Marty Krasney: Building A World That Works For All
ServiceSpace
--Bela Shah
13 minute read
Aug 2, 2015

 

In 1962, two weeks before Christmas, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a sermon at a church in Philadelphia about the birth of a baby. He was born in a stable, on the dirt floor and surrounded by livestock, but under a star that served as a guide for the Three Wise Men.

Coincidentally, this sermon was attended by a 17 year-old named Marty
Krasney, who listened intently to Rev. King’s sermon, taking away a powerful message that has served as a through line in his own life.

Today, 53 years later, Marty is the founding, Executive Director of Dalai Lama Fellows, a global community of mindful, compassionate, and ethical social innovators. On our Global Awakin Call, Marty’s humble, honest, and compassionate way of showing up in the world was deeply felt by our callers. The following blog hopes to capture the wisdom and stories that Marty thoughtfully shared, including the deeper meaning of the stable and the star.

A Life of Fortunate Coincidences?
Marty describes the people and events that have influenced and shaped his life as a series of fortunate coincidences. Whether these are “fortunate coincidences” or the by-product of Marty’s boundless energetic optimism is a question for the reader to contemplate.

The first of many such fortunate coincidences begins with Marty’s parents and the kind of people they were in the world. His mother was the first woman in her peer group to get her driver’s license and she read "The Feminine Mystique" as soon as it was published. Born to working class immigrant parents in 1913, she lived in times that were circumscribed for women, but was able to achieve a rich and full life of contribution and fulfillment for nearly a century. After Marty’s sister entered high school, his mother went back to work as a librarian in an inner city public school.

“She started working in a marginal school and surrounded herself with young people. There were students in her school who didn’t have a single book in their home, or maybe just the Bible, and that was the world she chose to serve. So she was a powerful role model for me from very early.”

As many Dalai Lama Fellows would agree, Marty’s own presence with young people is one of genuine humility, curiosity, and inspiration. He recalled a story of one the first Fellows, an imposing and charismatic young Kenyan man named Agostine Ndung'u, who was studying electrical engineering at Amherst.
One day Marty asked,

“What do you think you would like to do after college?”

Agostine replied, “If I’m fortunate, I’ll get a job with McKinsey.”

After Marty responded, “Oh, you can do better than that,” he recollected Agostine’s surprised reaction, since a job offer from McKinsey symbolized the pinnacle of success.

Agostine asked Marty, “What’s better than McKinsey?”

Marty replied, “For one, Ashoka,” which is the organization that defined social entrepreneurism 30 years ago.

Agostine didn’t know about Ashoka and he actually didn’t remember this conversation with Marty but three years later he ‘s working in the Ashoka office in Nairobi.

Marty’s journey to Dalai Lama Fellows is another story of coincidences. An unlikely journey to a Buddhist memorial stupa in Colorado with his wife, Pamela, eventually led to an invitation for Marty, at the time working as a philanthropic strategist, to conduct a feasibility study for the Dalai Lama Center in Vancouver. The results of Marty’s endeavors laid the basis for expansion of the infant, on-campus XIV Dalai Lama Scholars at UC Irvine, in 2009, with the Dalai Lama’s authorization, into the global Dalai Lama Fellows program. When the Dalai Lama Center did not develop the program, an American foundation asked Marty whether he would be available to be the Executive Director, Marty readily agreed and has served, without salary, since April 2010.

For him and Pamela, who has been a member of the programs Advisory Board since its inception, Dalai Lama Fellows provided a perfect opportunity to mingle their interests and enthusiasms and contribute to building a better world, one that elevates self-scrutiny, cooperation across differences and the pursuit of ethics and social justice: in short, a world that works for all.

Creating a World that Works for All
Marty describes himself as a peripheral visionary, someone who is constantly scanning and taking in the bigger picture. Because of a congenital optical anomaly, including an insufficient number of the rods and cones in his retinas necessary to transmit visual impulses to the brain, Marty can only see at 20 feet what most people can see at 80 feet. His vision looking straight ahead is closer to what most people can see at the periphery.

Being a peripheral visionary means that at the psychological level, Marty has spent his life glimpsing things rather than fixing on them; as his wife reminded him constantly, it’s made for a kind of attention deficit disorder, or as his son prefers to call it, “attention surplus”.

Some key insights from Marty’s vision “deficit” are:
1. As a result of not seeing quite so clearly what’s in front of me, or what’s inside the box, I have a tendency to see what’s around me, or what’s outside of the box.

2. It’s modulated my inclination to be at the center of things and has put me at the edge of things where I can survey the entire scene.”

3. It has taught me that I have to work around whatever limits I’ve been given and working around them can be better than not having them.

4. My vision also means that I can’t drive, and so I’ve been a passenger my whole life. Being a passenger means that you’re not in control, it means that you’re interdependent. So at the psychological level, I think the fact that I had this derivative dependency has been an asset. I couldn’t go off to many events by myself, for example. I always needed to coordinate and collaborate with others.

This last insight has profoundly influenced the mission of Dalai Lama Fellows, and how it seeks to create a world that works for all. Marty often says that we must work together to create a world that works for everyone, otherwise it won’t work for any one of us.

When Marty was 10 or 11 years old, his father came home with green and white campaign buttons that he had designed labeled “TOF,” which stood for “the other fellow”. It was the height of the Eisenhower Administration, the pinnacle of the Post War boom in America, but Marty’s father, a retailer, was concerned that self-interest was steam-rolling cooperation and social cohesion.

Twenty years later, while directing the Aspen Institute Seminar Program, Marty had a conversation with the distinguished Quaker economist, Kenneth Boulding, who casually commented that, “There are three ways to get things done in human endeavor: force, the mandate of the State; exchange, the business of the Marketplace, and collaboration, doing it together.” Force tends toward being a win-lose situation, exchange is often win-null, transactional where each party is simply focused on the satisfaction of his or her individual wants, while with mutuality, no one is subordinated and everyone is working together because they want to work together.

“Mutuality is the most evolved state and the one that we should all strive towards. Imagine a string quartet, a sports team, or dance ensemble. These dancers are dancing together because they love dancing together, not because they are being forced or because it’s an exchange for something else. With an exchange, there is no entanglement with other people but with mutuality, such as in the example of the dance ensemble, each dancer is dependent on the other.”

Howard Thurman, one of Martin Luther King’s mentors and teachers once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive because what the world needs are more people that have come alive.”

“This aliveness is really the spark of mutuality. People don’t talk much about the spark of the State or the spark of commerce. Some people might be afraid to become fully alive or think that they don’t deserve to be, so there is a sense that they will constrain themselves to the dictates of the State or the distractions of the Marketplace, rather than aspire to greater self-actualization.”

One of the core values of Dalai Lama Fellows, interdependence, centers on the idea that we are all interconnected, that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can effect lives on the other side of the planet, and that the choices we make in any individual life can impact everyone.

Through the complementary education and personal coaching that Dalai Lama Fellows receive throughout their fellowship year, young, social change agents cultivate their inner values while also working on their compassion-in-action projects.

When Marty first met to discuss Dalai Lama Fellows with the Dalai Lama , one of the things he said, in authorizing the program was that while hearts and heads are important, Fellows needed to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. Although the Fellowship is rooted in contemplative values, the Dalai Lama’s hope is that the Fellows will take the universal values of mindfulness and compassion and deploy them to build ethical systems, small at first, then networked to produce an ethical world. As hearts and heads align, this inner transformation manifests outwardly to revivify the external environment.

The Stable and the Star
This alignment of head, heart, and hands is very closely linked with the story of the Baby Jesus the way that Marty heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak about it in 1962. On that Sunday morning Dr.. King started by remarking that every life should have three dimensions:

1. Linearity: following your own path;

2. Horizontiality: building your community on the plane where you live; and

3. Verticality: finding and working towards a higher purpose.

The specific part of the sermon that most stayed with Marty is Dr. King’s observation that the Christmas story had two prerequisites, the stable and the star. The Baby Jesus was born in a stable, a small, shabby out-building in tiny room, where he was placed in a manger and surrounded by livestock on the dirt floor. The context was very earthbound, very human and very direct. The other essential element of the story was the brilliant star, which guided the three wise men and validated the Christ-child’s presence as the Messiah for those who came there.

“The Christmas story is about the stable on the ground and the star in the air and the vector between them, which created Christianity, and without either one of which, it wouldn’t have been the same story. So there is this idea that in everybody’s life, there needs to be a stable, a grounding, a reality check, and a star, a higher purpose, a guiding light.”

The Dalai Lama often describes himself as a simple Buddhist monk and despite everything, despite chartered flights and expensive hotels, that’s who he is, he’s very grounded but he too can see the star.

Another individual who profoundly influenced Marty’s life from this perspective was his wife, Pamela Krasney. Even though Pamela died suddenly and unexpectedly just a few weeks before Marty’s Awakin Call, he insisted on honoring his commitment, in part as a way to honor Pamela’s life.

He describes Pamela as the person in his life who was constantly working at the stable or ground level, serving those to whom no one else paid attention to because they were feared or unnoticed: residents of women’s shelters, those infected with the HIV/AIDS virus, single-parent children in public housing, prisoners on Death Row.

“There are lots of intersections between Pamela and Dalai Lama Fellows. She was working at the bottom of the pyramid and at the periphery but she moved things into the center. In the 19080s, when we were first married, she was one of the earliest hands-on HIV/AIDS volunteers. While the newspapers were saying, “We don’t know how contagious this new disease is,” she was cleaning up the apartments of people with AIDS, striving to build an inclusive world that works for all. Pamela was extraordinarily courageous that way.”

In 1998, when Pamela’s friend, Pema Chodron, the renowned American Tibetan Buddhist nun suggested that she get to know Jarvis Masters , a wrongfully-convicted resident of Death Row at San Quentin State Prison, Pamela went without hesitation, went alone. Then, for 18 years, she continued to visit Jarvis every other Tuesday, pretty much becoming his paralegal. She was a white woman of privilege who somehow had the courage to say this man needs my attention and my help, and I’m going to be there. Over the course of those years, she became a second mother to him.

Pamela exemplified post-heroic leadership, a quality that Dalai Lama Fellows cultivates in its Fellows. Practicing post-heroic leadership is to move beyond the “great man in the saddle” style of command-and-control leadership.

There are now corporate CEOs whose compensation is hundreds of times what the average employee at their company earns. About six months ago the San Francisco Business Times asked Marty to nominate people for their Business Statesman Award, which every year goes to companies that are highly philanthropic. Marty declined to nominate anyone, suggesting, “Maybe you should limit this award to those whose charitable giving in the Bay Area exceeds the salary of the Chief Executive Officer,” and the Business Times responded that if they did that they wouldn’t have any candidates. There is this obscene gap between the rich and the poor and it exists globally as well as domestically; the rich in African or in India are phenomenally rich and the poor are barely surviving, living on a dollar or two dollars a day.

“So how do we build a world that works for all? There have been heroes that have made a difference and that are well known but there are a lot more people who are quiet heroes. Sometimes it’s the barber and sometimes it’s the kindergarten teacher. They’re not the marquee names but they’re the people that really infiltrate their community and make things work. Our Fellows are going into places where they’re not at the center, they’re at the periphery, but in a lot of cases, as my wife helped me to understand, the periphery ought to be at the center.”

This One Wild and Precious Life
Marty was with Pamela when she took her last breath on June 9, 2015. The day she died, she had spent the afternoon in her garden, an activity that she deeply loved. Even when her close friend, out of concern for Pamela’s health, told her that she shouldn’t be pulling weeds because it was too strenuous, Pamela replied, “It’s makes me happy,” and she kept doing it until the end of her life. The end of her life was happy.

“Before I went to Dharamsala this past April, Pamela gave me a bracelet with 18 silver skulls on it. In the Buddhist sangha of which she was a part, they talk about how death comes without warning, that this body will someday be a corpse. What I learned from Pamela is to cherish the moments because you really don’t know when they’re going to end. You don’t know and you should just trust your instincts."

The Dalai Lama has said, “I’ve never met a stranger.” Marty believes that the same was true for Pamela. We really are all entangled. She would meet people and they would go away changed and she would go away changed. In their first years together, Marty described how she would sometimes stop the car and point out someone who was dancing in the streets. Marty wouldn’t understand why they were wasting their time, but Pamela would just sit there observing and integrating.

Recalling the famous poem by Mary Oliver, Marty wrote a note to himself for the Awakin Call and asked, “What are you doing with your one wild and precious life?”

Pamela had figured it out, against a lot of the odds that we all face, what to do with her one wild and precious life and it wasn’t what she could have done most easily, with the least exertion. Her grandfather lived next to Henry Ford in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and she could have spent her life dabbling or self-indulging. Instead she went to the hardest places, which is what the Dalai Lama told Dalai Lama Fellows to do.

Marty may not realize it, but for so many of us, including all the young Fellows that have been moved and changed through his presence, he has also figured it out. In his one wild and precious life, he truly embodies the words of Ralph Waldo

What is Success?

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty;

To find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;

This is to have succeeded.

 

Posted by Bela Shah on Aug 2, 2015


2 Past Reflections