Cindy Milstein’s words on kindness, generosity, care and love in the context of the struggle for radical change: “It’s not that random not-so-random acts of kindness constitute revolution, or that if we accumulate enough of them, those acts will tip the imbalance of power, bringing all those structures of social domination, exploitation, and oppression to their knees. Yet they are part of (re)schooling ourselves in how to practice, routinely, the lost arts of caring, neighborly, and empathetic face-to-face social relations. And as many of us have personally experienced during uprisings like Occupy, the lack of such rigorous yet tender practices on a daily basis makes us woefully unprepared to be the people we want to be during our own experiments with egalitarian and directly democratic forms of social organization.”
It’s night 5 of Hanukkah in my Brooklyn home. Colorful little candles are casting a warm glow against the tarnished-golden metal of the menorah — bringing light into the world, even if only temporarily.
Night 1, also in Brooklyn, was an evening of pausing and remembrance for me — good practices for nearly any day (http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2013/11/28/the-light-of-remembrance/).
Nights 2 through 4 were missed, and instead replaced with a two-hour trip north by train to the hilly, rural, calming landscape of the Hudson Valley for warmth, pauses, and remembrances of other kinds — calling forth illumination, too, but in different ways: woodstoves, sunsets near the end of hikes, star-studded skies, and most especially, friends old and new.
At this dark time, light becomes crucial to sustain our spirits, our humanity. Perhaps, to be generous, the tacky-kitschy-comic displays of electrified outdoor Christmas (and increasingly Hanukkah) lights starting to reappear could be…
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cultivating alternatives 