Free Walter Mosley by Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

have such weapons but others could not? And Beverly Chin of Santa Monica, California, might have wondered if, even if these dots were WMDs, we might do a surgical strike against the dots and not the people of an entire nation.
    This dialogue is genius despite Colin Powell’s IQ. We, the People, are the genius. We, together, make up the mind, heart, and conscience of America. All these secrets and last-minute claims have nothing to with brilliance, leadership, or morality. Powell was wrong but, worse, we were wrong for listening to him. We have been disassociated by a system of separation
of labor (defined by the Joes) and then considered only when we have something to say about our little corner of expertise. We are effectively cut off from the mainstream of decision-making by experts who owe their bread and butter and jam and caviar to the Joes. And these Joes aren’t worried about collateral damage or an eight-year-old girl being gang-raped by a troop of Congolese mercenaries. They have cell phones to move and Venezuela to reacquire.
    The individual geniuses and the Joes are brutes and thugs who believe that they are right because they can get around us. And they will continue to get around us if we don’t start demanding truth from our leaders and a willingness to listen too. Without our input and our experience, the experts’ genius is nullified. Without collaboration politics becomes a high-stakes game where there have to be winners and losers—and the losers are almost always us.
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    So what should we do to pit our communal genius against their false claims?
    Get together with a dozen people and ask a question, any question that brings to light a cultural or political conundrum. Let each member of the twelve make a brief comment on how they see the problem
and what they think might be a solution 4 —all this in statements as simple and short as possible. Do not argue about the claims but allow questions to be asked about the assumptions, the expected consequences, and the unexpected turns these definitions and answers might bring about. Do this all in a pleasant setting with food, maybe a little wine on the table. You might let the individual members of this group alternate as the secretary who puts everything down so that later on the members can go over their discussion.
    This weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meeting will be an exercise in genius. No one will pay you for this conference. If someone offers to pay you—turn them down. If a joke comes to mind—tell it. If you have an unpopular opinion, speak it. In many sessions, maybe most of them, you will not come to an agreement but this is all right; the exercise of thinking outside the coffin-like box the Joes have built for you will open your heart to the confidence of participatory leadership. That is what America needs.
    We all have a piece of the puzzle. Genius is a collaborative phenomenon. Yes, there are some amazing minds in the world but these minds are all just small
pieces of the Great Soul that we inhabit. The mere fact that someone adds faster or sees deeper does not mean that she doesn’t need the trace elements of others’ knowledge. And intelligence comes in all kinds of packages.
    The exercise of the Meeting of the Twelve will help its members to begin to see the possibilities in us while at the same time reinforcing the notion of how cut off we’ve been from the real decision-making going on in our lives.
    Coming together and discussing, digesting the opinions of our peers, readdressing issues and going over the possible answers again—these are the methods we must use to pass judgment on the modern world. We are the juries that must decide what crimes have been committed, what punishments must be meted out, and what payments must be made to make right what has been done wrong.

AFTERWORD
    This short monograph has been designed to question the assumptions of and about our so-called leadership and to