Greg Dunlap  0:03  
So last year at Lullabot's yearly retreat, we had a half day workshop that was run by Meg Bolger. And I'm going to admit that as somebody who's been involved in discussions around social justice issues for quite a while, I kind of went into it, assuming that I would be a fly on the wall and sort of support things as needed. And I was really surprised that I was absolutely blown away by Meg's ability to engage with everybody in a way that combined commitment with compassion and communicated in a way that everybody involved was really affected by and so I'm really happy to have Meg here to talk about social justice issues and how we discuss them in our communities. So thanks for coming Meg.

Meg Bolger  0:47  
Yeah, you're welcome.

Greg Dunlap  0:49  
Obviously there's a lot of communities that are discussing social justice issues now. As a matter of fact, I can't even think of any community that's not discussing them right now. And a lot, you know, there's a lot of people who are discussing these issues for the first time and encountering them for the first time and things like this. And I know that when I, you know, first talked to you, and when you first came to us, I found your approach to things very unique. And I was wondering if there's any way you can kind of summarize or give an overview about the way that you approach things.

Meg Bolger  1:59  
Well, part of me wants to answer your question Greg, and part of me wants to say that your description or you saying that you experienced a really different approach, like would be just as interesting to hear your difference than mine. I guess I'll start by saying that I have been doing social justice education and facilitation for a long time. And the more that I engage in these conversations ... let me think here. I think that my approach is heavily heavily influenced by my love and belief in facilitation specifically and my kind of by the principles of facilitating groups and that the the process for me really influences how I engage with the content. So if we think of the content as social justice, I think that the process, and the lens that I use is facilitation. And that really transforms how I relate to and experience the content of social justice.

Greg Dunlap  7:53  
I think when you were with us, one of the things that really stood out to me first was that you know, in a lot have workshops around social justice issues, there's an exercise that people commonly do called the privilege walk, and you did a variation on that called the privilege auction. Could you kind of describe those two things and why you feel like the privilege auction is a better approach for what you're trying to do?

Meg Bolger  8:24  
So the Privilege Walk, which more people would be familiar with, is an exercise where there's lots of different versions. So I'll just describe one version, where you have everybody stand up, and you read a series of statements and ... You have everyone stand in a straight line, you read a series of statements, and a statement might be "Take a step forward if you grew up in a two parent household. Take a step back if you are a person of color. Take a step forward. If you could go to college without worrying about financial aid" What you end up doing is having the group separate themselves, according to the privileges and advantages that they have experienced throughout their life, and you'll have the most privileged people at the front ... ideally, if the if the thing is working, you'll have the most privileged people in the front and the least privileged people farthest back. And that's how the process of like the activity itself works. And people use it as a jumping off point for a lot of different types of debrief and conversation. But that's what the overview of that is. The activity we did was a version of an activity that I call Privilege For Sale. How that works is there's a list of 30 or something, you know, some number of privileges. It's an overwhelming number like 30 or 25. And you put people into small groups. You have everyone understand that in the rules of this activity, you experience this list from a understanding that you don't have any of these things, and as a group, you have to collectively decide which of these privileges or you know, a lot of people see them as a list of rights you want to have access to. So you have to have a conversation with your group about what are the things that you find your most compelled by, you think is most important. And we do that for about five minutes. Groups gets different amounts of money, although they don't know that, and then we come back together for a debrief and the debrief is just as just as important and just as vital to the experience of the activity for me. But that's the that's the basis of those differences. There's a lot of reasons why I choose to do privilege for sale when I choose to do privilege for sale. Why I like that activity a lot. One is that "privilege" is a word and a "privilege" is a word that is very tricky to have good conversations around it. especially when it becomes personalized. These people have privileges, these people don't. Privilege For Sale, because of the structure, is that no one has these you know in this theoretical moment. You really shift the conversation away from the ... it is still personal right? But but not you have these and this person doesn't and how should you feel about that? So it allows people to to both see the list and have a lot of understandings and awareness raising around ... Wow, I didn't know that that was I had never thought about the privilege of walking into a public bathroom and not feeling and feeling safe or the privilege of being able to fill out HR paperwork and not fret about my identity being, you know, revealed to somebody or being able to, you know, get married. There's certain privileges that have evolved over the time of me facilitating this activity. But sure, people can have incredibly different experiences of reading the list, of having those conversations, while all simultaneously engaging with this concept. And to me, it allows for a lot of different types of realizations and realizations that where that people are going to have at different places and understandings to coexist without there being a bad guy or a common enemy.

Greg Dunlap  12:51  
Yeah, I mean, I was really floored when we ran this exercise because I saw a lot of people who had probably never engaged with the concept of privilege very strongly, or even possibly been resistant to it, being very deeply affected by that. And it reminded me ... I did an interview with a guy named David Dylan Thomas also for the podcast, which I don't know if it's going to end up getting released before or after this, so this may be a spoiler, but he talked about how so many of these feelings and beliefs that we have are tied to our identities and people's own personal identities are very much invested in these things. And so when you attack one of those beliefs, it's like you're attacking them, and it triggers of like almost a fight or flight response sometimes. And the ability for the exercise that you ran to break identity away from the discussion was really, really I felt like that was really important to making it work.

Meg Bolger  14:02  
Yeah, I think that when you were saying, you know, there's there's people who were resistant to that topic beforehand. I think the story that we have about why they are resistant is an important one. That for me, in, you know, like, I've been doing social justice education for 10 years. And when I started getting involved in social justice, the story that I was offered for how to interpret that resistance was "That's what privileged people do, in order to deflect for stay away from these conversations." And it's just another form of privilege is to get defensive and not want to engage. And I understand where that story comes from. And I understand like where, but it doesn't actually ... To me it is a very it's not a good faith argument. Have were like what might be going on? And so for me part of my work and maybe part of my approach has been somewhat to unlearn the stories that don't seem to be helping me engage with people and trying to replace them with stories that do. Or even just processes that do. So now when I experience resistance, instead of it confirming a suspicion that I have, like, "Oh, I knew you were going to be resistant" I think I've gotten myself to a place where I experience "Hmm, I wonder where this is coming from for you." Or like, "I wonder why you are scared." Or "I wonder what feels important to you to make sure is, like either remains true or feels true for you, and therefore this can't be simultaneously true." I have a very different relationship with resistance than I think I used to and I also think that kind of like the ... I don't want to say mainstream social justice, but just like, than a lot of the spaces and conversations that I have been in, that have been centered around social justice have offered.

Greg Dunlap  24:48  
Finding those paths to nuance and connection  seems so difficult. I feel like there there are lots of reasons why that is. Where do you see that going wrong most often?

Meg Bolger  25:07  
So, something that I believe I'm a big situationaist. I believe that the conditions that we are in make things more or less possible or may even really be all that is necessary to create the results. So let me be more specific. When you mentioned like it's very hard to have these conversations online and to have like nuanced you know, complicated conversations. I actually think it might be like that ... having really nuanced conversation with somebody on a Facebook post may just not be possible. What I mean by that is, what about the conditions of being public, right? Because Facebook and Twitter and social media, they are to almost like an unnecessary degree, like having a conversation on a stage where you have an audience and you are being watched and judged. And because of that, like evaluatory aspect. I'm not sure that that creates conditions under which you can have those types of conversations or exchanges, or at the very least, it is swimming upstream against a very rapid current. So it might happen, but the conditions don't set up so don't set you up for success. And so to me it's possible that the medium itself is that we are trying to really swim upstream when we do that, versus when we get on a phone call with them. Where no one else is listening in. We're not trying to impress anyone, we're not trying to prove we are one of the good ones, we're just actually having a one on one conversation with someone. That's a completely different set of conditions. And I think within those conditions, you can have a really different set of possibilities. And even if everything is possible at all times, which one makes it most likely to happen? That's something I think about a lot like what are the conditions that I can set in this workshop to make it most likely that people will be honest in a way that they are not going to be three hours from now? What are the conditions that I can set for somebody to think about something more deeply than they would have otherwise? To me it's not a willpower thing, or even like a personal characteristic thing. I really think that it's worth looking at the conditions.

Greg Dunlap  27:59  
It's hard because obviously Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms are not designed for the purpose of having nuanced conversations. I would argue in fact, exactly the opposite. But we're also in a situation where these platforms are in many cases for people the only way they have to communicate with each other right now, which probably doesn't make anything that's going on in the world at this time any easier.

Meg Bolger  28:27  
Yeah, and I mean, for me, if we had understandings that this is what Twitter is brilliant at. This is what Facebook is brilliant at. This is what Instagram is brilliant at. And we really try to maximize those things. I could be there are things that that social media is brilliant at. There's a whole other conversation we could have about, you know, the way it also might be crumbling democracy. But, like, there, there are things that are wonderful and beautiful that are happening on those platforms. It's when we try to make them our everything, or we don't see that like, actually, like, the reason that cancel culture is so viral on Twitter is because Twitter is just such a great place to do that. It's such it's set up to optimize for cancel culture. You know, one of the early things that did was allow people to, exert their power as a mass of people on to individuals or companies to put social pressure on them. There are ways in which that's really good. And I think it's Jon Ronson talks about that, where there was there were ways in which that was really helpful. But all of a sudden, there wasn't anything good to do with that energy. There wasn't any just cause and place for that to go. And so when you have a hungry mob, they will just keep going, they will just go looking for it. It wasn't easy to find, so you have to look harder and harder. And yeah, there are ways in which I think those platforms are really beautiful opportunities for people to learn and connect. But we have to know and see their limitations and not be confused by like, what they can do really well, and what we are trying to force them to do.

Greg Dunlap  30:43  
You know, you're making me think about, one of the realizations that I had when we went to workshops, that was actually one of my deepest realizations was that I had taken the methodologies that I use to manage these conversations and to defend myself online, and brought them into the real world and use them against people I actually knew and cared about. For me, that was a real eye opener. Because you're right, the context in which we manage these conversations should be different based on the realities that we inhabit within them or who we're dealing with or how or the method or the medium or all of that. And that how and what may be appropriate in one may not be the best course of action than another.

Meg Bolger  31:43  
Yeah, I think about what is the like ... So this is a perhaps a weird statement, but there's a lot of memes going on right now around social justice and I was talking to my partner the other day, and I was kind of picking picking apart one of the memes and I was like, "I just don't i don't think that this is true. I think that it's missing all of this analysis" and I was going on about this and she goes "I think you just don't like memes"

Greg Dunlap  32:21  
Right, the entire the entire stated purpose of a meme is not nuanced analysis.

Meg Bolger  32:28  
Nope. And I I'm just like not a big fan of ... it's not that there isn't a place for them. It's not that there isn't like a place for satire a place for dark humor right? It's not that but they're truly not for me because I don't like them. Like instead of me feeling like really seen by them or getting a laugh out of it or finding it entertaining, I just find them frustrating and mis-educational and all of these other things. So I guess I brought that up to say like, what is the purpose of a meme? What is the purpose of a post or an article. They can have such incredibly different goals. You can have a goal, which is "I want to make my people laugh" or "I want to make my people feel like their anger is valid" or "I want to make these people feel attacked." "I want to make these I want to make this educational point." Those are all such incredibly diverse goals, right? or ...  I'm not gonna use that word because it's going to get ... those are such disparate goals. And when we have such disparate goals, I think it's totally like ... if I argued with someone  that a meme misses all of this analysis, I think they could reasonably come back at me and say, "Yeah, it was supposed to be funny." And I was like, "Oh, yeah. Fair enough" you know? And if that's the primary goal is to be funny, then I can just be like, Oh, I don't find that funny. The thing that's so tricky, I think when you add in social justice to this, is that a lot of people? I think a lot of like, I'm not I'm not saying other people, myself included, would say the goal of this is to advance social justice. And I would say, Well, actually, I think it does a better job at being funny than it does at advancing social justice. I think it might even be it's possible it might even harm the cause of social justice but still be very funny. I think furthering the goal of social justice and trying to do something else simultaneously, sometimes you split your attention. And sometimes I think one thing is going to do it much better than it's going to do the other. And I think that's a really complicated extra ingredient when we're trying to connect with people. We're trying to heal people. We're trying to educate. We're trying to make people laugh. And we're trying to do all of that in the name of advancing social justice, or within this kind of ecosystem of social justice. I think that's where stuff gets complicated and tricky to parse.

Greg Dunlap  35:34  
 Well, I think to the point that you make of asking "What is your goal?" when you post something is really important. I'm very involved in the competitive pinball community and one of the pinball companies made a post about Black Lives Matter and here's what we're doing and etc. And there was a set of responses to that post, which was basically competing memes with each other, right? It's like ... here's a meme about how black lives matter. And here's a meme about how all lives matter. People are stupid. And here's a meme about, you know, whatever else. Let's face it, the goal of those posts is not to be enlightened. It's not to change anybody's mind. Because you're right. A meme is not going to change people's minds about things. So you start to think about what the purpose of those either side's posts was in the first place.

Meg Bolger  36:37  
I have two thoughts here. One is that I think sometimes we forget, and by we, I guess, I mean, the social justice community in this moment, but I'll also say I forget that the social justice community, if we want to call it that, and we could talk about what that even means, is not exempt from any other just like ... things that humans do right? They try to show off. They're cutting. They're funny. They bully each other. Like, those are all things that you're probably going to find in any community, right? You're going to have the bullies, you're going to have the funny people, you're going to have the people who like sarcasm, the people who don't. And the thing with it, I think that sometimes happens in social justice is that we are not exempt from any of those things. We're just doing it within this ecosystem, or within this set of content that we're engaging in. And it's incredibly important content. And it's incredibly, you know, to me, it is some of the things that I believe most deeply in the world, and I think it is harmful to lose sight of the fact that what I was trying to do in this moment is always trying to one up that person, right trying to convince them that black Lives Matter, I wasn't trying to convince them that all lives matter. I was just trying to pull one over on them and be the funniest person in the room. And to me, if somebody can earnestly say, "Oh, I was just trying to be the funniest person in the room" then I don't have to try to convince them or try to talk to them about like, hey, do you see why that was whatever, right? Because I understand their stated goal. But it gets really messy. I think when our stated goal, or even what we think our goal is, is "I want to help educate this person in the moment", but what we're actually doing is just trying to be the smartest person in the room, or the funniest person in the on the you know, meme thread, like those are just ... it's totally fine to want to be that. But then if you're like, why didn't that person learn anything from that exchange? My response is, that's not what you optimized for. If you were to optimize to educate them, you will have done something very differently. What you optimized for is to be the smartest meme creator on the thread. And you did that, but they didn't learn. And so which one was your goal? Right? And which one do you want to optimize for next time.

Greg Dunlap  39:16  
Yeah, and I'm trying to figure out. I mean, obviously we should always be thinking about what our goals are when we begin communicating about these issues. And I think that's a great first step in and of itself. Because then another part of that is, if my goal is to try and make an argument to somebody else, or to open up someone else's mind, a second part of that is is that other person coming at it from the same place. Because if you're trying to have an honest and earnest discussion with somebody who's just trying to be the smartest person in the room, this is not going to end well.  

Meg Bolger  40:11  
Yeah, I think that I see a lot of descriptions and experiences of burnout or of exhaustion or of frustration and some of that is completely unpreventable, right? I don't believe I have, like a secret ingredient or a secret tactic, necessarily to to prevent all of that. I do think that we would set healthier boundaries and perhaps be less frustrated. If we did. If when we entered a conversation with someone, we really understood our goal and got clear with ourselves about that, and paid attention to their goal, either got them to explicitly state it or even just like paid attention to the ways that they were showing up, you know ... I had a conversation with my brother a couple weeks ago that comes to mind. And politics came up and we were talking about it. And I was just kind of paying attention to where he was at. And about five minutes into the conversation, I was like, I think I should definitely not go further down this political rabbit hole, because it's just not where he's at right now. I believe too much else is going on in his life for me to be able to push back against this thing I disagree with, or for me to even really go into this thing. I believe in it, I'm just going to get frustrated and he's going to get frustrated. It's going to erode our relationship and it's actually not going to be because we disagree about this policy. Because we can't even know if we disagree about the policy right now. Because too much else is is going on for us to really come to the table and have that conversation. And because I was able to see that and pay attention to it, I think I was able to not walk away from that conversation just incredibly frustrated and feeling like ...  if I didn't see that I could have been like ... wow, me and my brother are on such different sides about this. And I can't believe he disagrees with me and all of this other, you know, I could have come to all of these conclusions. And instead my conclusion was, this isn't the time where I could even fairly assess if that's what would be true, because there's too much else going on in his in his life for us to get into that conversation.

Greg Dunlap  42:38  
Yeah, I think that's all super important. And I think it's really hard for a lot of people who engage with social justice issues because they feel like if they see a statement, or an argument being posited online, and it's very obvious that the argument or statement is being posted in bad faith, like ... there's a very well documented way of approaching an issue by asking questions where it's very clear that the questions are not being asked in a true spirit of engagement, but as a way to draw you out and sap your energy and to kind of trap you in mental loopholes and stuff like that. But I do feel like there's a tendency that's very hard to resist for people to just leave that stuff out there unanswered, because they feel that by leaving it out there unanswered either they're not allowing both sides to be heard or people will see the person acting in bad faith and and go their way because there's no alternative or something like that. And I'm, I just don't necessarily think that that's true.

Meg Bolger  43:51  
I think that it's very hard to discern. It's very hard to discern when to engage and when not to, but I think it becomes impossible to discern that when in a lot of my circles, there is a singular narrative, which says, "If you do not engage that person you are, you are just as bad as them."

Meg Bolger  43:51  
Yep, absolutely.

Meg Bolger  43:59  
It's not that it removes the element of choice, but rather there is a foregone conclusion about what it means about you to not engage. It doesn't mean like, oh, you're a very perceptive person, or oh, I knew you couldn't show up in the ways that would actually be productive for that conversation. Those aren't conclusions to that, right? If there's a singular conclusion, and that is, you are part of the problem. And if you have decided I am not part of the problem. I don't or I don't want to be ... and perhaps and this is the part that's really hard for me, is like ... even more importantly, I do not want to be perceived as part of the problem ... then you have to act, you have to act then, and it's very likely that you're going to act in the only way that you have seen other people act or in the ways that you have previously acted. And it takes so much more time and investment to show up in the curious "Hey, tell me more about that. Why did you post this? Can you say more I don't really follow your logic here" To show up in those ways, which to me have been basically the only ways I've ever really gotten to transformative places with people, that takes a ton of ... it's not that it takes a ton of time or energy, but I do think it takes more time. It takes more energy than just blasting someone. Or dropping a meme. Yeah, or dropping a meme. Or Yeah, when I say blasting someone, I guess I just mean really leading with "This is how you're wrong and why you're wrong and why it's so harmful." That usually takes more time and for me more conscious effort and that's just not always easy to access. So yeah, I think that's where it becomes really concerning to me is like when we have a singular story about who are the people who don't engage those those folks, well, those are bad people. It doesn't allow us a lot of space to to make our conclusion or there are consequences automatic consequences for not taking those types of actions.

Greg Dunlap  46:56  
Yeah, that's totally true. And I felt that my I felt that myself. And, you know, I felt it in different ways. Because, you know, you look at communities like ... I look at a situation where perhaps a family member of mine says something that is not great versus I'm in a community around a hobby of mine and somebody within the hobby says something that's not great. Or you're on your friend's Facebook page and somebody you have no idea who they are says something that's not great. And I think it's important to, to, you know, again, this all comes back to context, but all of this stuff is kind of related. Like there's different ways you may or may not engage in your choice, whether or not to engage are all over the map, right? Because like, I wouldn't feel comfortable if it's somebody who I knew personally and it was a family member of mine said something that was you know, that I felt was very deeply against something that I personally believe, I would want to respond to that. But my response to that wouldn't be to blast that person, it would be to say, you know, "Hey, I just want to, I just want you to know that this is not what I personally believe. And I want to make sure that, you know, while you know, you can believe what you want to I just want to make sure everyone that I, that everyone that I know knows that I'm not on board with this and here's why." And you can engage that way because you know, the person as opposed to if you feel like you're forced to engage in one of these other situations where you don't know a person, then obviously the much easier thing to do is just to blast them. I know for myself, and in a lot of the communities I see people finding their way through, that seems to be very hard. And I think a lot of it is we just don't think about it. You know, we just don't we were very reactive.

Meg Bolger  48:54  
I think what you just said Greg also jumps out to me though. Which is "I am saying This so that other people know, I don't believe in what you said." Right? That is such a ... I don't know ... that is something we have self-created, right? I would say the idea like ... and that is to me ... when engagement becomes a way of ... if that's like ... Let's go to the most extreme example of what you just said. And it was just like, I am not posting on this to engage with you at all. I really couldn't care less what you think of me, what this interaction does for our friendship or relationship. I just want to signal to anyone who saw this comment and wondered why I didn't post to make sure that they know what side I'm on. That is, I think an essence of what a lot of these things are doing. And then we wonder, like, why are we not having good conversations with people? Well, because we're not trying to. We're trying to make sure that people on our side view us as on their side. Like, we're not trying to build bridges. We're not trying to relate. What a weird way to have a relationship. It's a very strange set of conditions that we have created for ourselves. And I do think it is a set of conditions that is creating a lot of outcomes that we didn't want, but that are natural outcomes from that set of conditions.

Greg Dunlap  50:48  
And to be clear, I think what you're talking about is a little different from ... like we hear people talking about virtue signaling, right? Which is kind of an implication that you are saying these things, even if you don't believe them, to look good. Versus you making sure that people understand that you do believe what you do, in fact, actually believe, which is a subtle, but I think important distinction to make.

Meg Bolger  51:12  
Yeah, it is a subtle distinction to make. I think in both cases, it's just important. Who is the audience? And what are you trying to communicate? and the reason behind it, that doesn't change. It's just how personally connected you feel to those things, right? How much are you in your integrity around how much you believe them, that changes, but all of the other things are very similar, which is "This is for these people to perceive me in this way" and to ensure that I'm not one of the bad ones. That isn't to say ... I know exactly where ... that want is so natural and real right there. I don't want to be perceived as one of the bad ones either, right? Because there's enormous social consequences for being seen on the wrong side. And we are social creatures by nature. I think we underestimate how destructive, or rather how motivational connection and community is. I think it's one of the most important things that people will do almost anything to ensure that they have a community and that they have people who think that they are like ... you're with us. You're one of us. You're one of our people. I mean, I personally think people will become neo-nazis, just to ensure that they have community, not because it's what they deeply believe. 

Greg Dunlap  52:59  
Oh, I mean, I think the recruiting methods of those groups actually rely on explicit knowledge that that is true. Like they purposely target people who are disaffected and have no one and say we found a place for you. 

Meg Bolger  53:14  
Yeah. And so and, and to me, I believe that too, and that, to me has actually become a central ... I don't know, like maybe a cornerstone thing that I try to hold on to, is that the white supremacist belief system or the like anti-semite belief system, that often came second for those people and I think actually is the weaker link, right? Like that is not as important to them as the connection and the community is. And so if that's true, if the way that you recruit people into the neo-nazi movement is to ensure community connection, a sense of belonging, and then you feed the belief system on top of that right or just layered on top of that. Well, then it's not the belief system that I need to interrogate. That's just the thing on top of the pain. And I think that has become a really interesting thing for me. I don't want to get  ... the belief system is still a problem, but it's more knowing that might not actually be the ground floor of what's going on there.

Greg Dunlap  54:41  
Yeah, I saw you know, there's been this video going around of all of these people testifying at a hearing in Palm Beach about mask wearing, and they're all varying levels of ... masks deny you the oxygen that you need to breathe. Or this is all a conspiracy by the government, they want to roll out their 5G so they can bring control us and, you know, all along the different spectrums of that. And I see a lot of people saying "This is what the idiocracy of our society has brought us." But I mean .... I resisted watching this for a long time. And when I did I was mostly struck by a sense that these are people who are very scared and desperately trying to find meaning and a framework for their lives. And they found one, and it's not very healthy for them or for the greater society, but they found what they needed. And what we really need to do is to be finding a way to provide better frameworks to people than than the ones that they're encountering.

Meg Bolger  56:00  
 Yeah, yep. I think that there's a lot of things there to unpack. One is that I mean, if people are afraid, if people feel like their day to day life sucks, most of us are going to look for reasons why. And if somebody who you trust or you resonate with or who looks like you or who connects to you in some way says, "You know, this is why your life sucks. It's because the government." Or "It's because of the liberals." Or "It's because of the conservatives, and the racists." Or whoever. If they give you a person to direct that frustration towards, if that's your most compelling argument, that's enough for a lot of people. And it's not to say that there isn't real things going on underneath that. Of course, there's real systemic things that are causing that. But also for a lot of people, their day to day life isn't good. And they are suffering, and they need, and if what you have to offer is a compelling enemy, then that might be enough for them to say, "Oh, good. It's that" and to rally around that. And then if you find other people who are saying, "Oh my god, right, can you believe this blank, right? Those people are just bananas." You're gonna feel connected, and you're gonna feel supported in that theory of yours, and you're gonna have friends. So great! Those are all the conditions that allow that stuff to continue and to be sought out.

Greg Dunlap  57:59  
In the meantime, it's really hard because these people are, in the short term, actively harming everyone. This is the same thing that ... it's very hard with say, people say, "I'm a Trump supporter, you should acknowledge that this is a political belief" while at the same time, the policies that Trump is putting forth are undoubtedly causing great harm, especially to marginalized communities. And so, those two things are kind of similar in that a lot of people find it very difficult to separate the harm that's being generated directly or indirectly by a set of beliefs from a need or desire to get to the bottom of where they came from and dig it back out. Because the harm is happening right now and the other is going to take a while.

Meg Bolger  59:01  
Something I believe is that all of this work is deeply paradoxical. Like, really, really deeply paradoxical. I need to look up this quote, "The opposite of truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth." And, for me, that is true. Like that just feels like the tension that we are in. And I think sometimes it does take a long time. And I think sometimes it's right there under this one step away. You know, I've, I've had moments and conversations, where ... I had a single conversation where I was  kind of serving as a coach, I guess, for for these two executives. And they walked into the meeting and said, "Man, we want to get we want to get this diversity stuff, which we want to get done." And I was like, okay? What? "Like, we just, you know, want to get it done." And I was like, "Okay, I'm not sure that's how it works. But let's talk about it." And by the end of that conversation, which was an hour, they were saying, "You know, people who just want to get it who think that this stuff is just gonna happen overnight. Like, those people are just checking a box. Those people, they don't understand, this is a journey, and this is a process and this is going to take time. And it's a long game." And I was like, all right. And that was a single conversation, right?. We had that whole arc. I believe that they went through all that. Those weren't my words. Those were their words at the end of the meeting, right? And to me, that is as possible in a single conversation, to bring somebody from "I want to get this done" to "People who just want to get this done, are not seeing the full picture" and the understanding the scope and scale and the magnitude of what we are trying to do. I was like, I was personally blown away by that, that transformation in a 15 minute conversation. So I know it's possible to do big intellectual experiences or intellectual leaps in understanding with people very quickly. And it is very different work. And it does ask deeper or maybe not deeper, but it asks a different set of questions. Like, how do we prevent people from doing that or what causes people to do that ... to support these types of people or support these types of actions or protest mask wearing. What causes that? It is a deeper, or maybe a more long game set of questions. And I think that, for me, the paradox is that we need to do that work simultaneously. We need to do the short game and the long game simultaneously. And I have started to believe or started to consider like, maybe my role is the long I'm bringing the long game. That's my goal, and that's my set of contributions. And for other people, they're really going to be concerned about the short term. And the the trick I guess, or the thing I would love to see or love to invite in more, is the is to see those as complimentary, and to see each other as valuable. "Oh, thank you for doing that long term investigative work because I don't want to do that. You know, like, I am not curious about what is causing someone to be a neo nazi. I just want to make sure they don't hurt anybody." Right? Aand maybe a different set of people are saying like, I'm not a good you know, boots on the ground activist or I'm I'm not going to be able to respond in this short term way because my priority is the long term, or rather those those questions that can take years to unpack, and to see those as complimentary threads. I think that would be great. And I think sometimes they see as they are competing threads instead of coplimentary. 

Greg Dunlap  1:03:39  
It reminds me of a discussion I've heard in various forums around approaches to policy. I don't know how to describe it, but it's basically the idea that there's a group of people that say, you cannot win hearts and minds. All you can do is legislate right and wrong. And there's a group of people who say that unless you win hearts and minds, you can never legislate right or wrong. And I think you're right, I don't think it is an either or thing. I think we have to legislate right and wrong but we also have to win hearts and minds because neither of them is going to work without the other. 

Meg Bolger  1:04:24  
I think that, and this is where we get into a really like meta conversation. I don't think we have a lot of frameworks that we are offered outside of a competition narrative. We are in a world just full of artificially created scarcity and full of zero sum games, and narratives of competition. And so, of course, we don't know how to hold these paradoxical truths as complimentary because it requires acquires a type of thinking that we are so rarely offered. And within a lot of the very structures that we are trying to, in my mind, that social justice is trying to undermine ... like capitalism, like oppression, those are embedded parts of those structures. The less for you or more for me is less for you, or me and you are against each other. Right? Those are just part of the stories that we were raised in and that we know are so so harmful, but it is hard to not just let go of the structures, but also to let go of those like core ways of thinking. I know that competition isn't the only way to conceptualize two things. But I have so few other models for how to do it. And and so yeah, I guess to me of course we have a hard time figuring out how to hold those paradoxical truths or stories of how the world works. Especially the stories I was brought up in, in terms of  a Western-first highly capitalist culture. We don't do a lot of that. We don't do a lot of that. And so, so of course, I don't know how to do it when it comes to this movement work because I don't I don't have a lot of practice doing it anywhere else in my life either.

Greg Dunlap  1:06:37  
I think a lot of that comes down to circling back a bit to what I found very affecting when I went through this process with you, was that I had been involved in social justice work for a long time and had gone through a very traumatic experience in a community involving somebody who had done some things and there was a very, very deep and violent divide in the community out of it. I had very gotten very, very involved in that day to day and kind of developed a very "us vs them" attitude out of it, and as a result of that kind of put up some walls around myself to protect myself from what was for me very traumatic. And I think that one of the things that you bring up that's really important is that everybody has to find a balance somehow and I think I found for myself that that direct, activists boots on the ground is not me. And this is absolutely not a tone policing comment, because I absolutely believe there is a place for that anger and that that anger is not misguided. But for myself, I don't think it's healthy and thinking about ways to engage that may work better for me, even though at the same time, they may make me so vulnerable, was something that I think I found very profound. I think it really fits with myself as a human being more and I think that that's something that I continue to figure out a way to work through. On a day to day basis I find it hard. I think it's a shame that a lot of this well, it's not a shame. It's it's what it is, you know, as I said, a lot of this discussion is now kind of exploding into the world at a time when we can't get together face to face, which is a bummer, but I think there's also something to be said for the fact that if we weren't all locked up at home, this explosion may never have happened either. So it's just, it's another example of the paradox, right? But I'm trying to figure out a way to engage more with these issues. And I know that a lot of people in the communities I see struggle to engage with them in certain ways. And I think that understanding that there are different ways, and that none of those ways is necessarily bad is really, really important in a really big part of what I took away from what you brought to us in our workshop.

Meg Bolger  1:09:39  
I think that there are many ... there's a model going around that I'm seeing more which I which I love, which is like there's eight or 10 different roles to play in social justice work. There's disrupters, and there's healers, and there's educators, and there's bridge builders and those are just some of the ones I can remember. And I like the idea that there's`a lot of different roles to play. I think that a really powerful idea. To me, it's also a very community-centered idea. We have this very individualistic culture and a very individualistic heavy society, at least here in the US and in the communities that I have been part of. And  that requires this idea that like ... how you show up is how everyone needs to show up. And to me, if we if we were a movement that was entirely bridge builders, maybe that wouldn't be a good thing. I think it's very likely that that would not be a good thing, because every once in a while someone needs to shut down the highway because no one's paying attention, you know? Orif we were just a community of healers, well, who would be doing the education? One of the things I think that individualism, and this is me very much spitballing right now, I don't think I've said this before, but like, I think that individualism kind of traps us into this idea that how I show up, or how you show up is how everyone needs to show up. And so if i think like you by yourself isn't enough, then how you're showing up must not be enough versus like, you are fine as long as we have seven other different types of people, you know what I mean? If everyone shows up in any of these ways exclusively, that will be a problem. It will be a problem. But but that none of them out there, or tather many of them, I would say, I don't know if none of them I'm sure there is a problematic way to show up, but  there are so many different positive ways to contribute. And that it is okay. If one doesn't work for you, it is okay. If one seems to you like, well, that's not the most important thing right now ... because the most important thing changes you know? And for you, it may not be the most important thing. But also trying to all be the square peg isn't good if what we have is a very diverse set of needs and a very different sets of needs. So yeah, I would I think that some of the policing, wrong word, some of the some of the ways in which we critique each other, or fret about how we are showing up, is because of this less collectivist approach or ecosystem that we see ourselves as, like individual actors. And so the individual actors need to bring everything. Versus like, in this ecosystem, we have lots of different types of people, we have lots of different types of ways of contributing ,and what we what we want to ultimately build is a healthy ecosystem. And a healthy world, you know, from that ecosystem.

Greg Dunlap  1:13:32  
Yeah, and I think if we bring it back to the communities that we're a part of, I think a lot of what we've talked about today really comes down to intentionality and about really being intentional about the ways that we engage and what our goals are for engaging and setting boundaries for ourselves where if it's not working out, then it's okay to disengage and take care of ourselves.

Meg Bolger  1:14:02  
Yeah, I mean, I think ... and this is a conversation I have a lot is ... how much of how we are showing up in the world would need to change when we are in the world that we are trying to create. To me social justice ... so there's a book called The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. And it is, like I don't know, I've always just really resonated with that articulation of what I am trying to move towards is this more beautiful world that my heart knows as possible. For me, in that more beautiful world, or like in that just world, in the world where all of the work that we are doing and the struggle and the fight that is happening right now. Like the world that we want to be creating out of all of that work. In that more beautiful world, how much of what you are doing right now would need to change? You know, like, "Oh, well, there wouldn't be cancel culture in that world." But in order to get to that world, we need cancel culture, might be an example. Or there wouldn't be ... I don't need to give other examples. But to me, I think it's very important anytime we are doing something in the name or in the spirit of building that world that we wouldn't want to exist in it. For me, that's a little like flag where I'm like, okay, maybe there's a certain you know, I think the the phrase or the saying that comes up is you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. And for me, I'm like, okay, but I want to be very clear about what eggs we are breaking. When we are doing something that would no longer make sense. This more beautiful or more just world i think that i think that abolition ... like right now, the abolitionist conversation comes to mind for me, which is that in the more just and more beautiful world, we do not need the prison industrial complex. It is obsolete and unnecessary because we have figured out other ways in which to address the deep social conditions that that produce crime, that necessitate crime, that drive people to take violent actions. We have addressed those and therefore this thing is unnecessary. And I think that that type of thinking of like, what we want and and how we get there, like those are very important ingredients. And so, to me, I do pay attention I think to how I am showing up in this conversation in this workshop. Like, maybe to bring us full circle. I want my workshops as much as possible to be microcosms of the world I am trying to build. I want the best, the most amazing workshop, people would be like, dang, that was amazing. I didn't know you could relate to people like that. I didn't know you could have conversations like that. And then the world that you go back into feels a little more ick. Because you feel you're like, well, this is not great. I don't like this thing as much, because that was nice. That was good. That was desirable, even if it was hard, or challenging, or tumultuous, or conflict, you know, had conflict in it. Like, it still felt more real. Or it felt more true. And so in my mind, my workshops, to really get zoomed out, I want the microcosms of that world that I am trying to build. And in that world, there isn't an us versus them. In that world there is not an enemy. There isn't necessarily even a fight to be had. And so as much as possible, I want to be creating experiences where people can see that that is, that is actually possible even if only for three hours. 

Greg Dunlap  1:18:36  
Hearing that makes me feel really great. And it makes me wonder why I and I feel like you know, I can only speak for myself, but I'm sure this applies to a lot of other people. We wall ourselves off from believing in those things because we've been let down by them so often. And allowing yourself to say, you know, You're doing everything you can, even moving the needle a little bit is helping everything right? That, you know, this isn't always going to work. And that's okay. But you're doing what you can to make the world that you want to see possible. And that's the really important part. Like you said it's much more about the journey than the goal.

Meg Bolger  1:19:24  
Yeah, the process. I once said to my friend, my friend an I were talking about this stuff, and I said, "You know, I just think the process is more important than the solution." And she was like, "This is not compelling Meg! This is not helpful. I do not want to hear that." And I said, "Okay, the process is the solution." And she was like, "all right, all right. I can get on board." That is really my way of navigating it. I think my role, or the role I have given myself, I don't know in this social justice movement, is as an educator as a bridge builder. As an observer and a kind of reflector on the movement. And because of that I have particular role to serve in that way. And so for me the process is my solution. How I do my work is is the work I want to be doing. And not that I do that flawlessly. Like I am also ... don't know, I've been thinking about getting a poster for a while that says "Beatings will continue until morale improves." That is just because we know how ridiculous that is. Right? But that's absolutely how I relate to myself on a regular basis, right? It's not like I just beat myself up more, eventually I will get better. And so it's not to say I embody this truth yet, but I do believe that that the process, how we do this, matters tremendously to the outcome. And perhaps is so much of the outcome that we are desiring and at least that's true for me and how I show up in this work. So yeah, that's why it is so process focused for me is because that's the point.

Greg Dunlap  1:21:40  
Well, we've obviously been talking for a long time and covered a lot of ground. And this was probably as much a therapy session for me as it was anything else, but I really appreciate you coming to talk and I just feel like you approach to all of these issues is really refreshing. It's hard but rewarding. And I hope that everybody can get something out of this as much as I did. So thanks for coming in.

Meg Bolger  1:22:16  
Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai