Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Will you tell me, Charles, what in hell we're working for?”

“What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.”

“Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly.”

“All around the main subject the brothers beat. Now and then they would almost step into it, and quickly pull away, back into crops and local gossip and politics and health. They knew they would come back to it sooner or later.… Gradually they ran out of escape talk. Every acquaintance was covered and every local event.”

“People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments. During his second sentence on the roads of Florida, Adam reduced his personality to a minus. He caused no stir, put out no vibration, became as nearly invisible as it is possible to be. And when the guards could not feel him, they were not afraid of him.”

“He developed a love for poor people he could not have conceived if he had not been poor himself. And by now he was an expert tramp, using humility as a working principle. He was lean and sun-darkened, and he could withdraw his own personality until he made no stir of anger or jealousy.”

“Smallness has nothing to do with the size of potential change. What you look for is the quality of what happens if certain sets of people get mixed. The principle of yeast is this: A few strategically connected people have greater potential for creating the social growth of an idea or process than large numbers of people who think alike.”

“It seems to me that the key to changing this thing is getting a small set of the right people involved at the right places. What’s missing is not the critical mass. The missing ingredient is the critical yeast.”

“The number of people in the streets captured the media’s attention but were incapable of generating a sustained process of social change. … However, when I paid careful attention… when… significant change processes actually happened and were sustained… I came to the conclusion that these did not happen with a strategy of focusing on counting the numbers and on whether they amounted to a critical mass.”

“in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. … And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, 'Use it well, use it wisely. We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training.' ”

“because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.”

“Side-taking…seems to accompany social battlefields and therefore accepts the premise that change is inherently a dualistic struggle. While many of us in the peace movement feel a deep sense of discomfort with politicians who frame our challenges in this manner… as issues that force a choice between the "good guys" and "the evil empires," we have often fallen prey to the trap of replicating that which we abhor.”

“Develop a capacity to see and think strategically about social spaces. These are the actual places of life where unusual relationships cross and interact. This means we must develop a capacity to recognize and build the locus of social change. Markets, hospitals, schools, street corners, cattle dips, transportation service centers, youth soccer clubs… social spaces where people cross in natural ways…”

“Think, feel, and follow relationships. Relationships are at the heart of social change. Relationships require that we understand how and where things connect and how this web of connections occupies the social space where processes of change are birthed and hope to live.”

“In our physical world on the grandest scale, this is the place of the sun, that extraordinary and nearly uncontainable planetary body that sends out life-giving energy and around which the planets rotate and are held within a certain order. In our social world, a family typically has this characteristic. It sends us out into the world, yet we return to it for a sense of identity, direction, and purpose.”

“Paradoxical by their very nature, relational spaces create social energy that is simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal. But rather than anarchy, which is like exploding into a million pieces, peacebuilding understands that relationships create and emanate social energy and are places to which energy returns for a sense of purpose and direction.”

“What center holds things together? I have a simple answer in reference to building constructive social change: the invisible web of relationships. When relationships collapse, the center of social change does not hold. And correspondingly, rebuilding what has fallen apart is centrally the process of rebuilding relational spaces that hold things together.”

“Time and again, social change that sticks and makes a difference has behind it the artist’s intuition: the complexity of human experience captured in a simple image and in a way that moves individuals and whole societies. The true genius of the moral imagination is the ability to touch the art and soul of the matter.”

“Professional excellence increasingly has emphasized the technology, the technique and the skills of process management as tools that legitimate and make possible training, replication, and dissemination. … In the process of professionalization we too often have lost a sense of the art, the creative act that underpins the birth and growth of personal and social change.”

“The aesthetics of social change proposes a simple idea: Building adaptive and responsive processes requires a creative act, which at its core is more art than technique. The creative act brings into existence processes that have not existed before. To sustain themselves over time, processes of change need constant innovation.”

“Intuition is a funny thing. Most of us don’t trust it. In fact, most training about conflict resolution and peacebuilding […] built on skills that reduce, circumvent, or ignore intuition. But if you have ever talked at length with good practitioners… or even more if you talk with people working on peacebuilding… you will hear that what they circumvent are the rules of proper procedure. What they follow is their gut”

“Never again will I call you mine; but all there is of me shall be yours. Alas, you know now what it's worth. I never wished you well, never had one selfless thought of you. I was a craver.”

“And we said we loved her. And we did. She had no more dangerous enemies than us.”

“Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.' …When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years…“

“I would set out boldly each morning to be just and calm and wise in all my thoughts and acts; but before they had finished dressing me I would find that I was back (and knew not how long I had been back) in some old rage, resentment, gnawing fantasy, or sullen bitterness. I could not hold out half an hour.”

“I hid all the things I was feeling-and indeed I did not know what they were, except that all the peace of that autumnal journey was shattered-so as not to spoil the pleasure of my people. Next day I understood more clearly. I could never be at peace again till I had written my charge against the gods. It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child.“

“The pessimism…arises from hard-won experience as a guide that tests the quality of engagement. This pessimism is a gift, not a bad attitude, lack of engagement, or bitterness… It is a terrain-based understanding of the social setting…it seeks to engage is a deep understanding of human affairs, the… nature of how change happens, and the necessity of integrity as a condition for surviving manipulation and mendacity.”

“Theirs is not the indifference of apathy. It is the indifference of the heroic but everyday journey. They do not allow repeated cycles of violence to kill their passion for life or derail their daily journey. They keep walking the terrain in spite of the violence. This requires a selective indifference: These particular events that are out of my control will not restrict or destroy my life.”