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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
The ocean is unsettled, my friends. Strange fronts passing, dark loomings. There is a new captain aboard, new mates to command the watch. The crew is confused; there are grumblings of discontent below deck where past verities are honored, traditions and laws that have guided successful passage for centuries are respected as proof of considered, honorable, and effective traditions.
There is talk of resistance.
History has shown previous frustrations, and success has been advanced by action other than direct confrontation. Passive resistance has proven an effective tool, used by Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King to confront tyranny and injustice through the weight and power of collective non-violent opposition. It may be that we need to apply again the weapons of boycott, sit-down, non-participation. The ocean on which we sail is a construct of dynamic forces, ever-changing, sometimes as direct force of wave on shore and ship, sometimes as an invisible indirect current that guides us through the uncharted seas.
As always, I look to water for metaphor and method. Eric Liu is founder and CEO of Citizen University, a non-profit organization that promotes “citizenship power;" Director of the Aspen Institute Program on Citizenship and American Identity; and the author of You're More Powerful Than You Think, published in 2017, a citizen's guide to the practice of power in our changing world, wherein he writes as follows:
“Here is another metaphor: power is like water. It flows all around us at all times. Sometimes it takes the liquid form of politics-in-action, a turbulent flow with crosscurrents and strong undertows. Sometimes it takes the solid form of settled law: policy is power frozen. Sometimes it is like vapor in the air, invisibly shaping the climate and our behavior in just the way beliefs or ideology or emotions do.
But how we see is not just a matter of language. It is also a matter of moral imagination. Whether you conceptualize power as fire, water, mass, force, or something else altogether, the deepest truth is that we the people are not merely the passive receptacles or objects of power. We are the very source of power. We do not just receive power as it passes through us or acts upon us. We generate it. We give it.”
I concur. And submit that:
• Water has the directional power of concurrent flow.
• Water has the resistance power whereby action against the flow creates ancillary, contradictory power.
• Water has the controvertible power of mass and the unexpected.
• Water has the inherent truth of the collective laws of Nature -- yes, a shaping force and manifestation of politics in action.
Is there in this a new iteration of “moral imagination” as a force against strange fronts and dark loomings? Is there a new definition of passive resistance to be exercised against the unsettled climate in which we live? How can we use the power of such a metaphorical flow in this time, circumstance, and place to mobilize the confidence, energy, and direction to undermine and redirect the power of a new authority aligned against us?
We are living in an exceptional time of transition. The open space of change is the true looming, the light that will enable us to move forward and through to a new iteration of citizen resistance, a plan of action to be created now by us, by our invention and collective will. Power is not theirs to take, but ours to give.
We will discuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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