Reading an article this morning that talks about how turning the struggle for safe streets into a culture war is a lose-lose situation. The author's point is that you won't get anywhere by demonizing the large majority of people who drive. He instead argues that the goal should be drawing the circle of empathy big enough for as many people as possible.

"Every parent has fear that their teenage kids won't make it home alive. Every parent fears putting their baby into the car seat in the back of the car. Everyone with elderly parents fears finding out that they have been involved in some kind of traumatic crash while behind the wheel...

Everyone wants the street in front of their own home to be safe. Start with that. Here are all the ways your street is designed to kill people. When you show people, they get it—and they get their part in it."

I remember reading a similar idea around activism that suggested drawing your 'line of division' in such a way that gives you the most allies as possible. This is something that progressive causes just do not seem to understand, often pushing for full agreement on an issue before collaboration. We need to draw a larger circle.

This seems especially true when dealing with multisolving opportunities in which we are trying to rally multiple issues around a shared solution. Not everyone is going to be aligned on every aspect of all of those issues, rather we must paint a picture of a better future that the most amount of people can agree with. Embracing a new spirit of collaboration across our differences will be the defining value of the coming decades.

I hope.

Reading an article on the role of civil disobedience as a form of activism and why it's not as counterintuitive as the moderates would have you believe. The article cites a social psychologist named Colin Davis, who noted,

"The existence of a radical flank... seems to increase support for more moderate factions of a social movement, by making these factions appear less radical."

This is then backed up with studies done on other social movements, including both the women's movement and the civil rights movement in the twentieth century. The general point seems to be that acts of civil disobedience have a long and necessary history in advancing causes that seem more obvious today.

I think the key takeaway here is a reminder that centrism alone cannot make progressive change. It requires the existence of a more extreme version in order to help shake it out of complacency. So while many — in fact the vast majority — will denounce acts of civil disobedience as damaging the cause or targeting the wrong people, the opposite is actually true.