Together we can get through hopelessness to the greater good.

Amidst the everyday battle cries and the massive fundraising campaigns in progress, Healing Friction is struggling to survive and offer the next step beyond partisan frenzy.

The first in our Community Circles yielded an hour of excellent video and audio.

Participants spoke and were heard to say that a well developed process must be created that can include the voices now shut out. Helping to make Healing Friction a success goes beyond the slug-fest and insists on real leadership that hears all the voices and knows how to follow beyond simply being one of the symbolic candidates offered by similar and competing ideologies.

Most importantly, Healing Friction is a cultural intervention. The project has the potential to step beyond current "cutting edge" initiatives like those put forward by MoveOn and other campaigns (in part) which use technology but only to better organize and intensify the feelings of partisans.

HF can move the civil process of "politics as usual" beyond infantile pugilism and into an approach that insists on 1) hearing all the voices in order to and 2) develop a community of understanding - because one "leader" or party can't possible cope with a system as sophisticated as ours. Our decisions and policy unavoidably affect the entire world. HF will benefit politically conservatives and liberals alike because it will both slow down the contemporary rush to ideological extremism and intemperate action (hardly conservative) and provide the basis for reasonable, managed change (the goal of all true liberals).

The Healing Friction Project is also the research part of my dissertation for Pacifica Graduate Institute (Ph.D. in mythology and psychology - clarifying how culture is shaped by the way in which conflict is processed). Your help can make my dissertation immeasurably richer and the impact of these conflict studies more profound.

Most projects like this fail because the energy behind seeing it realized was never really in place, or became diverted at key moments when difficult spots threatened to require hard work from volunteers. As a part of my dissertation and an already extant non-profit, Healing Friction is guaranteed a fundamental investment on which many other initiatives cannot count. The potential for your participation ending in a satisfying cultural intervention rather than a "good idea that never really went anywhere" is considerably higher than usual.

This is a request that you consider personal involvement with this project.

Please help us make the politics of tomorrow more inclusive than they are today.

Respond by email: brandon at healingfriction dot org, by donating at www.healingfriction.org,

by phone (866) 236-0346, by forwarding this to anyone who wants things to change for the better rather than to more of the same. Whatever you do, if you believe things must change, PLEASE respond.

(graphic employed - "fair use" for scholarly purposes - permission being sought for further use)