Lesson Learned

Maura Riddick and I should have seen it coming, given the date and the political climate, but we were lulled into a false sense of security by the absence of protests during the past month and the general public enthusiasm that followed the founding of Possibilities from Responsibilities in Sieva, Montana. 

Anyone who has followed the news knows the story. A dozen armed protesters interrupted Saturday night’s town hall meeting in Sieva, loudly accusing PFR of being a front group for socialists in the World Information and Coordination Organization who they called “the WICO wackos.” Their leader Tom Torgenson specifically called out Maura as an example, citing her affiliation with “dangerous Colorado communes” that WICO “used as models for their evil test communities.” He then went on a tirade about how the concept of testing is antithetical to “traditional American values” and “is part of a sinister use of an imaginary emergency to create a single world order” that “trades freedom for tyranny.” We and the 232 other attendees, many of them Sieva residents, felt like we were being held hostage, amplified by the unwillingness of the county sheriff to remove them or their weapons.

Luckily, the head of PFR, Louis Delambre, was able to use past experience as both an Army hostage negotiator and a prominent businessman in another part of the state to convince Torgenson and his followers that PFR is “not the problem, but the solution to government overreach” by advocating for “personal responsibility in dealing with the obvious, local consequences of economic overreach by corporations who have taken resources necessary but unseen, like the quality of air and water, and not paid any of us what they’re worth.” He defended Maura’s background too, explaining that the communes Torgenson reviled were offshoots of a movement in Hawaii to protect local communities of all kinds from economic and ecological exploitation that includes what they call “corruption of our body’s very nature.” WICO’s leadership, he added, “shares that mission on a global scale, which requires global protection as well as individual action to create healthier communities literally from the ground up. That last part is what we’re all about, using what we learned in communities where we got to test how to do it.”

Torgenson’s group participated in a vigorous discussion with the rest of us that lasted until nearly two o’clock in the morning. This experience provided a valuable lesson, applicable to future events, which Maura summarized later as if it was a rule in one of the early versions of the global strategy: “We have a responsibility to apply empathy and seek knowledge to challenge our assumptions, because opportunities could be disguised as threats.”

Reality Check

Even in a world where most people accept the nature and magnitude of an imminent extinction threat, it’s reasonable to expect cultural assumptions to result in misunderstanding. It’s also reasonable to expect that resolving such misunderstanding can depend heavily on luck - such as having someone involved with relevant experience and understanding of the underlying issues.