Hello, everybody. Wow, I just don’t even know what to say. This has been an incredible morning. And I don’t even know if I can live up to the expectations because this has just been awesome, especially the last presentation. And it’s been so powerful. But anyway, I’m going to give it a shot. My name is Michael McPherson. I’m the executive director of Veterans for Peace. And thank you for coming to my talk, Making Concealing Space, Taking and Passing the Torch. Now, I’m going to have to use this because I cannot remember anything anymore. So just bear with me. Now, I have a question for you. How many of you are actively thinking about intergenerational leadership? OK, that was better than I thought it was going to be. So that’s good. How many of you are in organizations that use that term or some kind of term like that when they talk about leadership development? OK, see, that’s even less. But at least there are some. So that’s good. Now, even though your organization might not be using that term, how many of you have intergenerational leadership in your organization? OK, that’s good. All right, good. Good. My organization is ebbs and flows in that way. And we’re doing the best that we can to try to have more intergenerational leadership. Now, at this point in my life, and I’m at age 54, I’m thinking and talking about this in a different way than I was 23 years ago when I started to become a community organizer. And honestly, when I think 23 years ago, I just can’t believe it’s been that long. But it really has. So before I go into that, I’m going to tell you a little bit about myself. So I went into the United States military between my junior and senior year of high school when I was 17 years old. I went to college, became a captain in the US Army. And actually, 28 years ago today, I was in the desert of Saudi Arabia, waiting to invade Iraq. And just as an aside, or to push Iraq out of Kuwait, as they say, I just want people to know, and speak into your presentation, that that’s been 28 years of war that the United States has been conducting. And they try to tell us that these are different wars, but they aren’t. They’re the same war. And as communications professionals understand this, they market it to us in different ways. Gulf War I, the Iraq War, the war in Syria, but it’s all the same thing. So remember that as you talk about these conflicts. Then I went into corporate America. I didn’t stand there because it’s not about peace and justice. It’s about profits. So I wasn’t feeling good about that. So I got into corporate America. I worked for various not-for-profits. And I’ve been in the streets over many different issues, but I predominantly work at a peace movement because I see that as the intersection of all of our struggles. Peace at home, peace in the streets, and peace abroad. If you don’t have peace in both places, then you don’t have peace. So I had not really thought deeply about my age and activism until Ferguson happened. And at that point, I began to realize, oh no, I’m becoming the old guard. And I had to think about that because when I started 23 years ago, and I had ideas, and I was challenging the old guard at that time, people blocked many of those ideas. And they didn’t want to do some of the things I wanted to do. They let me in a little bit and gave me a little bit of a leadership position, but then they blocked what I wanted to do. So when I started to look at myself, I’m thinking, am I doing the same thing? So what happened to make me think about that? Well, first of all, many of you might not know that at Ferguson, Missouri, which venerable peace national office is about at the time 10 miles away, now it’s 11 miles away because we moved from Ferguson in St. Louis, Missouri. 18-year-old Michael Brown, Jr. was killed on August 9, 2014 by police officer Darren Wilson. And Michael Brown’s body was left in the street for like 2 and 1 half hours. As a result of that happening, there was a huge explosion of anger and frustration. They came from his peers and people that were like 12 to 13 years older. So you’re talking about 16-year-olds to 30, 31-year-olds. And when I say that, there were a lot of other people who got out in the street. But the people who led that rebellion and kept the energy of that rebellion were the young people. Many young people emerged as leaders, new organizations popped up. Of course, we still had old organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League, but the young people really didn’t want to have anything to do with those organizations. They didn’t trust them. They felt like that if you had done your job, we wouldn’t have to do this. You abandoned us. And that’s a good critique that needs to be examined. And I can say myself, like I said, when I tried to become a leader 23 years earlier, I guess at that point it was 18 years earlier, 19 years earlier, one of the things that I wanted to really challenge in St. Louis was police violence. But like I said, I got blocked. They weren’t ready to rock the boat as much as I was. Now, people who were in their late 30s and early 40s were feeling like old people compared to these young, these new activists. So me at 49, I was like, grandpa to them. So just a quick example of how much they distrust organizations like the NAACP. The executive director, the national executive director of the NAACP came to an event, and he basically got booed off stage. And that never happens. So that just shows you that they were like, we don’t want to hear it. So I was asked to help organize a coalition called the Don’t Shoot Coalition. I was co-chair of it. And it was about 50 to 60 groups of local activists, local organizations that came together to try to work with the young activists, the new activists, to support what they were doing in the street. So that was a very difficult space to navigate with these tensions that were taking place. The Don’t Shoot Coalition was the deepest coalition I’ve ever seen. And maybe the deepest coalition has ever existed in the United States, to be honest with you. And I say that because the coalition has synagogues, it had churches, it had Muslims, it had Palestinians and Jews who stood on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli issue, which you never get that. People like that coming together. It had the LBGT community. It had labor in it. It had, like I said, the Urban League and NAACP, these young people who didn’t trust them. It also had the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam. So it was a very, very broad coalition. So we were dealing with the trauma of the violence of police, misconduct, as well as these internal conflicts. So it was very, very tough. Now, I was taught in the military that you fight like you train. Now, I bring that up to say that if we had more intergenerational leadership and we had had more discussions across the generations before this happened, then we would have been able to deal with this situation a lot better. More energy could have been directed at the opposition and the issues rather than this internal conflict. I believe intergenerational leadership is the most effective leadership model because it ensures healthy and a smoother, not that there won’t be any tension, but a smoother transition from old leadership to new. It recognizes that each generation sits at a different vantage point and has precious insight and knowledge to share. And I say precious that we need to value. It provides a synergy of accumulated knowledge, wisdom, new ideas, and new energy. And it provides a better decision-making process. Now, the Black Panther came up earlier, and here it is again. The Black Panther illustrated intergenerational leadership with the Tribal Council, which was intergenerational, and also when Tashala went into his meditative state and visited with his father. Unfortunately, here in the US, we do not do a good job of that. And I think it’s because we don’t have intergenerational cultural literacy. We don’t know each other very well across generations. We don’t spend enough time with each other, so we don’t know each other, and we don’t really trust each other. We need to do a better job of getting to know each other across generations. So in my closing minutes, I want to give you two challenges. One is to go back to your organization and start an intentional dialogue about intergenerational leadership. What does it mean to people individually? And what does it mean to your organization? And I think as communication professionals, it would actually help with your messaging, because obviously people from different generations communicate differently and have different cultural touchstones. Also, number two, take the time to get to know more people if you’re young that are older than you, and if you’re older, get to know more people who are younger than you. That’s the only way that we’re really going to bridge this gap that we have in our society, which actually will make our society not only our organization stronger, but our society stronger. And here’s some advice. Put the tensions in the context by remembering, the tensions between the generations. Put those in the context by remembering if you’re older, you were once that young Turk, that young change agent, looking for radical change. Don’t be that person who stood in the way. That’s what I decided I don’t want to be. If you’re younger, you will one day be the old guard unless you die, right? So learn how to do it. Learn how not to be a person standing in the way. And for more tips, I quickly put up on a blog that I do sometimes called MTMdaily.com. I put some more tips on some things that I learned during this time period. So in the effort to pass the torch, I’m conceding space by stepping down from my position in Veterans for Peace. It’s time for me to allow new energy and new ideas to come forth, because this is my second tour doing this. So I’ve done this for 10 years. And I’m kind of ready to look at doing piece work in other ways. And we just need some new ideas in VFP. So I want to say in closing, good luck to emerging leaders as you make your space. I say to the longstanding leaders, be a good example and pass the torch well. Leadership in all things, but especially in the struggle for peace and justice, is a marathon run like a relay. Thank you very much. Thank you.