Realism in its many forms

My first task as an Artist as Citizen intern: write transcripts out for interviews to follow up on the Israel/Palestine project.
This third project holds the title, "The Realists." It's a series of portraits and accompanying interviews of leaders and members of the One Voice movement, which is a really incredible nonpartisan, person-to-person movement to end the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

I had a hard time describing to my father as we had an excursion this morning to Morehead City the relevance of the title. I can't help but notice the irony between what is typically known as the "realist" paradigm of thought or analysis, especially when examining political situations - and the way it is used for this project.

The "realist" that AAC finds in One Voice is this, exactly as founder Daniel Lubetzky said in the interview I'm transcribing, about the Human-ness within these political situations:

Lubetzky says: They are very skeptical that it's going to come about, and they are very hard to mobilize, because if you don't believe that something is going to happen, why are you going to invest yourselves in it? So part of our role is to help people visualize that this thing can end, but it has to require your involvement.


I love that the Realism here is a human truth - a more thorough acknowledgment of human nature. How many zillions of conversations do I have with cynics - "realists" - who insist that the only true way to be a master puppeteer in politics is to look at the sheer numbers. To ignore the humanity is to be effective?

We beg to differ, I suppose.
The way to trump the Realist Paradigm, where practical force - sheer numbers, regardless of their placement in economics, military, or plain old population count; perhaps the role of the individual, ties between bureaucracy and industry, its placement within the government and how that plays into the system at hand - overcomes any sort of soft political power, grassroots movement, or any will of the people not involved in the political infrastructure, is to give humanity its own power. To understand it, to channel it, to empower individuals and push them forward.

More than anything else, I think it's interesting that the hard power capabilities have failed. Formal diplomacy is failing. Is our last resort a grassroots movement of human-to-human power? Lubetzky might say, it is so, and it is time for it to happen:

I very often have doubts about whether we are going to achieve our goals of truly ending this conflict, so that doubt comes with me almost every day, and you have to rise above it, and say, there is no alternative. You cannot give up, you cannot not do this because the alternative is too ugly. And that is what drives me. It's not hope and excitement, it's fear of what will happen if we don't succeed.