Hamburg and the Future of Protest

It was exciting to see so many people on the streets in Hamburg in search of a better future. We all want a better future but here it’s on the march. People are getting out and showing it to each other.

But there’s very little coherence and deep resonance on the streets here. Little of the coherence and deep resonance that I know you’ve tapped into and felt and are probably trying hard to manifest.

Here’s how I see the “protesters” in Hamburg. (And why that word “protesters?” Is that what they’re doing? Or are they saying yes to something somehow.) I see people milling about, curious, exploratory. They’re alive to the conflict between police and demonstrators. They want be close to the action. They  want to be safe. Some want to express hurt and angst they’re carrying from other parts of their lives, feelings that have no place for expression. Some gather behind peaceable banners, some behind angry ones. People are unsure of their alliances, semi-united in the sense of a common but undefined enemy.  The crowd is disunited. If one is peacefully holding up a sign on this side of the street, someone with a mask is smashing a paving stone on the other. People wonder if there are provocateurs among them. They wonder who is who and is wonder if what’s going on inside them is any clearer than what’s going on inside me?

The overall feeling is one of confused excitement and uncertainty.

I know these feelings from demonstrations of my past. Nothing much has changed in the decades since my first protest.

But on the other hand.

Many of us have had experience of deep resonances and alliances with others in “crowds” – OK groups. Many of us are deeply excited about what’s possible here – “here” being intentional groups – In person but often online. We know what it means to make fuller room for each other, to listen deeply and to be heard deeply. To see and be seen. We know this and we know, even if not perfectly, how to do it. Reliably, predictably.

In that deep resonance where we’re much more fully heard, part of the experience is that there’s a “collective intelligence,” a strong sense of intention and clarity that’s greater than any one person’s expression. In other words, when we’re tuned into our common frequency, we know something that we don’t know when we’re tuned into the discord, the dis-chord.

And I look at Hamburg and I think: how can we bring what we know about group resonance into a gathering like that?

For one thing we’d do it before the gathering so we were used to that resonance and practiced in it, confident in it. I can imagine people who met  online many times and gotten to know each other forming a “phalanx” at a large protest in some geometrical shape. They’d keep clear on their intention, heart-clarity and connection. They’d link up with others, perhaps in a geometrical configuration. They’d be visible, focused.

I can imagine- I want to live to see – this self-ordering of resonant groups as a contagion within the populace. At “protest” but at many different venues. Very large numbers of us have pieces of this, know it, see it.

The future of “protest” is not protest, not making someone else wrong. It’s  standing connected to each other in a visible connection that holds the energy of the future we want.

I welcome any feedback you have on this idea and am imagining an online meeting to see what happens.

More on this later.