Global Research Assembly

Chicago Nexus

July 22, 1976

I want to welcome you to the Continental Rally of North America on behalf of the Planet Earth. I welcome you as people who see the future as colleagues, see the past as honored friend and receive the present as your spouse.

I am from New York, Buenos Aires, Brisbane, Nairobi, Cebu, Frankfurt, Peking and Montreal. I do not want to be from those places; but I show up in the twentieth century and have not much choice in the matter. Those are the places I am from and you are from the same places. A few years ago we spoke of that romantically, as we all held hands in some sort of friendship circle. Today that is a reality. We are here in North America to celebrate the globality of the world and the challenge that globality puts on Those Who Care.

Your presence here indicates not that you chose this day and this hour to be about the task but that this day and this hour chose you. We are about the profound, exciting and fulfilling experiment of human history because we are about Life. We are a group who, beyond our own understanding, care about the earth. We are about building the earth. I sometimes like to say rebuilding, for there has been an historical consistency in the journey of man. He has been called to build and rebuild and build again.

We have shifted in our work very abruptly in the last year. You and I have experienced this as fantastically incredible. We have become acquainted with people again. It seemed as if we had been talking to ourselves for about two years. What a refreshing thing it was to talk to others. When we began the circuits, we met phenomenal people and found ourselves saying, "They're saying the same things we are! And they have not had any courses!" Someone who is a disbeliever always interjects, "They must have had a course somewhere." All over your turf you discovered people yearning, just as you were, to build the earth. All they were looking for ways the ways and means to do that. In the Kiwanis Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the neighborhood associations and League of Women Voters, people have the same kind of quiet concern and care for creation and the same yearning that something significant could be born. It is almost that we did not have to tell the story. We just walk in and they say, "Right. When can we do it?" There has been a shift in the turn to the world, as we named it several years ago, now that we have grounded that in our engagement with­local communities.

We have turned to the social as well as the local. We spent a number of years being excited by the awakenment of the individual human being. That is still great and it will always happen. But we have discovered another dimension to reawakening ­­ that is, the reawakening of community ­­ whole communities, not just individuals here and there. I heard the other day about a town that proposed at the Town Meeting to have a community center. They proceeded to raise one million dollars to erect that community center. I am not interested in that community center, save that it is a sign that people decided to embrace the future.

We have one global task done through three campaigns. One is Community Forum. One is Global Social Demonstration. One is the Intra-global Movement. Rebuilding the earth is an unending task. It is not romantic. It is not done overnight. It is done with careful work and by employing well thought through strategies. We are at war against the lethargy that has almost stagnated the creative process in society. Our task is to move society and the world into the new resurgence and creative surge that forever and continually occurs within society.

There are people who fear the movement of history. They fear the new. They spend all of their energy and all of their time seeking to maintain the world as it is at this moment (to the extent that the world as it is is to their advantage). We have decided to wage a war against the encrusting that would block the resurgence that is yearning in the bowels of people across this globe.

We are about waging a war. If you go back far enough in the terminology of the Church, you discover there was a lot said about waging war and a lot said about winning that war. What we are about as people is winning that war; winning a war against lethargy and apathy. I bet that you have heard the word "apathy" in town meetings more than any other word. I bet there is not one of the 500 documents that does not have the word "apathy" in it. People yearn for something to happen to blow open the static that they experience not only in their lives but in the life of the community in which they live.

We are in a war. The enemy is anything which will not allow the creative urge of mankind to move ahead in the era in which we live. We are not playing games but we are out to win ­­ not for something called Town Meeting, not for Social Demonstration, not even for something called the ICA ­­ but to win in order that all of humankind can participate in creating the future.

In war strategies are needed to discern where the enemy stronghold is. We know a lot more today about where these strongholds are than we did twelve months ago. We have discerned a little more about how to deal with apathy and lethargy not in the abstract, but in the concrete. We have discovered that is present even in those claiming to be concerned for mankind, who come in with one idea that recommends the future, but with fifty good reasons why the future should not come at this particular time and moment. "If only we wait five years, perhaps we can be ready for the future that is coming upon us." That is what I mean by an "enemy."

We are waging war against that. It takes strategy. It takes prowess. It takes figuring out the best move in order that you not destroy the enemy, but take him captive, to allow the future to take him captive so that he. His community, the nation and the world are propelled into the future, so that he discovers the future is not enemy but is his colleague and the possibility for his community life and the life of the whole of creation. That takes prowess. ­­ ­

We are people in the process of developing that kind of prowess. I remember making a call a few weeks ago. The person was really interested and intrigued. He said, "Well, what can I do for you?" and we weren't prepared. We looked at each other and saw we had not even thought through why we were there. We were short of strategy and prowess.

Our task here at the Assembly is to define our strategies, to sharpen our prowess, to focus the tools we have. We will have to be selective in choosing the towns to display our banners next year. If we sharpen the tactics by which we make strategic moves across the rural, the suburban, the urban and the inner city communities, we will have thousands of community forums taking place. Nations are ready for this to happen. Communities are ready. People have a conviction that creation is worth it and they are willing to invest in it. You know it and I know it. Our task is to be equipped to enable what they are waiting for.

A second campaign directly and closely related to this is Global Social Demonstration. Many of you, before this weekend is over, will be screaming about "follow­up." You are going to say that we have to follow up Town Meeting. If we do not follow up, then we had better not have a Town Meeting at all. I do not remember now who said that, When a guy has a pistol pointed at his head you run up and take the pistol from his head. You do not think what his occupational or vocational future is going to be before you decide that you are going to rip the pistol out of his hand." Follow up for Town Meeting is yet to come but we continue to allow communities to awaken. I think finally that follow­up will be Global Social Demonstration.

In Global Social Demonstration we create a sign in both rural and urban places. We show not only that communities can be awakened but beyond that, that even a community that has been bypassed by the historical process, by the social structures, by the educational structures, can, in fact, be renewed and enter the stream of the creative process of society. At the beginning of the year we said that we would have eight demonstrations across the face of the earth. At the end of the year we completed eight Global Social Demonstration Consults across the world. Names that were foreign to us a year ago have become friends: Majuro, Oombulgurri, Maliwada, Kawangware, Kwangyung Il, Isle of Dogs, Sudtonggan, and one that was always a friend, Fifth City, became even more of a friend.

That is just the beginning of a way to demonstrate to the globe that change is in fact a possibility . It is a way to show that it is possible to engage in loving the earth again not as a romantic picture but as engagement of your life. It is a way of allowing the gifts that are possible in the world today to be the gifts of every community; giving communities the possibility of restating their destiny as part of the global configuration of society. Those eight have become a sign everywhere in this world. We cannot underestimate the kind of impact they have been, taking the places that everyone else gave up on. Concrete new life ­­ new housing, nutrition, health and economic base ­­ is happening in places where nobody believed it would happen. The globe stands in awe of this phenomenon.

I went to the Sudtonggan Consult and just like Town Meeting, I doubted. Then I saw Irenao, a fellow who was slouched over all during the first day of the Consult. He spoke English but did not let anyone know he could. He sat hack or stood back from the table. That man started out three feet nigh and at the end of one week, he was a giant. Before he left he told me, "I must take the story of Sudtonggan to another Global Social Demonstration."

This man had hardly ever left the confines of the village we were in during his lifetime, even though there is a great city only 35 minutes away. This is a phenomenal change to see. I understand that in Oombulgurri the children in the preschool are very excited about seeing whose stomach is flattest. Their nutrition has so improved that they no longer have bloated stomachs. That is what the world sees. You and I see through but not separate from that, to the rebirth of the human spirit and the fullness of life happening to people when they discover that they have the capacity to recreate the communities in which they live.

Now what is the task for Global Social Demonstration? We all know that eight is not enough for the sake of holding the world in awe and showing the whole world that this is possible anywhere on the face of the earth. As those people who decide to do what is necessary, we have decided to do a lot more social demonstrations until the globe itself picks up that task and sees it as exactly what is needed all aver the face of the globe. In this coming year we will be replicating social demonstration in Maliwada, India; in Maharastra state. In four years 250 villages will be "Maliwadas." Since there are 32,000 villages in Maharastra State, there is still a lot more to do.

Our task this year is to show that 250 can be done and that if replication can be done in Maharastra State, it can be done anywhere. The work of this Research Assembly has proven to me that replication is not only a great thing but it is a viable, realistic, accomplishable task for the renewal of the earth as well.

The Intra-global Movement is the third campaign. I do not know what to say about that except that it would be a start to have you look around the room. As we have done Town Meetings this year we­have discovered (not created) the Intra-global Movement. We discovered it in Peoria, in San Jose, in Tarrytown: in Houston and in Edmonton. All over, people were yearning to give their lives to something that was effective. Today people are not willing to throw their lives away on some foolish project. They would rather stay home. They will not do it.

Community Forum and Global Social Demonstration have evoked a league of people. Only a small fraction are sitting in this room. They may never come to a Town Meeting. They may never come to a cadre meeting. They may never come to the Religious Houses. But­they are present; a league of people ready to move when they see that which will engage their lives. These are the forces that are and will engage in waging the war against apathy and against that which blocks the movement of the creative process.

The Intraglobal Movement will emerge even more strongly in this coming year. All over this country and in Canada, people who­participate in one Community Forum or one Steering Committee have become circuiters, telling the story all over the turf of what happened in their community. That is what I mean by the Intra-global Movement.

The guardians have gone to Global Social Demonstration to use their expertise in distant places. One family that went to Sudtonggan had no previous contact with the "Movement." They heard about the Consult and decided they would go. Now about once a month, they invite a group of friends to their home to tell them about Sudtonggan, evoke their engagement and encourage their monetary gifts for further Global Social Demonstration. They were just waiting for that. The GRA worked on articulating the profound function of Community Forum and Global Social Demonstration so that we as the Intra-global Movement would have ways to tell the story to people and give them the possibility of responding and participating in the most phenomenal time in which we have ever lived. That is what the war is about.

As I look at the necessity for Global Social Demonstration replication and the need for five­ten­twenty thousand Community Forums, I discover that India needs Town Meetings. All the nations in Africa need Town Meetings. I anticipate within the next few years Global Community Forum will be happening across the face of the earth. As we build and refine the strategies to move Community Forum rapidly, we will be doing work crucial for Africa, India and the whole globe as well as for North America.

The war we are in is not a North American war; it is a global war. The war we are in is not one that will end, for it is the constant re-birthing of the human spirit. This day is the most phenomenal in history. I have discovered that, as you have. We are the people who are exhausted but we have never looked so good.

Remember the first time you saw Mountain Rivera? We all enjoyed watching him dance down the street in his illusions about himself. We all cried when he went into the ring to expend his life on behalf of others. I bet in a close­up shot he would have looked more alive when he was fighting than at any other time in the movie. That is my picture of us. We are. exhausted from an expenditure that makes it worth being a human being in the twentieth century. For that we can be grateful.