Live with Syrus Marcus Ware! (EP.23)
Last Updated
April 15, 2020
Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Syrus Marcus Ware, scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. [Live show recorded: April 13, 2020.]
Guest: Syrus Marcus Ware
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
SYRUS MARCUS WARE uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including in a solo show at Grunt Gallery, Vancouver (2068:Touch Change) and new work commissioned for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art and the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)) and in group shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Windsor and as part of the curated content at Nuit Blanche 2017 (The Stolen People; Wont Back Down). His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016, 2019), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015).
He is part of the PDA (Performance Disability Art) Collective and co-programmed Crip Your World: An Intergalactic Queer/POC Sick and Disabled Extravaganza as part of Mayworks 2014. Syrus' recent curatorial projects include That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel, 2016-2019), Re:Purpose (Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2014) and The Church Street Mural Project (Church-Wellesley Village, 2013). Syrus is also co-curator of The Cycle, a two-year disability arts performance initiative of the National Arts Centre.
Syrus is a core-team member of Black Lives Matter-Toronto. Syrus is a co-curator of Blackness Yes!/Blockorama. Syrus has won several awards, including the TD Diversity Award in 2017. Syrus was voted “Best Queer Activist” by NOW Magazine (2005) and was awarded the Steinert and Ferreiro Award (2012). Syrus is a facilitator/designer at the Banff Centre. Syrus is a PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live, the morning-ish show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Syrus Marcus Ware. Syrus wears a multitude of hats as a scholar, visual artist, activists, curator and educator. He uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture. He is a part of the PDA, Performance Disability Art Collective and co-programmed Crip Your World: An Intergalactic Queer/POC Sick and Disabled Extravaganza. Syrus is also a co-curator of The Cycle, a two-year disability arts performance initiative of Canada's National Arts Center. He is a core team member of Black Lives Matter Toronto and a PhD candidate at York University, in the faculty of Environmental Studies. Syrus was an editor of the recently published, Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada. And he also illustrated, I Promise, a recently published picture book that shares a conversation between a parent and a child about how different types of families form. And I have the distinct pleasure of getting to teach with him in the Cultural Leadership Program at Canada's Banff Center for the Arts. Without further ado, Syrus, welcome to the show.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Hello. Thanks for having me.
Lauren Ruffin:
So Syrus give us, how are you doing, maybe an update on what the tenor is right now in Toronto.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
It's a rainy day here as well. I'm doing well. I've been self isolating for a while just because of some health stuff. So it's not so safe for me to be going outside, so I've been inside. So the trip onto the balcony, the long journey onto the balcony to look at the sunlight is my big adventure for the day. Toronto is, it's a complex, beautiful city. It's a city that has an active disability community. So there's people who are actively saying, "Hey, we need to be thinking of those who are going to be most hardest hit by this crisis and stay inside for them." But we also have a lot of targeted policing in Toronto. And so there's been issues on the weekend about folks getting ticketed from being outside and some people aren't and some people are. And so those are some of the things that we're sort of dealing with in Toronto. But in general, we are well, we are healthy, we're starting to show signs of flattening the curve. Things are moving the way that they're supposed to.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's good news. So Tim gave you a lovely bio, but how do you usually introduce yourself? What about you and about your journey sort of pops to the forefront?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
I would normally start by saying that I'm an identical twin. I love being a twin, it's my favorite thing. And I'm so thankful that I get to be twins with this amazing person, Jessica Ware, she's a scientist and a geneticist. So she's been helping in the fight, trying to understand how things have shaped up the way that they have. So I'm a twin. As you mentioned, I'm an activist. I love being an activist. I've been organizing for about 25 years around things like racial justice, disability justice and prison justice. And I'm an academic, a scholar, activist. I've been working on a PhD and I'm almost finished, specifically looking at the experiences of black disabled people in contemporary art environments. And I'm a dad. I'm a father to an eight year old, almost nine year old, and we have done every craft that you can think of in the last few weeks. Everything like making dough, making cookies, coloring, drawing, making videos, like going to the garbage chute is our big adventure. That's what we've been doing.
Lauren Ruffin:
I understand.
Tim Cynova:
Syrus, I love this story of when you were at Banff, about bacon and getting up really early in the morning for the bacon with your daughter. It just like warms my heart every time I think about that story.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah, my daughter's pretty great. I would gush about her all the time and she's a little activist. She went to her first protest when she was eight weeks old. She went to an Occupy protest that we had in the city and she's pretty amazing.
Tim Cynova:
I mentioned in your intro, I have the pleasure of getting to teach alongside you in the same module at Banff Centre for the Arts. And we were there two months ago at the beginning of February, it feels like a lifetime ago since that time. Our module is focused on change management and little did many people probably know, they would have an opportunity to be experimenting with some of the things we were talking about then. And I was fascinated by your session for a number of reasons. First, your an amazing teacher and what you had to offer was really amazing. The idea or the concept or the framework around panarchy cycles was new to me. And I've been reflecting on this since that time about, as Lauren and I have conversations with people about what might a new normal look like, or what's going to happen as people start to interact again and where are we in this cycle and what's happening. Could you break down for people, or give people a quick overview of what our panarchy cycles, and your thoughts reflecting on that as we're in the midst of global pandemic?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Absolutely. I mean panarchy is this conceptual framework that helps us to understand complex systems. So in particular, it helps us to understand the two seemingly contradictory characteristics of all complex systems, and that is stability and change. This idea of being in stasis and this idea of being in constant flux, held together as a complexity that helps us to understand what's happening in a system. So there's this idea of a cycle of life that happens in a system. And you can sort of imagine it as a forest life cycle. You know how trees kind of grow and flourish, and then build a canopy and all of the ecosystems and biodiversity that go along with a forest grow and change in shape along with those trees. Until you have huge canopy, you have a forest floor that's full of plants, and you have this complex system that is reliant on each other in order for its survival.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
But then you get to a point where there is too much, there is too much growth, there's more than the forest can sustain. And this is when you see things like rapid changes or collapse, something like a forest fire, or something else that dramatically changes the system. It creates sort of a clean forest floor and new opportunities for other things to grow, for new plants and for opportunistic growth in the rebel and the decay from the forest fire. So this panarchy cycle is sort of like a life cycle, and it helps us to understand stages of growth and stages of collapse, and how they go together to help shape and create complex systems. Originally, it was conceptualized in 1860, the panarchy cycle, by Paul de Puydt, but it grows out of indigenous knowledge. And if you think about it in terms of a plant life cycle or a forest like cycle, this is something that indigenous elders had been talking about for millennia, and it's a way of understanding the world.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
So if we understand that systems never stay the same, as Octavia Butler says, "All that you touch, you Change. All that you change, changes you." If systems never stayed the same and they're constantly in states of flux and change, how do we understand where we are in the cycle? How do we help influence change in a certain kind of way? And how do we make sure that we are those plants that are growing in the forest after debris, in order to build a new forest. So you can sort of understand it through the panarchy cycle. It's a really great way of understanding complex systems change.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
As an activist, I mean I've studied systems forever. So this idea that things don't stay the same forever is something that we know to be true. And as an activist, I'm very excited about the possibility right now because we are in a state of collapse. The system has grown and grown and grown and grown and grown and mushroomed, and now it can no longer sustain itself in part because of capitalism not working as the way that it used to, in part because of climate change, in part because of all of these things. And now we're seeing this COVID-19 crisis, so we're seeing the system right now in this state of collapse, and something new is about to grow. And we don't know what that new thing is, but I'm really excited to find out.
Lauren Ruffin:
If you were to, and I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with another good friend of mine who is in Ottawa, and he was talking about, we're not going to go back to normal, and things aren't all going to open up all at once. Do you have a prediction for what happens at the end of the cycle or end? I guess, now that I'm saying at the end of the cycle, how do we know when we're at the end of a cycle?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
It's really hard to tell where exactly you are the cycle at any given moment.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Just because there's often multiple things happening at any given time, that's the complexity of it. But we are definitely at the rapid, the sort of reorganization phase, where things are changing and about to become something different. The hopeful part of me, the person who wants a better world, the person who wants us all to be free. I would hope that what would emerge after this, is a society that looks a bit different than it did before, that wasn't so reliant on capitalism as its main structure, because we know so many people are being left out. So many people don't have access to the resources that they need to survive and thrive under capitalism. So my hope would be that we have a different system, where there could still be trade and there could still be exchange, and all of those wonderful things that we've grown to love, but that it wasn't rooted in a monetary system that created a class structure where some people have and some people don't have.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
So my hope would be that when we reorganize our society, through this adaptive change moment that we're in, when we come back, we have things like what we're talking about now on the table in Canada, this idea of a universal basic income. In some places where they didn't have standardized healthcare, now they're seriously considering standardized healthcare. Like in the States, wouldn't it be wonderful if we emerged from this with standardized healthcare for all. And some of the sort of resources that are out there that would allow everybody to be able to be free and to survive and thrive. So I'm hopeful of that. At the very least, I think we're going to emerge from this as a society of people who have recognized that a lot of things that we do in public could be done from home. And I love science fiction, I love science fiction.
Lauren Ruffin:
Me too.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
And I love Star Trek.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yes.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
I confess to be a, not even in the closet Trekkie, fully out and marching at the front of the parade.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yes.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
But one of the things that I loved about that, was that there was this episode once where they had these people who had been frozen in the 1990s, and they get woken up in a pod and end up on the Enterprise. And they're like, "But what do you guys do for work?" And Captain Picard is like, "We all have all of the resources we need to survive, so we spend our time doing the things that we're interested in." And I was like, "There you go." That's it. That's what I would love to come out of this, is that we all had what we needed to survive and we were able to spend our time doing the things that were most interesting to us. Wouldn't that be a wonderful outcome that would come out of this?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
And that, in part, will happen if we have more time because we're not commuting and flying all over the world and commuting for work and all of those things. If we were able to continue some of this work from home practices, we'd be allowed to maybe use our time in a different way. And that makes me really excited.
Lauren Ruffin:
Have you watched Picard or Discovery?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Of course. Oh yes, of course. Oh yes.
Lauren Ruffin:
So good.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
And my daughter is really into it too, and on Thursdays, it's just very exciting.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
We have to do something in a pandemic, right? So why not binge watch Star Trek?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Exactly. I went all the way back and started watching Enterprise again.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Great.
Lauren Ruffin:
So it's sort of on in the background while I'm working during the day.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah. There's so many possibilities. And so when you think about sort of speculative fiction and Octavia Butler and Star Trek and all of these things that sort of suggest a future, one of the common things that I think that we look to in those stories is this future where we all basically have more free time, and we're able to do the things that we want to survive.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I think about The Jetsons all the time. Watching that as a kid, I'm like, "When do we get to where they are?" Isn't that supposed to be happening now?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Totally.
Tim Cynova:
Syrus, about a month ago you tweeted, this was as people were starting to self quarantine, quarantine, shelter in place, you tweeted something, a message saying, "Disabled people know how to survive in these times and throughout social distancing. I've got so many messages from folks doing check-ins and supporting each other behind the scenes in these hard times and it's F-in beautiful." One of the things we've talked about is how, what Lauren and I have talked about with guests, is how things that were previously too expensive or too difficult to do, online gatherings, things that had to be done in 3D in office, are now suddenly possible or people are realizing that they're now possible. However, people have been doing this work, organizations have been doing the work around this for years. And I'm wondering if you could talk about some of the organizations, some of the people that you work with that you know, who have been really doing the work of making places, making workplaces, making gatherings inclusive and accessible.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah, I mean we can turn to disability justice and disability activism right now and sort of figure out what are some of the best practices because disabled folks have been doing this forever. We've been calling and we've been Zooming in for a while because for a variety of reasons we can't always go in person to things. And it is, I mean it was really beautiful when the crisis first began, the ways that disabled people check up on each other is something that everybody can practice. Reach out to that person that you haven't spoken to in a while and just say, "Oh, by the way, Hey, how are you? Do you have all that you need to survive, to thrive?" I think that there's a lot of possibilities there. I mean there's some amazing and incredible work coming out of the States.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. If folks aren't familiar with their work, she is an author and a playwright and a performer and an activist, and one of the folks who helped to start Sins Invalid, which is the disability justice arts incubator based out of the Bay Area. And Leah has created a mutual aid, Google Drive, with all sorts of resources in there about mutual aid, collective care, supporting each other through a crisis, everything that you would need to know. I think she calls it a half-ass disability prepper guide, in there for how to prepare for any emergency, so there's just so many resources in there, that's amazing, that I would definitely suggest folks check out. Also, Stacey Melbourne has done some amazing work, again out of the Bay Area, around disability collectives, supporting and caring for each other. Anything that Sins Invalid is doing I think is incredible. There's so many resources out there, but I would start with Leah's mutual aid pack just because it's a really good place to kind of get your toes wet if you're just starting to get involved in how to build community care webs.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
There's a really great resource in there by Rebel Sidney Black about pod mapping and how you can map who's in your pod, who you're looking out for, who's looking out for you, who are your immediate circle, and then who's the tertiary circle just outside of that and outside of that. And how you would draw in those people if you needed them, if you did get COVID-19, if you were trying to not get COVID-19, and how you would sort of tap on those shoulders. So there's some great stuff out there. Again, I would just turn to some of the brilliant disability activists who can show us the way in these times.
Lauren Ruffin:
I've been following a lot of that work online. I feel like I learned so much from disability activists, and I'm 100% with you. Well one, has your sort of way of working changed besides crafting with your daughter, in every way possible, has your way of working change at all?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I didn't mention that I love to do is that I am a DJ, and I've been deejaying with, and helping to put on a black arts festival called Blackorama for 22 years, here in the city. It's part of Pride. It's the largest stage of Pride, it's the biggest stage of Pride. I love it and I just DJ throughout the year too, but my main focus is on Blackorama. And what we've seen now in this new world that we're in, is the emergence of the online Zoom dance party.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
And I just deejayed for an Aries themed one on Saturday and, oh my goodness, I actually think I prefer deejaying from home. I actually prefer it. It's so nice to be in a party and people are there and you can see them dancing and you can see them moving. But I actually prefer, I did it from my bedroom. I just played the songs that I wanted to play. I could see people in their little squares having their little one-two, boogeying and it was wonderful. So I definitely been changing the way that I've been working. Deejaying from home is wonderful. I've had a lot of Zoom calls like this with collaborators all over, artists who I have met through, I travel a lot, I'm a very, very busy traveler. My art practice keeps me on the road a lot. And so I go to a lot of different places and meet people who I would love to collaborate with, but there's never time. And so right now there's time. And so I've been having all of these Zoom calls and connections to build collaboration plans going forward with folks in Australia and in Zurich, and in all over, the places that I've met with collaborators. So that also feels like a really exciting moment right now, is that there's just potential for collaboration across distance in new ways than we would've otherwise done before. And that feels really exciting.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I went to a dive bar last night and listened to one of my favorite artists on Zoom, Asha Santee. She's a DC based, pretty fantastic. I was like, this is exactly how an introvert should party.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah, it's incredibly better than being at the awkward part of, I mean to actually go out. I mean put on pants and go out and stand in a line, come on.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. As a recent non-drinker, I really don't want to be around people. I don't have enough niceness in there to be out in a bar anymore.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
But at home, you could have your hot chocolate, you can just boogey down.
Lauren Ruffin:
It's like, grab my little non-alcoholic beer and kept it moving. It was great.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
It's great. It's really great.
Tim Cynova:
This is the conversation that I needed to start my week. This is really amazing, you two. One of the things we're hearing is about the overload though, of connecting online. Whereas it is amazing, I've been doing this with my own friends who I haven't seen for months, to connect on Zoom. But then it becomes a Zoom meeting, after Zoom cocktails, after Zoom dance party, and then a FaceTime. And then you're like, my whole day has been in front of this screen in this chair. Syrus, how do you approach this? How do you approach your self care and resilience in this time?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah, I think so much of it again, goes back to drawing on disability justice. So like what do we need to know in order to have a good day and to sort of thrive in our day? And so we know that as many times as we take breaks, we probably should be taking 10 times as many breaks as we take. All those times when you feel tired and feel like you need to take a nap because it is so draining staring at a screen all day, and under the normal capitalist system and our busy lives, we normally just say, "No, I'll nap later." No, nap now actually. Nap when you can nap. Take breaks when you can take breaks. Like these are strategies that we learned from just then. You mentioned in my bio when we did the cycle, it was a curated program trying to understand how to crip theater. And so in theater it's such a command performance. You have to go on stage, you have to perform, it's opening night.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
And we were trying to say, well what would happen if we did it from a disability frame? What if we took longer breaks? What if we took more breaks? What if we rehearsed by Zoom? What if we didn't always have to be there on opening night? And sort of imagining other ways. So I think we can kind of draw on those strategies and say, okay, how do we take more breaks? How do we build in more bubble bath time, more stare at the sky time, more watch paint dry time, because those things allow us to kind of rejuvenate and enliven ourselves. Similar to that panarchy cycle, we are a complex system and we go through periods of growth, and we go through periods of collapse. And we are also complex systems and we need rejuvenation time. We need that forest fire and then the breath after it, where we can kind of rejuvenate and gather what we need to gather in order to go into the next thing.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
And I think if you're doing Zoom all day, you need to build in a lot of love time and care time and nap time in order to be able to continue doing that. And then also to say that we are getting a crash course on what it is to be alone. And for a lot of disabled people who require attendant care in order to even get out of their beds, being alone is something that we've practiced, that we've had to practice. And I think that we have a lot that we can share of how to get through long stretches of time alone, because maybe you don't need to fill your day with Zoom catch-ups. Maybe there's one day a week where you're just alone and that that's okay. And to figure out ways to be comfortable being alone and just sort of having that quiet alone time. Again, we can draw from that. So I would say again, check out those collective care strategies and we can figure this out together.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. That was one of the things that resonated with me with the panarchy cycles was, once you learn it, then you realize that it's not just one. You pointed this out, like each one of us have that. And then you start to layer them together and then our organization has that, and then our sector has that, and our world has that and our city has that. And you get to see just how complex this is and how you might be in one part, but the people on your team might be in another part. And then the tensions around those things and what you're dealing with. It was quite resonant to me and I'm really thankful to you and the rest of the Banff team who included that. I feel bad every time I go to Banff, I'm like, I think I learn more than I'm giving, but hopefully it's at least like net neutral here. That really was powerful framework.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
The cycles can be nested into themselves exponentially and in an infinite way. So you never know where someone is in that cycle. I mean sometimes we don't even know where we are in the cycle because we're in a state of flux. But yeah, absolutely.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's way messier than some of the other sort of organizational development. Like ways people think about it, like you've got, who was it, Tuckman, who's like, "Groups get together and then you're norming and your storming and forming and performing." And it seems that we're all moving at the same pace as individuals, and that all organizations go through those cycles. But I do like the sort of chaos in this and I love it, of course, it's panarchy. But it really works for me.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah, I don't know if there's a possibility to show images, but we can always post. There's a beautiful image of this forest rejuvenation that helps to kind of, I'm drawing it, but imagine an infinity symbol as sort of how panarchy works.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Yeah. But the organizational development stuff that we typically think about happens in a really, really orderly way. And the other thing about the forest cycle is, and living in the Southwest now, wildfire can happen anytime. Or you could be going way past your typical cycle and a wildfire hits. I'm also thinking about in your personal cycle, have you had that moment where you felt like things were going pretty well, besides this pandemic? I mean I feel like we all go through it, but once you get smacked by something, how do you stay resilient in sort of picking yourself back up and then stay within your mind to be able to know where you are in that cycle? Or how to get back on cycle?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah, totally. I mean it helps to remember that this is a natural thing. I mean part of why I am so drawn to the panarchy cycle as a concept is that it's something to hold onto when you're in the middle of the storm and you're being battered all over, is that you know that things are changing and that they're going to continue to change. I mean, this is what Octavia Butler was saying in Parable of the Sower, "All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you." Touch change, shape change, change is the only constant. To be able to hold onto the fact that this is part of a cycle and that you will come out of it, there are these two four loops and ground loops that sort of growth and then collapse and that you will get to the next part, is something to hold onto. I actually had the opportunity to have lunch with Octavia Butler and-
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, we can end it all now.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
And spend the day with her. And I asked her how she was able to sort predict the future in the way that she did, and how she was able to kind of imagine these worlds. And she just basically said, "If you just continue on the trajectory that we're going on right now, it's very easy to imagine the collapse and the fall, and the rise and the collapse." I mean this is just something that happens again and again and again. And so she felt that she wasn't predicting the future. She was just saying, if we continue on this road with no changes, this is the direction we're going in. So she understood systems change and system thinking and wrote it into her books.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I stumbled upon her relatively late in life, like in my 30s. And I've always been like a sci-fi reader. I feel like I cracked Parable of the Sower. I'm afraid of violence, which is weird. In my real life, fine, but I can't read about it or watch it on television. So I felt like I picked it up and just kept putting it back down. I owned it and I finally read it in my early 30s, and it was life changing.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Yeah. If folks haven't read it, I mean what a time to read Parable of the Sower. This is the time to read it. But it's really about a society that's right at the moment of collapse and that it's been in a steady decline, but now they're at the bottom of that collapse loop. And the main character, Lauren Olamina, without realizing it, she's actually planting the seeds for the forest that's about to grow.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Yeah.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
And it's amazing.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I would say her and then Broken Earth trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin. There's another one that's sort of, as I'm thinking about putting panarchy cycles into some of my favorite reads. Jemisin's talking about sort of how the earth heaves and breaks apart and separates, and I mean that whole story is about cycles of growth and change.
Tim Cynova:
Oh well, we have to land the planet at sometime people.
Lauren Ruffin:
Are you really drawing the image?
Tim Cynova:
I did, but I'll post a link to it. It'll be easy for people to explore because I found a lot of images and I was wary that I might cut off our live feed if I start poking around too much. So in the interest of keeping the conversation going, we'll just post a link to it. Syrus, what are some of your thoughts as we close our time together today?
Syrus Marcus Ware:
I just want to say we are going to survive this. We are going to make it through this stronger and better. All of the things that we were doing when we were sort of imagining these prefigurative politics, we were imagining these future worlds that were possible. Now is the time to try to put those plans into action. We have the possibility of building a world where we all get to be free and where we all get to thrive. And I can't wait to get involved in organizing to try to make that happen.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
When we come out of this, we're going to come out of this different and I hope that we come out of this better than ever. I am so thankful, Tim, to have had the chance to work alongside you at Banff, and to have learned from you. And it's so great to meet you and just to be able to be part of this conversation, and to know that I'm standing shoulder to shoulder from my apartment to your apartment trying to make the world a better place. We're going to come out of this stronger and better, and I can't wait.
Tim Cynova:
It's been an absolutely wonderful morning with you, Syrus. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Syrus Marcus Ware:
Thank you.
Tim Cynova:
Continue the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live adventure with us on our next episode, when we're joined by Gail Crider, President and CEO at National Arts Strategies. Miss us in the meantime, you can download more Work. Shouldn't. Suck. episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co. If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review in iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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