Control Freaks
(and the lack thereof)
If enlightened thought seeks to free us from fear, Minnesota has strayed from the path of righteousness. We exist in a state of comfortable fear. Fear causes my neighbors to peek out their blinds at any movement from my front stoop; fear pushes another next-door neighbor to call the police on my family (the only family of color on the block) anytime one of our cars is parked on the street for over 24 hours. So, in order to eliminate the fear that permeates Minnesotan culture at the hint of a threat to what it means to be comfortable and challenge the status quo, we have to re-think how we interact in arenas that question systems.
Whenever what could be considered the #FutureLeadersofTomorrow (!!) gather, often they do not know what the outcome will become at the onset. This is what we have managed to build in the HECUA classroom space. What this means is that the people who have come together in HECUA’s Environmental Sustainability program this fall of 2018 are working towards a deepened understanding of what’s going on around us every day. With that understanding will come the basic tools necessary to incite palpable change and facilitate effective discourse.
So how can this be, in an era of #fakenews, #resisting, and #division? Within the HECUA-ES family, we have created a domain that touches on each of these movements, and effectively works to dodge the things that stand in the way of a group’s success in co-creation. HECUA has created for us a space that is on the righteous pathway to achieving harmony. This group dynamic works through a number of mediums that have allowed us to do two things:
1) Challenge a dominant narrative that exists in the structure of a learning/creating, educational/working space;
2) Critique (and hopefully eventually change) something that many Minnesotans take pride in: working for and achieving comfort in their surroundings.
(And from there we tend to examine exactly what we think we are doing in this Land O’Lakes).
And now, for the How. Look on.
Riddle of the day: What is something that typically organizes a group’s structure, has been tied to the nature of humankind (mankind) since the first few, and drives silent struggles between Alpha and Beta-types? Dominance! The quest for dominance within a group of people causes most collectives to subconsciously elect someone to direct the sway of idea flow, and for a level of regulation to lord over ideas, thus producing a limited end result due the communication patterns exhibited. To combat this, we have essentially had to give up the need to have control of the group’s flow in order to allow for a place where equal parts talking and listening merge, and that we privilege breathing in deeply the effect that words and intentions pose on a people. In a society that almost deliberately eschews communication for efficiency, proficiency, and meeting demand to supply, it is equally refreshing and necessary in order for genuine connections to be established.
Speaking of connections, this kind of niche where thought is turned into action is key, given the relation to where it exists. Our program consists primarily of University of MN students (and a token U. of St. Thomas student) from Minnesota and the surrounding area. In some regards, we showcase the excellent qualities that some people are privileged to experience living in Minnesota, and in most others, we actually illuminate the shade within our collective communities here.
What is this ‘shade’ I am calling out of hiding? The age-old myth that MN is “nice” and that we all act out of a constitutional niceness. If you take a critical stance on the actions of most Minnesotan neighbors, the reality of this belief is enacted in an underlying foundation of passive aggression (and often, outright aggression); not truly respecting the values and ideas that some folks defend with tooth and nail; and what seems to be a rally against the introduction of anything that indicates the concept of ‘the Other’. While this has been an internationally observable common human notion, anything that is perceived as an upset to the status quo is birthed from fear. That inherent fear ostracizes most people, and makes it difficult for platforms such as the one we’ve worked to create to be successful.
So, how has this fear-induced ‘Other-ness’ staked its claim on us earth-people?
This concept is one that describes the ostracization of people by defining a “them” vs. an “us”. The Other was defined by European conquests, slavery, erasure of culture, and a never-ending list of structural violence that made it even easier to be disconnected as a human race. A race to modernity forced the Other(s) to be seen as a liability to the cause if they are to speak out of turn at the first sight of inequality. During the Enlightenment period, a distinction between belief and thought, and “then” vs. “now”, aimed to see the path to Enlightenment as “understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought; has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity,” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972).
Seeing as us HECUA students will all receive credits toward graduation, valuable learning and work experience, and other tangible outcomes to the completion of this program; this is still a classroom space of sorts. What we are doing, however, is reshaping what it means to learn as a class in a room. This construct provides for what some could consider a ‘loss’ of what could be seen as an orderly, business meeting-esque space, like most of the academic places that we have ourselves endeavored through. To re-create the idea of a classroom and what goes on there, and to learn from one another in an impeccably visible way, is a blessing. Or whatever you’d like to deem something that is inherently good.
Excusing the tangent, this method of organized chaos will begin to do a number of things. It has allowed us to operate in a way that will eventually benefit the “Greater Good”; it makes a healthier group dynamic as a whole; and it implores the parts of a collective to reflect upon the individual self and that self’s discernment between right and wrong. Essentially, by tossing the idea that we all need to tiptoe around each other’s ideas out with the rubbish, we establish a renewed sense of trust within a small congregation of young people, and a way of associative communicating that births powerful co-creators and beautifully conscious beings that intentionally change the world as we know it.
