Conscious Choice Seattle: Mercury Uprising

September 2005 | Evergreen Citizen

Mercury Uprising

Healing Global Hotspots

By Miryam Gordon

It never, ever felt right to Susan Partnow to separate people into us versus them, black versus white, Jew versus Christian and then keep apart. Even as a youngster of nine, this month’s Evergreen Citizen felt the most important thing was to value people over money.

Not to say that she grew up rich. Far from it. Partnow’s father worked hard selling novelties and souvenirs on the road, trying to make the best of an eighth grade education, until he finally established a small shop. She remembers working for him, as a child: “I stuck on those little stickers on the donkeys that say‘Grand Canyon’ and that sort of thing."

Early activism : Partnow’s friends in the neighborhood were children of survivors of the Holocaust. She remembers the Eichmann arrest and Nuremburg trials, vividly, and being “terrified that someone could come and grab you, for what, because you were Jewish?”

Bridging the gap : Starting from her years at U.C. Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement, Partnow characterizes herself as “a bridger,” connecting people to each other and finding ways people could understand each other across cultures.

When she lived in Switzerland and Paris for a few years, she organized the women she met into “consciousness raising” groups. Looking back, she realizes how audacious that might have been, but says, “It just seemed easy and somehow people were willing to go along with it.”

Sharing leadership : During a bad organizing experience while in her Master’s program at Northwestern University, Partnow was labeled a troublemaker and agitator. She learned never to be the only leader in any group, but to find shared leadership. If something happened to one person, “It didn’t kill the group, you couldn’t cut the head off."

Seattle days : Here in Seattle, Partnow found spirituality could bind with her vision. She joined Earth Stewards and helped start Families for Peace when she became a young mother. She was a member of the African American-Jewish Coalition. She helped start Conversation Café to help people connect and find each other, learning civil discourse along the way.

Her latest : Partnow’s current project is Global Citizen Journey. It grew out of Peace Trees, an organization to bring the youth of America to foreign places to plant trees and be a bridge for peace. In Global Citizen, groups of citizen “diplomats” go to global “hotspots” to build a project with citizens of that country and, in the process, also bring compassionate listening and conflict resolutions skills.

Global Citizen Journey is taking a group to the Niger Delta in November. The Nigerian delegates include people from warring tribes who will work together to build a regional library. It will be the first library in this region. The Niger Delta is an area where major oil producers are tapping huge oil deposits with adverse economic, environmental and social effects on the people who live there.

Tipping point : Partnow believes this region might have a “tipping point” effect on all of us if tensions between rebels, oil producers, warring tribes and embattled townspeople come to a boil. She points out that we in the U.S. have already experienced rising gas prices; directly related to an incident where rebels made threats against the oil companies there. Partnow continues to demonstrate her belief that if you “…change the structure, you’ll change the people.”

Miryam Gordon is a staff writer for Evergreen Monthly.

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