At 05:27 PM 12/27/2002 -0800, you wrote:
You bring up many interesting and true points. Emotion is key -- and the way in which emotion is not felt in the context of action, but passively is also true. Two variables to mention in connection with that is 1) that to feel an emotion requires time, and Americans are one of the most overworked people on earth: no time = no emotion and 2) as so much of the emotion we feel is constructed by advertising, we have come to think of emotions as things that are subjective/individual/divisive. The notion of an emotion (pride, rage, anger, love) as a binding force is uncommon in the U.S. The closest thing to it is rooting for your football/baseball/basketball team.I think emotional structure is key to making left organization. There is a confusion about using text based tools to form emotional structure in left groups. In my email 'Face Blindness' I give some of the crucial elements of emotion structure that the face provides that text either poorly performs or can't do at all. Face to face organizing founders in competition with media emotion structures. Email distribution lists come closer to a model of left organizing that succeeds where face to face is not succeeding. One can belong agnostically to several lists. The group membership is loose, and relatively open to the world. Email suffers like any other text based communication tool with comparison to expressing emotion structure via the face. So for now we continue to confront what you raised as a problem in your remark. I see the problem in my way, but the commonality we share is that emotion structure is the barrier in the U.S. to an effective left.
You also leave out one important social space -- that created by religion. It seems to me that the official religion of the left is atheism and I think this is a huge loss. I think the left needs to recongize that there is a whole spectrum of religious belief in the U.S. -- ranging from the communal meditative practices of Buddhists and Quakers...to extreme Xtian fundamentalism. To put all these practices into the same "basket of delusion" is a big mistake. It completely shuts out many communities that do believe that the right to life is greater than the right to property, and these communities would well be worth working with.
Joanna
