Democracy on an Ordinary Tuesday
This is the fourth piece of the cycle. It was supposed to tell you what we're going to do. It doesn't. That absence is the most important thing this site has published yet, and here is why.
Every action cycle on this site runs the same loop. Name the problem. Announce the alternative. Learn from each other. Act. The first three pieces are up: the check named for what it is, the world that can't be bought, five working people speaking for themselves. The fourth piece was supposed to report an act, chosen together by the people in the third piece. What stands in its place is this: an explanation of why that piece cannot exist yet, and what gets built instead.
First, the honest thing to say about the whole cycle, not just its last step. Everything you have read on this site should have come from a group. The arguing over what to denounce, the deciding what to announce, the sitting with each other's answers, and most of all the acting: in the method this site follows, that of dialogue circles for a renewal of democracy and representation, all of it is the work of people meeting together over time, a dialogue circle. What is up now was made by one person working alone, and it shows. But the pieces stay. They show the shape of the loop, and the shape is sound. But read them for what they are: a scaffold. A pale reflection of what the real cycles will look like, the ones produced by a circle of the people they are about.
Nowhere is that clearer than at the fourth step. The Act Piece reports what the participants in the Dialogue Piece decided together, and then did. But look at that third dialogue piece. Five people, one at a time, about five minutes each, in a parking lot. Their answers were printed exactly, and that printing is done and true. But nobody heard each other. Linda does not know Tina exists. Tina does not know Steven thinks there is enough in the world for everybody, though it is not distributed fairly. Nobody said, after hearing the others, that's it, that's what we should do.
Five minutes can carry what a person feels. It cannot carry what people decide.
Deciding takes people sitting together, more than once, hearing each other out.
The people who built dialogue circles in Brazil and Chile in the 1960s had a method with a strict order. Investigate first what is holding people down, and denounce it together. Then imagine an alternative reality together. Then engage in dialogue about it, about what steps can be taken to begin to make the alternative vision a reality. Only then, act.
Every step in this cycle was done by one person trying to set the framework, trying to build the road while walking it. Yet every step is a supposed to be a group project. That's democracy, that's representing ourselves in a new way, in new organizations, dialogue circles. Without dialogue, there can be no dialogue circle. We were able to muddle our way through until now, the fourth article in the cycle, the Action Step, and the gap between what dialogue circles should be and what this first, iterative example is, became unavoidable.
So the fourth piece, this piece, as envisioned could not be written, and the reason turned out to be the finding. Not a failure to write. Nothing yet to report. The fourth piece does not need a better writer. It needs a group.
The Change That Matters More Than Any Article
The action cycles go on hold. Not canceled. Held. The loop stays on the homepage and stays true, but future cycles become real when people have deliberated together and decided, and that does not exist yet. Running the loop without it would mean this site deciding for you and calling it democracy, and this site was built to refuse exactly that.
Field Notes
What starts now is a new section, Field Notes, and it is where the real work lives while the loop waits. Two threads run through it.
The first thread is us, including you, in dialogue with each other. Not five minutes in a parking lot. Longer. Whenever and wherever people are already standing: markets, doorsteps, waiting rooms, protests. At the coming No Kings protest there will be a sign. It reads: "How do we build democracy? No, really. Tell me." That sign is not a decoration. It is a question this site does not know the answer to, and here is the question behind it.
Wars: no vote of ours. Trade wars: no vote of ours. People gunned down by armed immigration agents: no vote of ours.
People will say, well, you vote for the ones who decide. Fine. Then why, when these things are so widely hated, can nothing stop them between elections?
Here is my honest guess, and it is only a guess: because between elections, the organized money stays awake and nothing else does. We have no everyday civic muscle to answer it with.
This country has no place where people exercise power together on an ordinary Tuesday.
We do not know how to build one. That is what the sign is asking.
The second thread is us, in dialogue with the books, the scholarship. People have been working on this problem for a long time, educators and organizers and researchers, and Field Notes will read alongside them and say plainly where our practice agrees, disagrees, and runs into walls. We seek answers the same two ways everybody ever has: from each other, and from the people who wrote the problem down and studied it before us. What people tell us at the protest and everywhere else gets printed, in their words. What the books say gets printed too. What nobody says can get printed too.
And when enough people have talked long enough and decided to do something, the loop starts for real, and the fourth piece, the real one, the action, gets written from their decision. Not by any single individual. That was always the point.
The check is still on the porch. The leash is still on the porch. And now the porch has a bulletin board, and the first note pinned to it says: we don't know yet. Come help us find out.
The porch light stays on.