Hegemony How-To. Jonathan Smucker

Hegemony How-To - Jonathan Smucker


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      In that moment it suddenly dawned on me that one should never know for certain that their partial truth was God’s universal truth—or whether or not God was on their side. I thought of all the horrors that have been committed by people who entertained no doubts about the rightness of their actions, and I decided right then that I would always maintain a healthy measure of self-doubt. I would embrace a life in which questions were more important than definitive answers.

      At the same time, however, I knew that a lack of certainty was no excuse for not taking decisive action on the moral issues of my time. I felt that I had to figure out a way to take bold action on the social justice issues that had captured my attention. I knew intuitively that there would be costs to speaking or acting upon my emerging convictions. I was quite familiar with the story of the righteous person who speaks truth to power. That story ended on a cross.

      What I had not anticipated was the number of students who would resonate with the message and who would want to find out more. They even wanted to do something about the situation I had spotlighted—to take some kind of action. Nor had I anticipated how many teachers and faculty members would agree with the social justice message. Teachers, it turned out, had to be careful to not appear too “liberal,” lest they become the next victim of the periodic witch-hunts that conservative parents were known to take up. My act had given teachers cover to open up space in their classroom to candidly discuss social and economic justice issues, as they could not be accused of initiating the conversation. Starting the conversation was my part to play.

      At the end of the school day, I went promptly to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), an organization whose headquarters are in Lancaster County. It was at MCC’s alternative resource library where I had first paged through publications like New Internationalist, Multinational Monitor, and The Catholic Worker—my initial sources for self-education about the global economy. This time I walked into the main office and I asked for help. I told the first folks I saw what I had done that morning. News travels fast in tight-knit Mennonite communities—they had already heard. I also told them about the response, especially the students who wanted to find out more. One of the two people I encountered there was Dave Schrock-Shenk, who just so happened to be working on a curriculum for a 30-day educational experiment for groups called World of Enough. It wasn’t ready yet, but we soon made plans to pilot the draft curriculum with 70 interested students at Lancaster Mennonite.

      This was my first small taste of political hope. I had psyched myself up to play my part in a story of the righteous few. I had expected that by speaking my truth, I would be rejected by everyone. It’s not that there was nothing of value about the process I had gone through to psych myself up. After all, I had faced my deepest fears and overcome them. And I had found my voice—it was shaking, but it was audible and I could sense the power of saying aloud what I felt needed to be said. I wasn’t totally off base in my prediction of the reaction: the social justice message was, indeed, rejected by many in the audience—violently so by a few folks later on. However, for others, the message had resonated and served as a spark.

      My experience of connecting with others on social justice values and then of figuring out together a way to take collective action produced in me a feeling of efficacy—like I could help to make a change in the world.

      Immersion


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