This room may appear
to be holding 600 people,
but there's actually so many more,
because in each one of us
there is a multitude of personalities.
I have two primary personalities
that have been in conflict and conversation within me
since I was a little girl.
I call them "the mystic"
and "the warrior."
I was born into a family
of politically active,
intellectual atheists.
There was this equation in my family that went something like this:
if you are intelligent,
you therefore are not spiritual.
I was the freak of the family.
I was this weird little kid
who wanted to have deep talks
about the worlds that might exist
beyond the ones that we perceive with our senses.
I wanted to know
if what we human beings see
and hear and think
is a full and accurate picture
of reality.
So, looking for answers,
I went to Catholic mass.
I tagged along with my neighbors.
I read Sartre and Socrates.
And then a wonderful thing happened
when I was in high school:
Gurus from the East
started washing up on the shores of America.
And I said to myself,
"I wanna get me one of them."
And ever since,
I've been walking the mystic path,
trying to peer beyond
what Albert Einstein called
"the optical delusion
of everyday consciousness."
So what did he mean by this? I'll show you.
Take a breath right now
of this clear air in this room.
Now, see this strange,
underwater,
coral reef-looking thing?
It's actually a person's trachea,
and those colored globs
are microbes
that are actually swimming around in this room
right now, all around us.
If we're blind to this simple biology,
imagine what we're missing
at the smallest subatomic level right now
and at the grandest cosmic levels.
My years as a mystic
have made me question
almost all my assumptions.
They've made me a proud I-don't-know-it-all.
Now when the mystic part of me
jabbers on and on like this,
the warrior rolls her eyes.
She's concerned
about what's happening in this world right now.
She's worried.
She says, "Excuse me, I'm pissed off,
and I know a few things,
and we better get busy about them right now."
I've spent my life as a warrior,
working for women's issues,
working on political campaigns,
being an activist for the environment.
And it can be sort of crazy-making,
housing both the mystic and the warrior
in one body.
I've always been attracted
to those rare people
who pull that off,
who devote their lives to humanity
with the grit of the warrior
and the grace of the mystic --
people like Martin Luther King, Jr.,
who wrote, "I can never be
what I ought to be
until you are
what you ought to be.
This," he wrote, "is the interrelated structure
of reality."
Then Mother Teresa, another mystic warrior,
who said, "The problem with the world
is that we draw the circle of our family
too small."
And Nelson Mandela,
who lives by the African concept
of "ubuntu,"
which means "I need you
in order to be me,
and you need me in order to be you."
Now we all love to trot out
these three mystic warriors
as if they were born
with the saint gene.
But we all actually have
the same capacity that they do,
and we need to do
their work now.
I'm deeply disturbed
by the ways in which all of our cultures
are demonizing "the Other"
by the voice we're giving
to the most divisive among us.
Listen to these titles
of some of the bestselling books
from both sides of the political divide
here in the U.S.
"Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder,"
"Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot,"
"Pinheads and Patriots,"
"Arguing With Idiots."
They're supposedly tongue-in-cheek,
but they're actually dangerous.
Now here's a title that may sound familiar,
but whose author may surprise you:
"Four-and-a-Half-Years of Struggle
Against Lies, Stupidity
and Cowardice."
Who wrote that?
That was Adolf Hitler's first title
for "Mein Kampf" -- "My Struggle" --
the book that launched the Nazi party.
The worst eras in human history,
whether in Cambodia or Germany
or Rwanda,
they start like this, with negative other-izing.
And then they morph
into violent extremism.
This is why I'm launching a new initiative.
And it's to help all of us,
myself included,
to counteract the tendency
to "otherize."
And I realize we're all busy people,
so don't worry, you can do this on a lunch break.
I'm calling my initiative,
"Take the Other to Lunch."
If you are
a Republican,
you can take a Democrat to lunch,
or if you're a Democrat,
think of it
as taking a Republican to lunch.
Now if the idea of taking any of these people to lunch
makes you lose your appetite,
I suggest you start more local,
because there is no shortage of the Other
right in your own neighborhood.
Maybe that person
who worships at the mosque,
or the church or the synagogue, down the street.
Or someone from the other side
of the abortion conflict.
Or maybe your brother-in-law
who doesn't believe in global warming.
Anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you,
or whose point of view
makes smoke come out of your ears.
A couple of weeks ago,
I took a Conservative Tea Party woman to lunch.
Now on paper, she passed my smoking ears test.
She's an activist from the Right,
and I'm an activist from the Left.
And we used some guidelines
to keep our conversation elevated,
and you can use them too,
because I know you're all going
to take an Other to lunch.
So first of all, decide on a goal:
to get to know one person
from a group you may have negatively stereotyped.
And then, before you get together,
agree on some ground rules.
My Tea Party lunchmate and I
came up with these:
don't persuade, defend
or interrupt.
Be curious;
be conversational; be real.
And listen.
From there, we dove in.
And we used these questions:
Share some of your life experiences with me.
What issues
deeply concern you?
And what have you always wanted to ask
someone from the other side?
My lunch partner and I
came away with some really important insights,
and I'm going to share just one with you.
I think it has relevance
to any problem
between people anywhere.
I asked her why her side
makes such outrageous allegations
and lies about my side.
"What?" she wanted to know.
"Like we're a bunch
of elitist,
morally-corrupt terrorist-lovers."
Well, she was shocked.
She thought my side
beat up on her side way more often,
that we called them brainless,
gun-toting racists,
and we both marveled
at the labels that fit
none of the people
we actually know.
And since we had established some trust,
we believed in each other's sincerity.
We agreed we'd speak up in our own communities
when we witnessed
the kind of "otherizing" talk
that can wound
and fester into paranoia
and then be used by those on the fringes
to incite.
By the end of our lunch,
we acknowledged each other's openness.
Neither of us had tried to change the other.
But we also hadn't pretended
that our differences were just going to melt away
after a lunch.
Instead, we had taken
first steps together,
past our knee-jerk reactions,
to the ubuntu place,
which is the only place
where solutions
to our most intractable-seeming problems
will be found.
Who should you invite to lunch?
Next time you catch yourself
in the act of otherizing,
that will be your clue.
And what might happen at your lunch?
Will the heavens open
and "We Are the World" play over the restaurant sound system?
Probably not.
Because ubuntu work is slow,
and it's difficult.
It's two people
dropping the pretense
of being know-it-alls.
It's two people,
two warriors,
dropping their weapons
and reaching toward each other.
Here's how the great Persian poet Rumi put it:
"Out beyond ideas
of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there."
(Applause)