Historically, Eldridge Cleaver is given credit for the saying "You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem". In actuality it was his wife Kathleen who came up with it the night before Eldridge spoke it. The concept has been derided as the logical fallacy of the excluded middle and equivalent to George Bush's "You're either with us or with the terrorists," all of which misses the point magnificently.

The ground which this statement relates with, the universe of discourse, is the full spectrum of human society, from microcosm to macrocosm. There is no escaping this ground, we are indelibly a part of it if we exist at all. It is not a monolithic thing, a club we join or a concept we postulate. It is rather the sum and substance of all our interrelationships with everyone else on earth. It is all our interactions with each other, great and small, and all our communications. Everyone is a part of this at many different points and in many different ways with many different people.

Now it should be obvious this ground is troubled. Conventional wisdom says that always has been and perhaps always will be. This trouble manifests immediately in our environments as problems of a particular type, problems which involve people acting in ways that increase each others suffering instead of acting in ways that are mutually beneficial. This is human dysfunction and it is endemic. We can analyze how it arises, how it works, what keeps it going, and what ends it. We can postulate singular or clusters of clauses. Whether we do this or not, however, we instinctively, intuitively, holistically recognize when things are working, harmonious, moving ahead, and functional and when they are broken, discordant, stuck or turned destructive. Such things tend to become quite clear quickly.

As long as we are alive, we are a part of this. As long as we are a part of things, we are perpetually either evolving solutions or perpetuating problems. We may be doing both at once and frequently are even within the same situation. We support some common project with money and effort, for example, while simultaneously participating gleefully in malicious gossip. We are both solution and problem here, but most significantly not the solution to the problem we are perpetuating. In the end, when people create or support collective endeavors at the nuts and bolts level but sabotage them at the human level, their net contribution is problem not solution. No matter what though, everyone within every matrix of relationship, is working solutions or problems or both (which ultimately resolves to being part of the problem). The nature of things is that you are a part of them. Reality does not include bystanders.

This is diametrically opposed to the way most people see things. We are a part of various, enormous, somewhat abstract, but ultimately extremely powerful associations, things like nations, religions, races and cultures, corporations, etc. These associations are organized in ways that imply only a relative few have any role in shaping the solutions or creating the problems. The rest of us are bystanders or pawns, onlookers or compelled to play a predefined role. Thus we are neither part of the solution nor part of the problem. One might imagine we do not even exist as capable, responsible individuals and that might be a critical part of the problem. "All that is neccessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing" as Edmund Burke has been quoted many times.

Yet at the same time, the enormity of the human problem is so vast in every way imaginable, it is also difficult to imagine that we as individuals can do anything about it whatsoever. We are, it seems, neither solution nor problem, but only "dust in the wind". We are impotent, incapable of response or responsibility.

In some domains of reality this is true. These are the parts of things with which we have no connection whatsoever which evolve as overlays upon other relationships that are intrinsic to our identities. Because society conceptualizes itself in terms of enormous abstractions which restrict and ritualize relationships as components of membership identities, it creates a lot of unreal relationships. In our collective confusion, which is an element at the heart of the problem, we frequently see these unreal relationships as primary and our real relationships as secondary. Rather than disengaging from them, we make them the center of our lives, which inevitably leads us to become part of the problem. The man who sacrifices his family life for a career is one obvious example of this. But so is the soldier who sacrifices his or her life for country.

While country may be built upon aggregates of common experience, the nationalism which evolves as an overlay tends to have no substance beyond shared misery. The poor peasant toiling for the rich lord shares only language with the lord, yet a wealth of common experience with other peasants who do not speak that language and whose lord operates in different ways to maintain control.

Yet these peasants both historically and today, frequently find themselves fighting each other in the services of their respective lords, acting out a false identity in which their own self-definition is subordinated to a nationalist abstraction. Even within the false identity of nationalism we affirm this, though in its polarized form. The enemy is fighting for a false or lost cause. The damage they do is a source of suffering. Destroying their identity as an army solves the problem. If we abandon our mythic national identity so that we see both or all nations involved in terms of their roles within the problem, then it becomes clear that war, or whatever other mischief is going down, cannot occur without the people who have been given the roles of soldiers or other instigators of suffering, playing those roles and acting out those deadly rituals. Sanity would return quite quickly to the human race if a critical mass of individuals realized just this much and determined not to play their assigned roles within dramas crafted by abstractions to create suffering for people. That behavior, however "upstanding" it may seem to be, is part of the problem.

What it means to be part of the solution is to act in ways that improve things near term and evolve solutions long-term within every context of human relationship we find ourselves. That means a focus on our immediate environments and the problems we face, individually and collectively within them. The key to effectiveness of action, which is empowered self-determination, is to recognize clearly our spheres of involvement and to work to alleviate the immediate suffering and evolve long term solutions within them.

It's actually quite easy to identify and do what needs doing within this context. All our lives consist of three spheres of relationship: self, family, and community. All the world there is for us is found within these three. Working with them is working with everything there is.

Self is where it all begins. Whatever issue exists in your personal universal has some hook in self. We have greater ability to work with things within our selves than anywhere else which is one good reason for starting here. We need to spend the time to see how the problem we wish to solve works inside ourselves. Sometimes this seems quite straightforward. A young person, for example, who is opposed to war and military recruitment on campus, may feel that this issue is wholly outside and only begins to impact him or her personally if and when a draft is instituted. Yet this same person may find themselves screaming hatefully at demonstrations on campus against recruiters and even acting with purposeless violence, overturning tables and the like. If war and violence is what we oppose, then we must first act to end its roots in ourselves. We must learn not to hate. We must learn to work constructively with our own anger. As long as we carry the problem around inside ourselves, we are the problem. We cannot be the solution.

Family today is not necessarily just our blood relations. Throughout human history, family has been much bigger than the "nuclear family". The nuclear age seemed to split the family as well as the atom, but it hasn't changed our need for a rich matrix of intimate relationships. Morality, ethics, common endeavors, inspiration, solace, comfort, understanding, alternatives, help, and succor, all arise primarily from this sphere of our relationships. Its absence is another, big part, of the problem. Isolation and anomie are poisonous to the human spirit.

Most of us learn early to populate this matrix with close friends: individuals, groups that hang together, other couples if we are married, sometimes complete families. This is a critical element of personal wholeness. Without the sense of family, human beings suffer effects very similar to victims of genocide. Genocide is, after all, the destruction of a people's culture. In reality most of us have lost all or significant portions of our inherited cultures. But human beings construct cultures out of shared experiences, so that even the most alienated recreate a cultural matrix that provides identity and direction when they bond together. For many people, though, action within the familial sphere requires the creation of that sphere. It's a necessary task. The presence or absence of familial level connections is the difference between building a movement or being perceived as a lone nut carrying bizarre signs and talking to the wind.

Community is the largest sphere we relate with. It is our relationship with everyone who is not part of the circle of family. Any social task, great or small, we would take on has its roots in this, our community. If it doesn't, it's an abstraction, at least to us. The social dysfunction of humanity is endemic at every level of society. It can be found everywhere. Even the great tides of nationalist agendas find local expressions. If they do not, they don't affect us. People act and are motivated to action by what affects them. The more directly they are affected, the more motivated they are to action. Being part of the solution involves identifying what affects things here, in the communities we live in, and taking concrete action here to ease suffering and eliminate causes. Grasping this makes things very direct, quite immediate. We are always working with what is in front of us.

Of course the argument can be made that this is not sufficient. The colonial model, in which people at home benefit from oppression across the world which they don't even see and which doesn't affect their communities negatively, provides a valid objection to this construct. It's an objection that is less compelling today than historically. The old situational isolation through distance has pretty much vanished in the age of the internet. The connections between events in one part of the world and their consequences in another are more and more visible and their impact more and more personal. The relocation of call centers for US companies to India, for example, is quite obvious to all of us. Whether we think it benefits or harms, it impacts our communities quite immediately and directly along with all the other elements of corporate globalization.

More significantly, however, people do not engage with things that don't impact them, at least emotionally. This is why charitable drives always lead with a poster child or two. The child moves us and becomes, at least temporarily, a symbolic part of our familial circle. This is sufficient to pry a few dollars from relatively affluent people, but isn't enough usually to get people to commit time and resources long-term. When it becomes that for someone, you'll inevitably find that their involvement with the particular charity occurred as they moved from relating symbolically to the poster child to relating in human terms with other victims or representatives of the organization that could personalize the stories of others for them. This is why programs that require an ongoing committment, such as monthly donations, tend to build models based on "adoption" and the like where one individual benefitted communicates regularly with their benefactor, thus becoming part of the familial circle.

Movements and revolutions are really about the family sphere, in its extended sense, working within the community sphere. All great social changes come about this way. If you live in or near a major city, you will likely find virtually every cause represented for your potential involvement. If you become a conscious part of life in your community, which includes the immediate relationships of work, church, fraternal organizations, etc. but not their organizational abstractions, you will find continual choices between promoting solutions and perpetuating problems. These choices arise from the ground of experience. They aren't abstractions either. Something needs doing. You do it. Someone needs help. You help them. An injustice arises. You stand against it. Doing this empowers you and frequently expands out well beyond where it began. The journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step. The greatest building in the world began with the movement of a single shovelful of dirt.

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