Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The Nieto school of thought was that the self shouldn't be an after- thought in the pursuit of system change. You had to know yourself to change others. You had to be interested in their inner lives. You had to cultivate warmth even with those you disagree with, without letting that warmth lull you into milquetoast compromise.”

“That editing project immersed Ocasio-Cortez in Nieto's philosophy, the "third reality" between protest and assimilation. In Nieto's view, those who wanted to change systems too often went straight to challenging them, skipping over the work of self-discovery, self- interrogation, and self-assertion. They didn't dwell long enough in their own assumptions and experiences to work effectively to change others' minds.”

“"...every conversation left you with a powerful experience that made you want to have an experience with him again. If a given interaction can make you think, can make you feel good, can make you feel heard or seen, even if you are at polar opposite ends of things, it encourages the person listening to you to come back and have another interaction with you... that's a very important tableau to set."”

“"He spoke directly to people's humanity. It starts with actual mutual respect. I think that that lack of respect is usually the first place where things fall apart. That's one thing that Ernesto did. He never belittled anybody; he never made anyone feel stupid, even if you were just so off base. He was very Socratic in his approach, and he never, ever, ever expected one conversation to change someone's mind."”

“His work had been to strike the same forbidding balance that she later would attempt—between being intransigent about what is right, where things must go, what progress is, and, on the other hand, calling people gently in to your visions: to give no quarter while assuming enough of the humanity of those you want to win over that you're willing to try to change them.”

“Ocasio-Cortez began to do more of it, interrogating people to find out what they had to say and then doing the part they struggled to do as well as she did: framing it for others to hear.”

“They no longer needed to spend time reacting to issues outside their control. Efforts had to concentrate on reshaping and recreating a different self-identity and belief, one that enthused youth about their future...”

“Should we continue the fight for social justice and reform? Or is there a third choice, a third reality?" Nieto writes in his book titled Third Reality. That third reality, in Nieto's view, broke both from the cultural erasure of the melting pot and from the endless waiting of fighting the Anglo power establishment. Instead, it focused on helping the community see itself in new ways.”

“The NHI was animated by a particular philosophy that Nieto has called the "third reality," a path between what he saw as the road of protesting the white establishment and the road of seeking to engage with it at the risk of assimilation. "Should we surrender to the omnipresence of mainstream culture and merely attempt to fit in, whatever the costs to our identity as community and culture?”

“She didn't think her father's passing changed who she was, she told Ta-Nehisi Coates, "but I think it really clarified a lot of things. Because having my father pass away at such a young age forced a lot of questions of mortality. What am I here for? He passed when he was 48 years old. And so it really forced me to grapple with questions of legacy and what is important, and what do I want to do with my life at 18?"”

“He was interested in the content of the case he was making against the system, and less so in how that case was reaching people, drawing them in or turning them away. It was why he had done less than he could have to heed her advice to make sure that people were receiving the transmissions of his movement of love, rather than being content that he was transmitting it.”

“No one saw Ocasio-Cortez in her complicated fullness, across these walls. "For more affluent kids or white kids, it's a much more seamless transition between home, get on a school bus, school, and come back," she told me. "And for me, it was like all of these different worlds. And trying to be myself in all of these different worlds required me to learn those kinds of communication skills." ”

“ "I had to really learn how to advocate for myself," she said. "It took me a really, really, really long time to realize that these basic challenges to be heard and to be believed were not challenges that my parents had." The parents at home didn't see the cowed girl at school whom no one listened to. The kids and teachers at school didn't see the confident, opinionated child whom Blanca saw. ”

“when Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Sanders and his armies, she was also, and quite consciously, speaking to herself, asking herself and others if it was possible to change big things by summoning in yourself the humility, patience, and openheartedness to move individual human beings.”

“All her life, as far back as she could remember, she had cultivated that spirit of openness and outreach. She was an organizer who knew you had to meet people where they are and pitch the same thing fifteen different ways to eleven different people. And then lightning had struck. In a way no person on this earth could ever plan for, she had landed on the world's stage...”

“She was referring to a certain type of progressive who came off as uncompromising, who, to paraphrase the journalist Michael Kinsley, was more interested in finding heretics than converts.
"It's not about giving up your principles," she continued, "and it's not about changing your positions, but it is about opening up your posture." ”

“It was brief, subtle, but carefully worded advice. If the movement was determined to combat the disconnection and alienation and brutality of America in the age of capital, it had to embody, to be, the opposite of those things. It had not only to argue for a politics of love and solidarity but also to incarnate it with a sense of welcome and home and humanity.”

“"We are here because we have been separated from each other." she said. "As sister Rashida Tlaib here in Michigan says, 'We are not divided; we are disconnected.' That is, at its core, our problem today. And that means that the antithesis of that is to connect, to fight for someone you don't know, to love our neighbor, to bring people into the cause. To listen, to adapt, to open a posture of acceptance..." ”

“Why should working-class people mad as hell about being shafted for decades graft a fake smile onto their cause? Doesn't coalition building invariably end up meaning compromised positions? Isn't the desire to win over the middle of the road why the middle always wins? Do you build a movement capable of smashing oligarchy by rallying your armies or by reaching out?”

“ "If you go back and track what I was saying in those, one of the most things I would say is that we are a welcoming movement. We need to bring people in. We understand that everyone is on their journey, some people further along on that journey than others. And we need to give space and allow for people to basically be welcomed into it. I would use that phrase all the time: 'a welcoming movement.' " ”

“ "Because that is the script that we tell working people here and all over this country," Ocasio-Cortez continued, "that your inherent worth and value as a human being is dependent on an income that another person decided to underpay us. "It wasn't until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders, that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being." ”

“ "Last February, I was working as a waitress in downtown Manhattan—at a taqueria. I worked shoulder to shoulder with undocumented workers, who often worked harder and hardest for the least amount of money. I was on my feet working twelve-hour days, with no structured breaks. I didn't have health care. I wasn't being paid a living wage. And I didn't think that I deserved any of those things." ”

“The politics of charm and goose bumps that gives elected officials a way of performing compassion while slashing through an already threadbare safety net. The politics of feeling pain while doing the bidding of corporations.”

“Gruffness could be its own kind of sincerity. So many of the people who flocked to Sanders were used to being spoken to in slick, kind-seeming language that obscured what was really going down. They were being "rightsized," not fired. Their pension wasn't being cut; it was being shifted to a cash-available model, the smiling HR lady said.”

“Sanders didn't want it to be about the self. He wanted it to be about the system. And yet broken systems translate into broken backs and broken hearts, and that is often how people experience them. Some people will connect to your quest to fix the broken system because they share your sense that it is broken. But others will connect to it because they connect with you...”

“The system Sanders was fighting was built on the promotion of the sentimental and the self and on the avoidance of the structural.”

“ The campaign's slogan this time around was "Not me, us." And one meaning of those words was that individual pain and suffering can atomize people, separate them from each other, even if the causes of that pain are held in common. Now, more than before, Sanders had figured out how to speak to that pain in a way that didn't separate, that saw the "me" but pulled it up into an "us." ”

“ "I think one of the political crises that we face, in fact one of the reasons that Donald Trump is president, is that we've got millions of people who are in a lot of pain, families are suffering, and they turn on the television and they don't see a reflection of their lives," Sanders told me. ”

“ "There's a lot of individual credit and blame in a capitalist society," Jane Sanders told me... "You know, this is not an individual failure that you're having trouble meeting your bills, or that your health has suffered you, because can't afford health care. He tries to give them a context you that says, 'Hey, stop blaming yourself. Start thinking about how in a democracy, can help change the system." ”

“Sanders didn't generally do what other leaders did: hug people, say he felt their pain, ask follow-ups about the family. What he did with their pain, once it was his turn to speak, was analyze it; contextualize it; connect it to laws and agencies and instances of greed they may not know about; and, having processed it, offer it back to them as steaming, righteous, evidence-based anger. ”