HARNESSING THE THUNDERBOLT

This period we’re going through is a living laboratory for so many things. An ongoing experiment that challenges petrified worldviews, knee jerk reactions, pushing you to reconsider your comfort zones..

On the one hand the forums at the parks going on at full speed, on the other, people are marching, one day for their “Kurdish brothers,” to be followed the next day by the gay pride (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=141431382722591&set=vb.309272629091835&type=2&theater). All so incredibly dynamic, fresh and refreshing.

The youth teaches the cold war generations a new way of communication. Free from the habitual (by the oriental thinking badly reinforced) context orientation, they are content oriented. They express themselves in a direct, simple and clear way without sinking into endless what if’s.

Let me give an example. As security forces killed a Kurdish demonstrator in the southeastern Turkey last week, people here immediately organized a protest. I for my part, was hesitant needing to know exactly what happened –with the so-called official and fragile “peace process” going on and given the fact how the region is a “closed box,” ready to be exploded at any moment, I was worrying about a possible misstep which I thought would be fatal. But no, thousands marched, bypassing the details of a particular instance –just forget about hidden agendas, conspiracy theories and stuff!-  proclaiming brotherhood, thus owning the peace process, giving it a real chance. Once more I was in awe –oh, how I LOVE eating my words!

Once empathy is in, as a visceral reality rather than an abstract idea, it expands toward all until then marginalized groups. Kurds, gays, Alawites.. Resulting in a clear and loud demand for basic human rights and a participatory first class democracy.

My enthusiastic emphasis might make seem the whole purer than it really is. Of course there are opportunistic elements as well –besides, a leaderless networking is something altogether new. And the defenders of the status quo suffering deeply from Dunning-Kruger effect are resisting at full strength.

As a person with no political interest/muscle, I used to see such grassroots movements like thunderbolt. Immensely powerful, disruptive but not transformable into a sustainable force. Those who pull the strings, I was telling myself, are doing so by being extremely single-minded. They have to be strategically thinking marathon runners as opposed to the sprinter-like people whose intermittent energy is bound to be distracted and dissipated some time.

This too I had to swallow. (And I find the shaking of my cynical, skeptical stance liberating. It’s as if a heavy crust of dried mud around my waist would crumble.)

It’s not about changing the world overnight. It’s about redefining our humanness and ways of relating to each other, and maybe also to life itself.