to watch the rioting and the city burn. When it felt too unsafe, I fled the city. I had a safe place to go.

A few years later, working with a school district, the head of the Black Student Union asked me to come in and work with her students. MLK day was fast approaching and the students, preparing presentations for the day, were in rebellion. They were mad. They didn’t want to read speeches about peace and justice when those ideals were nowhere on their horizon. I thought it was my job to help them give voice to what they wanted to say. It was my first conscious lesson in my white-blindness. The frightened parents of the students descended. I’ll never forget the mother and father that pulled me aside, saying to me, “You don’t understand. If they say what they want to say they’ll be killed.” Their terror was real. They had to teach their children a lesson that was the opposite of what my parents taught me.

To call it a problem is to reduce it to the level of mechanics. It is to pretend (or hope) that a few changes in the law or better policing will do the trick. To treat it like a problem guarantees that we’ll recreate it. This is not a problem, this is a pattern. It is a cycle. It is a relationship.

The pattern is currently in our faces. The pattern is not only the death of another black person. The pattern is also what white America chooses to do – or not do- with the knowledge of it. What is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves that makes it possible to stand in the fire with people of color during the protests but walk-on once the fire subsides? It is simply this: I get to go home. I get to drive out of LA when things feel too unsafe. I have someplace to go. I get to go home when the officer is prosecuted or a law is changed or a commission empaneled, dust off my hands, and say that I did my part.

Why don’t things ever change?

I was stunned when those parents pulled me aside. At first, I couldn’t believe that they were going to silence their children when their children had something so important to say. It made my head spin. And then I went home. And then I realized that they couldn’t go home. There was no place in this “living system” where they were safe. That was what they were trying to tell me. It was what Martin Luther King was trying to tell us. It is what the protesters in the streets today are trying to get us to see/admit/realize. We are watching a living system built on racial division and inequality fight to the death because change is knocking.

What if we realized that we cannot simply go home and forget about it?

read Kerri’s blog post about HOUSE ON FIRE