By: Sandra Criswell, Field Organizer
 | I recently took a personality assessment for my final Generative Fellow retreat that said, “Your distinctive power starts with your optimism in the face of uncertainty.” Me? Optimistic? The surly red state organizer from Oklahoma? My immediate reaction was to side-eye my results. Optimistic is not a word I’ve ever used to describe myself; if anything, I felt like I fall in the pessimist end this binary. I have been accused in many situations of being too critical, too demanding, and too negative. Accusations of negativity were usually met with me saying, “I’m not being negative… I’m just being descriptive!” Maybe I wasn’t always trying to be negative, but that surely didn’t sound very optimistic, even to me. |
After I let my initial reaction settle, I started to see myself in a way that I never had before. The more I reflected on the way I approach my work, the more I saw my own brand of optimism that I was hiding so well even I failed to acknowledge it.
For the past several years, I have been doing what is incredibly optimistic work with Oklahomans for Reproductive Justice and Take Root: Red State Perspectives on Reproductive Justice Conference, elevating the voices of organizers working in some of the toughest, most conservative areas of the United States. Most of us have very limited formal training in organizing and activism and all of us face many and varied obstacles that the reproductive health, rights, and justice movement–traditionally centered in social justice power hubs like San Francisco, New York, and DC–is struggling to address.
Not only must we fight against Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers TRAP laws, we are also fighting to love and create families, be heard in a sea of conservative political rhetoric at home, and defend our homes and neighbors that some derisive progressive allies on the coasts dismiss as “hopeless”, “backwards”, and by extension, deserving of our fate. We are frequently advised to leave our homes in favor of greener progressive pastures, without any of our well-intentioned but ultimately misguided advisors taking into account that is simply not a viable economic or political strategy.
You can see why it feels very difficult to identify as an optimistic in this sort of setting. I frequently feel discouraged and even bitter; losses feel huge and devastating and victories feel temporary and inadequate, especially when consuming dismissive progressive media.
So why am I ultimately an optimist? Because I know that the organizers I’ve met in so-called “Flyover” Country are some of the fiercest, most determined, and most resilient kind of folks you’ll ever meet. I know that we are able to connect with each other like never before; whether through huge convenings like Take Root or more intimate CoreAlign Breakthrough Conversations, organizing direct action through Twitter or casual group brainstorms on Google Hangout; flyover organizers are collaborating across regional and other identity differences and refuse to be ignored anymore.
Now am I suddenly so optimistic that I think that I will wake up one day and will be living in a progressive wonderland? Do I think that our problems can be solved in a few legislative sessions or in a couple of election cycles? No.
That would be lovely but my particular brand of optimism is seated in long (and I mean long) term planning, which is what drew me to CoreAlign. Changing my home state radically in a year or two seems daunting, but changing it in 30 years? Thinking in terms of decades instead of days, months, quarters, and fiscal years opened possibilities in my mind around relationships, coalitions, movement-building, and even electoral politics that I had barely dared to fantasize about.
When I think of the work that we’re setting out to do as a movement over the course of the next few decades, everything seems so much more possible. My optimism doesn’t lie in petitions or lobbying (though those are obviously important), but in the light at the end of the tunnel in the long, tireless work of culture change. That light keeps me warmed, focused, and unexpectedly optimistic.
For the past several years, I have been doing what is incredibly optimistic work with Oklahomans for Reproductive Justice and Take Root: Red State Perspectives on Reproductive Justice Conference, elevating the voices of organizers working in some of the toughest, most conservative areas of the United States. Most of us have very limited formal training in organizing and activism and all of us face many and varied obstacles that the reproductive health, rights, and justice movement–traditionally centered in social justice power hubs like San Francisco, New York, and DC–is struggling to address.
Not only must we fight against Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers TRAP laws, we are also fighting to love and create families, be heard in a sea of conservative political rhetoric at home, and defend our homes and neighbors that some derisive progressive allies on the coasts dismiss as “hopeless”, “backwards”, and by extension, deserving of our fate. We are frequently advised to leave our homes in favor of greener progressive pastures, without any of our well-intentioned but ultimately misguided advisors taking into account that is simply not a viable economic or political strategy.
You can see why it feels very difficult to identify as an optimistic in this sort of setting. I frequently feel discouraged and even bitter; losses feel huge and devastating and victories feel temporary and inadequate, especially when consuming dismissive progressive media.
So why am I ultimately an optimist? Because I know that the organizers I’ve met in so-called “Flyover” Country are some of the fiercest, most determined, and most resilient kind of folks you’ll ever meet. I know that we are able to connect with each other like never before; whether through huge convenings like Take Root or more intimate CoreAlign Breakthrough Conversations, organizing direct action through Twitter or casual group brainstorms on Google Hangout; flyover organizers are collaborating across regional and other identity differences and refuse to be ignored anymore.
Now am I suddenly so optimistic that I think that I will wake up one day and will be living in a progressive wonderland? Do I think that our problems can be solved in a few legislative sessions or in a couple of election cycles? No.
That would be lovely but my particular brand of optimism is seated in long (and I mean long) term planning, which is what drew me to CoreAlign. Changing my home state radically in a year or two seems daunting, but changing it in 30 years? Thinking in terms of decades instead of days, months, quarters, and fiscal years opened possibilities in my mind around relationships, coalitions, movement-building, and even electoral politics that I had barely dared to fantasize about.
When I think of the work that we’re setting out to do as a movement over the course of the next few decades, everything seems so much more possible. My optimism doesn’t lie in petitions or lobbying (though those are obviously important), but in the light at the end of the tunnel in the long, tireless work of culture change. That light keeps me warmed, focused, and unexpectedly optimistic.