Note: I first encountered the notion of becoming dexterous in the activity of power and love from Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change. He drew inspiration from Martin Luther King.
“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change…. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with the resignation of power and power with the denial of love. Now we’ve got to get this thing right. What [we need to realize is] that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr. “Where do we go from here?” I came across Kahane’s outlining of the need for facilitators and leaders to balance power and love when I was still a maturing practitioner in the fields of dialogue, conflict resolution, and leadership development. The simplicity of this polarity-that-must-not-be-a-polarity provoked the kind of “aha” that is exhaled when a cognitive frame slips easily into some slot of experiential being. While Kahane builds his developmental model for the integration of power and love with a kinetic metaphor of movement – a narrative development from falling, through stumbling, walking, and culminating with the intensely hopeful phrase of “stepping forward” – I absorbed his and MLK’s insight in terms of language. My dialogue and conflict resolution work was fundamentally about communication and a colleague used the phrase “bilingual in the languages of power and love” and that phrase found its perfect slot in my being of words. Now, as I have shifted into being a writer, a new kind of trader in words, I find myself viewing and understanding the balancing of power and love as a whole body effort of kinetic, emotional, and verbal actions (and stillness) in relation to others. When I first encountered it, the beauty of King-to-Kahane’s model of power and love was immediately relevant to every relationship in my life, every situation in which I made choices about assertion and reception, assertion and empathy. It gave me permission to be, consciously and often delightedly, both powerful and loving: as a parent, a spouse, a friend, a colleague, a boss, a subordinate. In some cases, the choices and balance were easier and more obvious than in others. Looking beyond myself, looking for ambidexterity with power and love in our leaders, I found that the larger the scale, the more diffuse and tertiary the relationships, the higher the stakes in terms of gain and loss, the more complicated and difficult the balance. In fact, for leaders of large, complex entities, it is not just one balance, it is many little (often counteracting) balances, except in the core of the single person. The greatest leaders develop and maintain that ambidexterity deep within themselves despite inevitable imbalances in particular relationships and actions. Of course, I’m thinking and writing about this because we are in the midst of a crucial election in which we will choose a leader whose actions will shape the lives of millions. The European Union is already struggling with the desperation and pathos of numerous refugees, the aggressive nativism of longtime residents, and the shape-shifting enmity of diversely disaffected peoples who are recruited, or drawn by, a reactionary cult that calls itself Islamic. In this context, today’s March 22, 2016 attacks in Brussels heighten the will to power in both ordinary people and in leaders. More than ever “love” feels anemic and “power” risks abuse and reckless escalation. As people closer to us – in distance and cultural formation – are killed cruelly, those who have been similarly killed in Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, so many elsewheres, become even more faceless, and yet responses – balancing power and love – to any one of these acts of violence must be articulated with responses – balancing power and love – to all the other places and people affected by related acts of violence. In the midst of global outrage and the lengthening grief of real people, I find myself asking: are European leaders marshaling their whole bodies and full brains (brain stem, limbic brain, cerebral cortex) for ambidexterity with power and love? And what can we do to allow and encourage our own leaders, our not-too-distantly-to-be-new-President, to do the same?
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The Miami debate was largely a good one for Sanders and largely poor (or at least mediocre) for Clinton who was asked the tougher questions, got on the defensive, and made disingenuous, counter-productive attacks on Sanders. She’s been better. So has he. Her best response at the debate got no play from the media that I’ve seen: her direct, personal response to the Central American woman with five children. She sounded genuine (I think she was) and hit all the right notes, directly acknowledging the woman’s courage in speaking and her commitment and struggle in taking care of her five children on her own, and responding to the woman’s question about reunification in a personal way – sympathetic, related to a policy frame, but without over-promising. In contrast, to my ear, Sanders got the family relationships mixed up and sounded like a distant savior who would solve all such problems of all such people.
The above was one of three things that stood out for me at the debate. The other two were videos: one a video that Clinton mentioned, the other a video that was actually shown and discussed. The video that was named is a supposed Koch brothers’ video that supports Sanders. Clinton raised it in a clumsy way that suggested that Sanders and the Koch brothers are in cahoots in some way. Of course he is not, and I am assuming she knows this. If this video does exist and I have seen nothing to suggest that it does not, the more significant question is why are the Koch brothers behind such a video? Well, of course, because at this point they want to suggest that Sanders is better than Clinton. In the long run, does anyone think that the Koch brothers care, that they would prefer Sanders to any of the Republican candidates? Of course not. Which brings me to the second video, the one of Sanders talking about Cuba and Nicaragua. Leave aside, for the moment, whether you support his ideas or not, and ask why the Koch brothers are not showing this video. Now, even if you agree with Sanders’ ideas, do you think that more than fifty percent of the U.S. electorate will buy those ideas? Holding the above question, consider a recent headline from The Nation which says that the way that Trump can defeat Clinton is by attacking her from the left and from the right. If Trump and Clinton do end up becoming the nominees, Trump may try that, but for the most part the left (even those who dislike Clinton) will close ranks against him. It is now that Clinton is being effectively hammered from the left and the right; The Nation’s headline is simply extrapolating from what is happening now. Meanwhile Sanders is being (largely) supported by the further left, supported or getting a pass from the center-left (many of them Clinton supporters like me, but who like or at least don’t dislike Sanders), and mostly ignored by the right. If Sanders becomes the nominee, we know that every rock in his life will be turned over. Trump’s phrase, “our communist friend,” will become more virulent, with interviews and speeches quoted and televised as evidence. The right will easily be mobilized against him. The left will unify behind him. Videos like the one on Cuba and Nicaragua will be used to sway the center – the big question is how large is that center? And will the Republican nominee re-fashion himself enough to appeal to that center? Both Clinton and Sanders are flawed candidates. Clinton is clumsy-to-disingenuous from time to time (not always, but sometimes with more unnerving frequency than other times); an incrementalist who is mostly quite comfortable with status quo institutions and laws, though she believes they could be better; and a foreign-policy hawk (who, if she is in office, I hope will be tempered by more sensible advisers and the legislature and public holding her accountable). She has these flaws, and, over the last twenty or so years of ambitious political efforts, has become an easy and favorite target, both through her own making and through the efforts of political adversaries. So every mistake she makes is hugely amplified, while Sanders’ mistakes seem minor in the light of his more inspiring aura of revolutionary change and genuineness. Sanders is selling a populist fantasy, one that provokes and inspires change in many wonderful ways (I do think his campaign has the potential to be a game-changer in U.S. politics!), but his political range is very limited, his legislative record is stunningly incrementalist (much stronger in amendments than bills; apparently only three of his bills were passed, two of which were for changing names of post offices), and his knowledge of foreign policy is limited and naïve (admittedly his foreign policy naiveté could lead to a freshness; I’m just not sure he has the strategic suppleness to leverage the freshness). Of course, I will support Sanders if he becomes the nominee, but I do worry that he would lose to the Republican candidate. Before the Miami debate, I had worried more that, as President, he would not be able to deliver on his promises. After the two videos, I am worried about his electability. An aside: I would love to see a Clinton-Warren ticket, and I was rather appalled at the way Sanders’ supporters excoriated Warren for not endorsing him before the Massachusetts primary. I’m not sure Clinton is risk-taking enough to do it, and I’m not sure Warren would want to do it, but if they could work together, they could push U.S. policy-making into very interesting new territory. I came to the US in late August 1980. In early September, my pocket was picked while I waited for a bus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was distressed for all the obvious reasons, and even more so because I was in the US and I’d never had my pocket picked in India! Most of the people around me looked uninterestedly sympathetic. Someone suggested I call the police. When the police came, they were large men, one light-skinned and one dark-skinned. One of them, I don’t remember which, asked me if I had caught sight of the pickpocket. I said I thought it was a tall man who had been right behind me in the throng, who walked away in the moments before I noticed my wallet was gone. The policeman asked, “What color was he?” I gaped at him, thinking green and blue. He looked at me. This was a college town. I was clearly a foreign student, fresh off the boat. “Black or white?” he asked.
That was my first direct encounter with the peculiar taxonomy of colored people – white or black – in the United States. Others, at least in the very late 20th century and early 21st century, don’t have color: they are either Native Americans or immigrants with some ethnic identity. I knew the term “Red Indians” from movies and novels, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a real person use that color designation about another person; nor have I ever directly heard a person described as a “yellow”(-colored) man or woman. In the early weeks of that fall, I sat at the dining hall table that had only dark-skinned young women around it, several of whom were lighter than me; and I discovered that I couldn’t affiliate simply because they and I shared the same color range. FOB and young that I was, I didn’t understand that color was the superficial indicator for a much more deeply alienating taxonomy. After 35 years in this country, and now American myself, I am still learning. Today I, fuzzily and somewhat fearfully (because every word on color in the US is potentially hurtful), see “white or black” as the division between a category of people who have held the standard for voice and authority in the US, whether used poetically, violently, patronizingly, or just nicely, and another category of people who have struggled for authority, whether over their lives, relationships, or words.* This is not about individuals, whether black or white, who may struggle more, or less, depending to a very significant degree on their class background and access to the educational resources and habits of the upper classes. This is about a pernicious typology that makes the experience of one profoundly different from the experience of the other, such that the same words spoken by one and the other have cultural and emotional referents that are different. I was stimulated to write this post by a chance thought: what if Macklemore, with his White Privilege II, and Morgan Parker, with her poem “If You Are Over Staying Woke” were to chat. I’d hazard that no other white American could listen more carefully than Macklemore, and, yet, I would speculate that some core of Morgan Parker would not feel heard. I would guess that Parker would appreciate Macklemore’s honest speaking out as a powerful ally, and I wonder if she would hear patronage, regardless of his self-conscious intention to avoid being patronizing. As I write this, I’m deciding that just leaving the song and the poem side by side may be more effective than a direct conversation. Placing them side by side allows more space around each as well as space between, in which meaning can be heard, said, felt, witnessed, and created without being narrowed by the potential politenesses and pedantry of a conversation. These thoughts are at the surface of a messy confusion in my mind, the mind of a minority brown woman in the US who lived her formative years as a class-privileged member of the majority community in India, and therefore, to a significant degree, has a majoritarian mindset (i.e. oblivious to its own fundamental assumption of standard). I find myself both assimilating to the majoritarian mindset of white America, and spitting it out as I find it resonating with current and deep histories of injustice and cruelty. It’s easy for me to spit it out because I am a brown woman, I’m not white. But am I simply using my brownness as an alibi, pretending my majoritarian equanimity is brown Indian equanimity? Of course, there are surely instances when the majoritarian mindset of white America spits me out, but my own majoritarian mindset, along with class privilege, allows me to be oblivious. These thoughts, questions, my confusion, have increased in recent years as #blacklivesmatter raps insistently on my eyes and ears for attention; as I’ve developed deeper friendships with African-Americans; and as I’ve found and read more African-American writing. So where is my increased awareness, which is the other side of my confusion, taking me? In general, to curiosity, to dialogue, to protests, to expressions of solidarity, to Twitter and FB activism, to voting choices. In this blog post, it takes me to revealing my naiveté and confusion. I’m still learning. I care, and learning is one way to make that caring count. * As African-Americans have struggled for authority and voice, they have suffered violation and loss, but they have also produced great beauty (writing, art, music, performance) and extraordinary moral leadership, not just for Americans, but for all humans. As someone who leans Democrat and leans liberal (which should not come as a surprise to anyone who reads my blog), I am paying minimal attention to the Republican field of candidates for President. I’m going to vote in the Democratic primary in California and, realistically, I am almost certainly going to vote Democrat in the fall election. The only reason I don’t drop the almost is because nothing is certain until it is certain. All these words to underline that I am paying attention mainly to Clinton and Sanders. And, right here, already, I find myself irritated at my own twingy inclination to say Hillary Clinton, as if a reader in 2016 could understand the “Clinton campaign” to mean a “Bill Clinton campaign.”
In 2008, most observers agreed that Bill Clinton was overall a liability to Clinton’s campaign that year. In my recollection, his negative effect was attributed primarily to specific missteps, though some people did comment that Clinton needed to separate from Bill’s shadow. Today when I read about Trump’s jabs at Bill Clinton’s role in what Trump mocks as Clinton’s feminist campaign, I end up (despite myself!) agreeing, somewhat, with Trump. Let me be clear. I do not feel that Clinton is, or should be, smeared by her husband’s past sexual history. The public aspect of his sexual history is his problem, his responsibility. The private aspect is between them, none of my business. But I do believe that Clinton’s using her husband to campaign for her diminishes her candidacy. In 2016, President Bill Clinton is history, regardless of whether one looks back at that history as good or bad. Both my children will vote this year; both were babies when he was last President. His authority is from a past that, for the purposes of this election, is only hazily known to many and irrelevant to many others. In 2016, few people will vote for Clinton because Bill Clinton is her spouse. Indeed, I hope nobody would vote for Clinton because Bill Clinton is her husband. Bill Clinton is an extraordinarily well-informed and strategic person, and so it makes complete sense that he is an influential member of her kitchen cabinet, but, as a political voice, he needs to stay in the kitchen and similar private spaces. On the campaign trail, his only public role is as a supportive spouse. Fifteen years after his second term, he is still an accomplished and active man with his own pursuits. He should stick to them; give advice in kitchen-like spaces; and clap and smile on the campaign trail. So far Clinton appears the most competent candidate of either party, and the most likely to be effective in rebuilding the center that the US sorely needs to redefine, based on new demographics, and strengthen, given contemporary geopolitical and environmental challenges. In another blog post I have written about Sanders – that I like and respect him and hope he will hold continue to hold his fellow politicians accountable. Indeed, I hope all his supporters will continue to hold their elected representatives accountable, whether he becomes President or not. But fundamentally I don’t think he would be effective even in achieving his vision, leave alone building the robust, twenty-first century socio-political center that the US needs. I think Clinton can do it; I’m not passionately confident that she can (and, yes, I know her reputation as a polarizer), but I think she can. And I, we, need to hold her accountable too. I cut her some slack on the email slip-up (sloppy, but no great damage), and also on the Foundation shenanigans (overconfidence and lack of adequate oversight; not great, but still a relatively small slip-up). I partially looked away when I heard about the funds she got from the private prison lobby (that hurt; but then, thankfully, she repudiated them!) Now, I find myself distrustful of her use of Bill Clinton as a political speaker on her campaign trail. The Clinton name gave her huge name recognition, with both positive effects and a lot of negative baggage, in the early years of her political career. Since then she has worked very, very hard to build her own credentials and credibility. Today, she is so well able to stand on her own; we saw that most stunningly in the Benghazi hearings. Her kitchen cabinet, though certainly subject to judgement by me and other voters, is for the most part her own business. But, in public, Clinton muddling in Clinton’s campaign puts her authority, both perceived and real, at risk. What do you do when a city you love is cruelly attacked? Paris is not the only city that has been cruelly attacked this millennium, this decade, this year, this month. Think of Beirut, Baghdad, Lahore, Nairobi, New York…. These are cities whose attackers claimed to be true Muslims, and yet they are a miniscule fraction of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, most of whom do not participate in or support these attacks. Apart from these “Islamist” attacks, there are hundreds of places all over the world where people are subject to cruel attacks by non-Muslim people, mostly in the pursuit of money and power. So cruel attacks, whether by “Islamists” or not, are commonplace (how do I write a sentence like that so calmly?!). Why, then, am I stricken by today’s tragedy in Paris and what do I do about it?
For people who live in Paris, this tragedy means that people they know are hurt – some are dead – and places they know are splattered with blood. Their hearts are broken in an immediate way. That cannot be the case for me. I’m in San Diego, and I haven’t been to Paris in years. But I’m stricken all the way in San Diego because I know Paris. It is the most beautiful city I know, which may seem irrelevant in the face of humans being mass-murdered but I cannot think of Paris without seeing its beauty; I cannot imagine anyone there who is not shaped by the beauty of Paris (even if negatively because they feel excluded from it). And the beauty of Paris is not a static, plastic beauty nor an archaic, lifeless beauty. The beauty of Paris comes alive because it is a vibrant world city, in which you hear languages, see art, listen to music from all the populated continents. It’s a city in which I can easily imagine myself, my family, and any of you, including refugees from warfare,“Islamist terrorism,” drought, and extreme poverty. Its beauty comes alive because so much living – walking, eating, painting, arguing, loving, laughing, playing, kissing, self-adorning, thinking, critiquing, mocking – happens in public, in a way that I have enjoyed and I love. Parisians are often offhand, grouchy, and snotty; they can be racist and bigoted; but they can also be charming, enlightening, loving, and very, very kind. The wonderful thing about Paris, and France in general, is that to a very significant degree one can hold them to liberté, egalité, fraternité. That ethos has inspired great heroism, and that ethos made me brave when I walked into uncaring offices or unfriendly cafés. So when Paris is attacked, it feels personal, not gut-wrenchingly immediate as it feels to people in Paris, but personal because I’ve lived some of what Paris is, I’ve absorbed some of its spirit. I’ve laughed with and loved some of its people, I’ve been inspired by its heroines and heroes, I’ve been intellectually challenged by strangers, I’ve argued with its officials, gosh some part of me is in Paris and some part of Paris is in me. And the attacks in Paris don’t make me forget the attacks in other cities, other places. Somehow they bring those other attacks into sharper focus. There was life – living, loving, laughing, arguing, excluding, including, self-aggrandizing, self-adorning, with beauty, grouchiness, bigotry, kindness, grieving – in those places too. So what now? I’m mourning, angry. For the first time in years, perhaps ever, I think, “war, this is an act of war.” Perhaps because of what Paris stood for in World War II? Less fancifully, perhaps because this attack follows a string of possibly linked attacks in different countries on different peoples? But if this is war, who exactly are we (Americans, the French, the “Allies”) fighting and how? If it’s ISIS, it operates like a cult, how do you fight a cult? In the long-run with social-psychological resistance and safeguards. In the short run? Must we acquiesce to the curtailing of civil liberties, the blanket “other-ing” of whole groups of people? Must we narrow and regulate our kindness? If it’s Al Qaeda, who is Al Qaeda today? And how does fighting Al Qaeda feed ISIS? The option that is perhaps most logical is also the hardest to activate – supporting true (not puppet) alternatives that, inspiringly and powerfully, will draw acolytes’ attention away from the lures of Al Qaeda and ISIS. It’s the most difficult option and also long-term, so in the short-term, what? There has to be something. This won’t go away easily, not on its own. A post-script, a reminder to myself: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Martin Luther King, Jr. (Parenthetically, the picture on my blog page is of graffiti in Paris, as is the picture on my “about” page.) In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty tries to find an economic driver of structural inequality that might be amenable to policy control; he finds that capital income contributes strikingly to increasing inequality and that, potentially though not easily, its effects can be reduced by tax policy. Most discussions of his book focus on his academic work of data gathering, analysis, and theory-building.
A second intention gets less attention. This is the intention to engage directly in public discourse: not simply informing public discourse, nor simply a written form of public speaking, but seeing himself and his work as direct participants in a marketplace that includes ordinary, not-scholarly, not-official people and, presumably, their language and ideas. “Social scientists, like all intellectuals and all citizens, ought to participate in public debate…. It is illusory, I believe, to think that the scholar and the citizen live in separate moral universes, the former concerned with means and the latter with ends.” For me, the charm and importance of his work, well beyond the competence of his (and his team’s) data-gathering, analysis, and theory-building, derives from this engagement, unabashedly personal, with a systemic moral universe that includes the scholar and the citizen. I started reading Piketty’s Capital around the same time that I read the transcript of Marilynne Robinson’s conversation with Barack Obama, and immediately promised myself that I would write this post, because Robinson and Obama’s conversation has the same quality of ranging outside the lines of conventional or official categories. In a back-and-forth that comfortably meanders from careful phrases to sentences that try to capture a truth so intensely they immediately reveal their own limits, then on to rambling words strung together thinking-out-loud, Robinson and Obama discuss the importance and meaning of Christianity in Robinson’s life and writing, the language and role of Christianity in contemporary politics, the gap between ordinary decency and mean-spirited politics, and race in the US, among other things. It’s not that such discussions are unusual or that the content is extraordinary; what is remarkable is the ease with which Robinson and Obama make the ordinary* commute with intellectual, author, President, in a public conversation. So, why am I writing this post? Because I was invigorated by Piketty’s, Robinson’s and Obama’s smudging beyond the boundaries of expertise and the lines of disciplinary language. I loved their engagement beyond the professionalization of their, and our, lives. In his book and in their conversation, these three people – Piketty, Robinson, and Obama – bring intellect into direct contact with ordinary life, in the public sphere. I hear their words bringing to the fore, in a wonderful way, an obvious but usually subdued understanding: that all people – social and political beings, whether “intellectual” or not – have equal stake in the moral universe that human society necessarily is. * here a noun Marilynne Robinson and Barack Obama chat on Sept 14, 2014 Part II of Robinson and Obama Chat I did not pay attention to Bernie Sanders much until the first Democratic debate on October 13, 2015. Watching him and listening to him at the debate I grew to like and respect him very, very much, and I understood why so many people love and support him. But I don’t think he should be President.
I want his voice to remain as clear and unambiguous as it is today. I want his message, which is fundamentally a moral message that unapologetically seeks equal access to wellbeing (or, as I would put it, equal access to beauty), to remain undiluted. As President, his voice would have, HAVE, to be ambiguous; and his message, of necessity, would be diluted. In our country today, the person who is President must be a politician who mixes strategy, glad-handing, compromise, power, and moral authority – the last as often kneaded by the first four as not. And s/he must be a competent CEO. Sanders may have the ability to configure himself for strategy, glad-handing, compromise, power, and management, but I don’t believe he has the personality, nor will he have the conditions (legislature; sufficient popular support), to retain the clarity of the moral message of his campaign and transform it into real legislation. That said, I want him to hold our politicians’ feet to the fire. I want him to continue to rouse our youth to hold their politicians accountable, particularly our Democratic politicians as they get elected. There are other issues. I think Sanders is less knowledgeable about world politics and economics than Clinton. Despite our country’s fascination with exceptionalism, it is now gravely, indeed crazily, important for the US Head of State to be fully aware of and nimbly curious about our increasingly obviously one world. Sanders rightly focuses on a limited message – the gross and growing inequality in our country and the outrageous political power of an appallingly wealthy minority. I want him, his supporters, and others to continue hammering out this message. But I want a President who combines comfort with the underground of politics with connections to and a ear for the moral voices that call for equal access to beauty. Is Hillary Clinton that person? I think she could be, if she allows herself to be, if she is supported and encouraged to be that leader. I think she has the capacity for it. But she is a topic for a different blog post. In 1997, I was asked, “Would you want to live in a country where the only people who have guns are the military and the police?” by an extraordinarily accomplished and politically centrist Indian-American lawyer who had grown up in Texas. I did not respond right away because I was sure it was a trick question. And then I stuttered. I couldn’t even argue because the question seemed to come from a completely unfamiliar world of knowledge and being. I remember my eyes goggling in my head while I tried to get a grip mentally.
Today, my eyes don’t goggle, though depending on my interlocutor, they may inquire, glare, or roll upwards. Today I am more practiced; more prepared to construct reedy arguments with statistics and political talking points; more patient. Until there is one more avoidable mass shooting. And then, simply-if-tritely, I’m like Dylan: How many times…? This is a plea, particularly to members of majority groups (in North America, Asia, Europe, anywhere).
My daughter, Milena, has explained very simply why, when the rights and dignity of a minority group are threatened, members of the majority group need to speak up: the minority group is already under threat. If the members of the majority group do not speak up, who will? It’s the same phenomenon as the bystander effect in bullying. If you are a member of a majority group, don’t let minority group members in your community and workplace be bullied. If you leave minority group members to speak up for themselves, their voices can get thinned, and then either they are not heard at all or they are heard as shrill and annoying. In a democracy, if you are a member of the majority group, you have the larger and louder voice. Use it, not to attack because then you invite counter-attack, and not simply to defend, because then you structurally can be shoved into the bullied group. Use your voice to engage with other majority and minority group members on the basis of values that are clearly more important to all than the usually fragile logic of bullies. Model the respect and dignity you would want for yourself and your family even with people – from the majority group or minority groups – that you fundamentally disagree with. Wherever you are, speak up, please. |
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