Channeling my inner Rodney King

Rodney King died recently, but his poignant question – “Can we all get along?” – lives on.

King was the African-American man whose vicious beating by Los Angeles police officers was captured on video in 1991.  His attackers were tried in 1992, but the all-white jury acquitted three and could not agree on the fourth.  The verdict sparked terrible riots in Los Angeles, leading to the deaths of 53 people.  In the midst of the violence, a distraught King went on television to plead for unity, or at least civility.

So what does this have to do with dog rescue?

Like every movement, animal rescue is divided in multiple ways.  I have been participating in social movements for a long time – since I was 14 and joined protests against the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons manufacturing plant near Denver.  (Yes, that dates me.)  Since that time I have worked for a number of groups, on a number of issues, as both paid staff and volunteer. I have also studied social movements as an academic for more than 20 years, beginning with undergraduate and graduate research on revolutionary movements in Central America.  Divisions in those movements were sometimes literally deadly.  A number of prominent leaders were assassinated by their former allies, as was Malcolm X in this country.

Fortunately, at least so far, dog rescuers do not seem inclined to go after each other in such lethal ways.  Still, our divisions can be destructive.  We spend time criticizing others who are working for the same goals – helping the dogs who need us.  To the extent that it focuses on direct service, ours is a less ideologically-driven movement than some, but it still suffers from divisions about all kinds of things, ranging from the mundane (should your dogs eat only raw food?) to the abstract (what kinds of rights do nonhuman animals have, anyway?)

Some divisions matter more than others, and they matter differently.  Lots of people have “deal breakers,” issues about which they will not or cannot compromise.  This can lead to single-issue politics, on a large scale – the citizen for whom a politician’s position on gun control, the environment, or abortion becomes the only thing that matters.  For others, a big picture view trumps any specific issue – they wish that politician had a different position on immigration, for example, but like everything else about her enough to overlook it. Personally, I like to keep my make-or-break issues few and far between, in order to keep the tent big and the conversation expansive.

Perhaps because I’m an academic, I think of these issues in relation to the split in philosophical ethics between deontological ethics (in which rules must be followed and principles adhered to regardless of the cost) and consequentialist ethics (in which the end result is much more important than the means used to achieve it).  Both of these approaches can be destructive when taken to extremes, and at least in my activist life, I prefer a pragmatic approach with multiple values and multiple approaches to achieving common goals

Against this big tent approach is the claim, as someone put it to me a while ago, that “we are more effective when we are all on the same page.”  The problem is that the people who say this often mean (sometimes without realizing it) that everyone should be on their page.  This kind of unity is domination, the subordination of alternative perspectives for the sake of a “greater good” that those in power have defined.  Again, there are parallels in other social movements, notably the ways that women have been told to put aside their own interests for the sake of other goals.

In addition to ideological issues and strategic issues, of course, we are divided by personal concerns, which can be just as compelling (or more so).  Asking people to set these aside for the greater good can be as hard – and as much of a power play – as asking someone to compromise a deeply held principle.

The problem is how to get along, as Rodney King would put it, without forcing some people to toe a line set by someone else.  How can we establish a unity that is more than skin deep but that respects diverse principles – and makes it possible for people who are personally divided to collaborate when our common goals demand it? 

  

Amazingly, I find myself thinking of the dense and obscure German social theorist Jurgen Habermas here.  I took a seminar on him in graduate school and spent the entire semester complaining about him (to the extent that a friend of mine thought his name was “stupid Habermas,” or, as she put it, “stupid Haagen-Dazs”).  However, Habermas left me with a take-home message about the central role of open communication in any group that aims to be democratic.  Free and open communication is impossible without proper conditions, which Habermas calls the “ideal speech situation.”  In this situation, every interested party has the opportunity to speak, be heard, and influence collective decisions.  No one is excluded from the dialogue and no one has the power to silence or overrule another.  The goal of the conversation is to reach consensus – not a final vote, because people who know they are in the majority have little motive to listen to minority points of view. 

As a graduate student, I thought Habermas was overly abstract and idealist.  I have a feeling I am opening myself to the same criticisms now.  Perhaps the most charitable way to put it is that this thinking is a work in progress.  I am struggling to figure out how we can work together despite our differences – but that means figuring out what differences matter (and how much), when we can agree to disagree and work together for a common goal, and when the differences are so deep that there is not really a common goal.  We like to say that we are all in it for the animals and that our shared goal is to save lives.  There are many paths toward that goal and many tasks needed to reach it.  Even when we disagree about which is the most important task or the best way to pursue it, it may still be possible to acknowledge that the people on another path, or another page, have something valuable to offer.

Recently I was looking for pit bull advocacy groups in the San Diego area who might help someone moving there find an apartment where she can keep her dog.  I came across one called Just a Dog Rescue, which has this quotation (from the Dalai Lama) on its home page:  “Compassion is the radicalism of our time.”  I have seen this before and find it a fascinating political statement.  Today I thought about it in terms of our disagreements and judgments.  We are all motivated by compassion toward dogs.  I often find compassion toward people harder. It is so easy to suspect not just the conclusions but the motives of people with whom we disagree.  That suspicion weakens our work together, sometimes fatally.  The victims in this case are not movement leaders, but the dogs whose fate is determined by human decisions. 

In 1975, the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton was assassinated by former comrades in that country's revolutionary movement.  Dalton’s most famous poem ends with a beautiful vision of solidarity, made more poignant by his tragic fate:

I believe the world is beautiful

and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me

but in the unanimous blood

of those who struggle for life,

love,

little things,

landscape and bread,

the poetry of everyone.