Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom (Bk Currents) - Hardcover

Halpern, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576754421 ISBN 13: 9781576754429

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

This book is about working for a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world while cultivating the wisdom that supports and deepens this work.

Charles Halpern is a social entrepreneur with a remarkable record of institutional innovation. He founded the Center for Law and Social Policy, the nation’s first public interest law firm, litigating landmark environmental protection and constitutional rights cases. As founding dean of the new City University of New York School of Law he initiated a bold program for training public interest lawyers as whole people. Later, as president of the $400 million Nathan Cummings Foundation, he launched an innovative grant program that drew together social justice advocacy with meditation and spiritual inquiry.

In his years of activism, he had a growing intuition that something was missing, and he sought ways of developing inner resources that complemented his cognitive and adversarial skills. These explorations led him to the conviction that what he calls the practice of wisdom is essential to his effectiveness and well-being and to our collective capacity to address the challenges of the 21st century successfully.

With wit and self-deprecating humor, Halpern shares candid and revealing lessons from every stage of his life, describing his journey and the teachers and colleagues he encountered on the way—a cast of characters that includes Barney Frank and Ralph Nader, Ram Dass and the Dalai Lama. Making Waves and Riding the Currents vividly demonstrates the life-enhancing benefits of integrating a commitment to social justice with the cultivation of wisdom. It is a real-world guide to effectively achieving social and institutional change while maintaining balance, compassion, and hope.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles halpern is an innovative social entrepreneur who has led the way in bringing inner work and the cultivation of wisdom into the world of social activism. As chair of the Board of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, he is helping to integrate contemplative practice into mainstream institutions, in order to develop greater clarity, compassion, and effectiveness to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.
With his extensive record of institutional creativity and achievement, supported by twenty years of meditation, Halpern is the ideal person to write about the intersecting arcs of effective work in the world and the cultivation of the inner wisdom to deepen and nourish it.

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AWAKENING

I STEPPED INTO the main entrance of the federal district courthouse, a sterile modern building facing the manicured lawn of the Mall, between the Capitol and the White House in the heart of official Washington. I greeted the guard by name as I walked through the green marble lobby. “How ya doin’ Mr. Hapner? Nice to see you back,” he said.

“I’ve got a big case in district court this morning,” I said, as breezily as I could manage, as if I had trials and arguments in the courthouse every day. Just two years earlier, in 1965, I had been a law clerk in this same building, my first job out of law school, doing research and drafting opinions and memoranda for an appellate judge. Today I was returning, dressed in my gray pin-striped suit, carrying my new monogrammed calf-skin briefcase. I was lead counsel in a case I cared about deeply, asking the court to take unprecedented steps to protect the rights of mental patients confined in public mental hospitals against their will. I was no longer carrying the bags for a senior partner in a case for a bank or drug company. This was my first big step into professional autonomy.

I had spent months preparing, learning about mental hospitals and the diagnosis and treatment of mentally ill people, interviewing 10experts, and lining up witnesses. If we could establish that my client was receiving inadequate treatment, the decision would have major implications for the hundreds of thousands of patients confined in mental hospitals throughout the country. Success would mean that courts would, for the first time, look behind the sealed doors of the hospital and evaluate the activities, the tedium and neglect that characterized the patients’ lives—their long days watching soap operas, their sunlight filtered through thick windows and mesh security screens, surrounded by patients on thorazine rocking back and forth and chewing their tongues. Courts would have to determine whether the hospital was providing adequate treatment for the inmates’ mental condition to justify their incarceration for an indefinite term.

As I entered the courtroom I felt a mix of excitement, anticipation, and terror. This was a highly visible case and Jim Ridgeway was covering it for The New Republic.1 He greeted me at the courtroom door with a big, gap-toothed smile. “Is your client like McMurphy? Is Nurse Ratched beating him down? Does this case involve an effort to hit back at the whole repressive system that is clamping down in this country?”

“I am just focusing on this hearing, this morning,” I answered. “It is about one guy who has been held without treatment for over four years. The Constitution doesn’t permit that.”

Of course, I had read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Ken Kesey novel that had been published just a few years earlier, along with R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, and I knew the sociological and cultural implications of this challenge to psychiatric authority.2 But this was a law case in a courtroom, and I had never conducted a hearing before. I was too tense for a casual conversation about sociology or literature.

By the time I arranged my papers at the counsel table and sat down, my client was brought into the courtroom by two marshals. 11Charles Rouse looked confident and hopeful despite his ride from St. Elizabeths Hospital in handcuffs, alone in a bus with security screens on the windows. He was a man in his mid-twenties, dressed in an ill-fitting gray suit and a narrow black tie, his skin pallid from his years locked away from the sunshine, with the demeanor of an ambitious used car salesman. His black hair was slicked back, and he wore dark-rimmed glasses that enlarged and framed his darting eyes. There was a little swagger in his walk, as if he were pleased to be the focus of attention. We shook hands.

“How are you feeling?” I asked him.

“Nervous,” he said.

“Me too,” I said.

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I found myself representing Charles Rouse in court that day because of an unusual telephone call I had received six months earlier. I was sitting in my office under the eaves of a brick mansion near Dupont Circle, a charming, oddly shaped little room, which I liked very much, even the annual spring ritual when the serviceman came through my office and climbed out my window on his way to tune up the air conditioner on the roof. The mansion housed the law firm of Arnold & Porter.

The firm had been founded in the fifties by three veterans of the New Deal. It was known for its smart, innovative lawyers—effective advocates for major corporations, as well as, paradoxically, flinty independents willing to take on unpopular clients, like accused subversives in the McCarthy years. It was a pleasingly eccentric place to begin my career, but the initial blush of novelty had faded. I was becoming impatient with work on issues that I didn’t care about—license agreements for marketing laundry soap and joint ventures for shopping malls—drafting legal memorandain 12long days in the library, and client conferences where my job as a junior associate was to take notes and try to look interested.

On that afternoon I was drafting testimony for a trade association executive for a congressional hearing on bank interest rates when I received a call from David Bazelon, the chief judge of the Federal Court of Appeals, where I had served as a law clerk. I was familiar with Judge Bazelon’s reputation at Law School, a restless and creative judge who used his judicial authority to work for social change. To do this, he was willing to reach out to promote novel legal theories. He was particularly identified with probing exploration of the insanity defense.3 Because I hadn’t worked directly under him, I had been spared the often tense exchanges he had with his own clerks, with whom he could be demanding and ill-tempered.

“Can you come down to see me at the courthouse?” he asked, with no preliminary small talk.

“When?”

“Now.”

I looked over the testimony that I had been drafting. “Sure,” I said. When the chief judge asks, I thought, it was a good idea to say yes. I knew that he often reached out to his former clerks to assist him in drafting speeches and developing new legal theories. But since I had not been one of his clerks, I was flattered that he was calling on me. And there was a good chance that he wanted to talk about something more interesting than the maximum interest rates that can be charged on an unsecured loan.

The chief judge’s suite of offices looked over the Mall, at the west façade of the Capitol, which was glowing pink in the setting sun. It looked to me like the kind of picture postcard view that tourists send home. To my left the dome of the Capitol hovered. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue stood the White House. The Mall was surrounded by sprawling government buildings housing cabinet departments, each with endless corridors leading to beige 13cubicles, spreading out in huge rectangles from classical entrance colonnades. The bureaucratic decisions flowing from those offices came to this court for review.

When Judge Bazelon’s secretary showed me into his office, the judge remained seated, the overhead lights making a halo of his silvery hair. He hardly looked up as he gestured me to a chair, across a large expanse of desktop covered with drafts of half-completed opinions and marked-up lawyers’ briefs. On the wall behind his head he had hung a dramatic etching of himself—younger, ruggedly handsome, and darkly introspective. What kind of person decorates his office with such a picture of himself? I wondered. I knew that he gave...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1576754421
• ISBN 13: 9781576754429
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Berrett-Koehler; https://www.dc.com/tv; ; 1333 Broadway Suite P-100; Oakland; CA; 94612; USA
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