I happened across a podcast of Grace Lee Boggs recently on The Moth. In it she said:
“It is such a wonderful time to be alive, because we can create solutions and he [Jimmy] was a solutionary. He could do visionary organizing; propose things that people really wanted to do but didn’t know they could do until someone told them they could do it. And that’s the sort of thing we need today – visionary organizers. The crisis we are in is really an opportunity; we can change the way of this…There is opportunity to create a new society.”
We can gather data about our opportunities. We can hire a multitude of certified specialists and experts consultants who produce models, recommend new technologies, conduct studies, and propose solutions that tend to be creative but incredibly complex and incomplete.
Unfortunately, without the people who can simply connect the dots, propose things in easy steps, apply common sense, and interpret between groups in plain language, we often don’t make any progress. I have heard these folks informally titled, “the person who can get shit done.” The title “solutionary” is so much more sophisticated.
No matter what you call them, maybe we need a few more of them.
Photo source: Source: “James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia