It always seems impossible.

Until it's done.

A Call to "Arms", Hearts, Wallets

Next Step Together has a plan absolutely bursting with hard-nosed idealism!

1. Live broadcasts and You Tubed recordings of noted activists, religious figures and celebrities discussing NST
2. A Video Contest to explain Next Step Together and sociocracy
3. Seattle’s/America's Next Best Idea Contest
4. A Sociocratic Party in America
5. Seattle/US/World Voter Open Data Base, possibly on Facebook - where everyone records their votes, making fraud impossible

Can you spare a little social change? I'm sinking all my time and money into this, can you please join and chip in at www.NextStepTogether.Net! The equivalent of $5 to $25 a month should do it! No other organization will transform our culture as deeply and permanently as Next Step Together. Why wait until "it's time has come"? MAKE it come!

"It always seems impossible. Until it's done." ~Nelson Mandela

Please check out this speech I gave at a Seattle community-building event about an essential aspect of Next Step Together. It's a spunky call to arms/hearts!

~


Tonight, December 4, 2009, I declare a Love War!
I will gather my forces, and you will gather yours, and, together, we'll plan a Love Attack! And we'll beg for swift, sure retaliation: "Please, shock and awe us back with your powerful love!"
I declare a Love War Council! Come, gather, you representatives and leaders, thinkers and creators. Come tell us whom you represent and what they most want to do, together, and how many Love Warriors you'll need.
I declare a big, fast, yummy Love War. A war we can win in months, in days, in an hour, with our unvanquishable numbers - because, we are many, they are few, and because we'll lovingly, plan-fully make them a Love Offer they can't refuse - because they want and need happiness, wonder, a future more than they want or need a 17th yacht. They want to dance with our beautiful, powerful, graceful dancers. They want our deep, sweet healing. They want our amazing creativity, our brilliant minds and music and science. Maybe we'll stop selling our talents, and only trade them for the keys to the world's armies, which we'll then drop in the Dali Lama's lap.
They won't refuse to sit down in this circle of juicy community. We'll prove to them that we're on their side too, not just on our own side, not just on the side of the poor, not just on the earth's side - on their too - the side of the rich, violent, deadly, powerful. And, not just because they can kill us, and have bought us and terrified us right out of our tender bodies, but, because we are just like them, we are them, and we need their consent too to run our world together.
We need to listen to their objections, to their fears - their many, well-founded fears - that we'll just take their power and wealth and kill them, as we have before. We know now, that won't work. We will make a plan to love them better this time.

We'll follow the rules we learned in kindergarten:
o No hitting
o Be kind
o Share
o Listen
o Clean up your messes
o Nap
o Laugh and play
o Every living thing is precious
o There are no throw away people


We have misplaced so much of our hope and vision and felt so powerless for so long. We've been sleepy, confused, scared - we were born to it.
But, shift happens. We feel it in our hearts, in our eyes weeping, sparkling - our arms, embracing. And not only because this could be our last chance, but because it's our best chance for the most joy and love for us and for everyone.
So, we'll send in our representatives, our trusted envoys. They will select representatives and send them in – and in this simple way all of us will be represented.
And our elegant system of representatives will make a good plan and share it, and we will improve on it. And more and more groups will join this sweet, obvious, fair process where we share power efficiently.
And we will promise to help each win Love Wars with our massive Armies of Love Warriors, our unvanquishable numbers.
The rich, the ill, the furious, the cruel, the powerful will vie and beg to be the target of our next Love Maneuver. And the whole house of cards will fall, float, gently down, like a tantruming child collapses exhausted, into loving arms.
Can you see it? Can you feel it? It's right here, just a step ahead of us - one giant step together.
We are connected enough, know enough, we are conscious enough to start now. We have done so much great work on ourselves. We have so many smart thinkers and wise leaders.
Sure, we're scared. We have reasons to be. But, everything's shifting. And the past will not be the future. The future will be all of humanity trusting, delegating, steering itself powerfully, wisely, lovingly to paradise
now
we declare
a Love War.


~December 2009


☉ Tim Anderson