The Platform Is Yours
Seven Years of Change · A note on grief
My fellow Americans who still want to care simply because caring is the right thing to do: this is for you.
I write these words with a clear and sober mind. This morning, I practiced yoga, ate a healthy breakfast, and had a cup of coffee. I recognize that I am fortunate, even as I remain only one serious expense away from financial devastation.
When I was sixteen years old, I made a promise to myself about the kind of person I intended to become. Seven Years of Change is part of keeping that promise. It is my offering to Americans who choose to value the diversity, creativity, dignity, and innovation found among people of every background and in every corner of this country.
To those who have surrendered themselves to hatred, cruelty, and division, this message is not for you. Wake up and live. Listen to Bob Marley. He understood something essential about the deliberate choice to embrace life rather than participate in its destruction.
I stopped drinking on July 2, 2014. That decision saved my life.
Since then, I have survived three separate abdominal surgeries that resulted in the removal of approximately one meter of my intestines and part of my colon. I remain alive, in part, because I sacrificed my Arizona retirement pension to pay medical bills, purchase healthy food, and give my body the best possible chance to recover.
During that recovery, I received help from people with whom I have profound disagreements about America and how this country should operate. Their family has a long history of military service, including multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. I knew several of the uncles earlier in my life, and I later lived on property owned by the grandparents and parents of the family.
One member of that family was associated with the Proud Boys. I do not know whether he remains involved. I strongly reject what that organization represents, and most of the family’s political beliefs are far removed from my own.
But I will never deny, diminish, or dishonor the kindness they showed me.
We are veterans. We served the same country. Despite our political and cultural disagreements, they opened their property and their lives to me when I needed help. I have never forgotten that generosity, and I never will.
This experience represents part of who I am, and it reflects the reality of many mixed-race and multicultural Americans. We are living evidence that the American experiment can work. It does not work without conflict, honesty, accountability, compromise, effort, and sustained human concern. But it can work.
Seven Years of Change was built to accommodate this difficult and often contradictory American reality. People may disagree profoundly and still recognize one another’s humanity. They may reject one another’s political beliefs while continuing to honor genuine acts of kindness. They may oppose one another on serious questions while still working to protect families, children, elders, communities, and the natural world.
I would care for any member of that family, including the person whose political movement represents something 7YOC was designed to move beyond.
That is not surrender. It is not political agreement. It is not moral confusion.
It is the decision to remain human while refusing to construct our future around hatred, domination, humiliation, or revenge.
Something else happened when I woke this morning: I finally admitted how deeply this work has affected me.
After nearly thirty years of rejection, I no longer want to, and cannot, carry the responsibility of persuading people to listen. Those years have taught me something painful: many of the people who most need this message are not yet prepared to hear it.
I have deliberately reached out to individuals, organizations, and communities that I believe possess important pieces of the solution. I watched people gather at protests and marches for our shared humanity, yet I repeatedly saw temporary responses offered to permanent, structural problems.
I cannot fully explain the years of research, travel, observation, conversation, visitation, and reflection that went into Seven Years of Change. I can only hope the platform itself reveals the seriousness of that effort.
I learned from Somali, Vietnamese, and Hmong communities that created and sustained community gardens. I learned from Italian and Irish men, and from the Scots whose bagpipes and kilts drew me to Highland Games. My deep and lasting love for Polynesian and Filipino communities will never be diminished.
The warmth and acceptance I experienced among many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helped deepen my belief in caring for one another. I witnessed firsthand the care the church can provide to members in need. The question that stayed with me was simple: Why can we not build that level of care for everyone?
We can.
My life has also been shaped by my love for Central American and African communities, Muslims and Sikhs, Japanese culture, Northern European cultures, and the many Korean, Chinese, and other Asian traditions that have influenced how I understand family, discipline, service, creativity, and community.
I grew up speaking Russian and Hebrew in a community of other mixed-race and predominantly White children. I have been influenced by people from many cultures, religions, regions, and political traditions.
All are loved. All are also subject to the same moral judgment when they choose to carry hatred.
Stop it, all of us.
7YOC was intentionally designed as an open framework that people can take, adapt, improve, and build upon. Its ideas and concepts are free and open-source, gratis. Communities do not need to pay me or ask my permission to use what is helpful.
I will continue tightening the language and clarifying essential sections, but I am stepping back from the belief that I must personally carry the entire message forward.
You, and life itself, have shown me that I am not the person, and I am not the messenger. No single person can be.
I have paid to keep the website operating for the coming year. It will remain available to those who need it, those who recognize themselves in it, and those who are prepared to carry the work further.
What pains me is the extent to which our collective attention is consumed by foolishness, humiliation, conflict, spectacle, and the public destruction of other human beings. We watch films and television programs in which ordinary people protect one another, then walk outside and ignore the suffering visible in our own streets.
We may give money to one charity or many charities while continuing to participate in lifestyles and systems that extract from vulnerable people and pollute the planet at devastating levels.
Seven Years of Change was intentionally built for those who lack political influence, wealth, institutional access, or loud voices.
It was built for whales and seals, forests and oceans, birds and bees. It was built for children receiving treatment at the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, for children and families served by Shriners Children’s, and for every family struggling to remain whole through illness, disability, grief, uncertainty, and loss.
It is for people with intellectual, developmental, physical, and mental-health disabilities. It is for parents who have buried children and for children growing up without the people they love.
Our family buried my son on January 25, 2020. He was half Mexican, and his mother was from Sinaloa. I understand something of that pain and loss because I have lived it.
7YOC is for the nerds and the athletes, the quiet students and the loud band members, the artists and builders, the caregivers and farmers, the veterans and teachers, the workers and elders, and the young people who have not yet been told that their gifts are necessary.
My questions, requests, and reasons are already present throughout the platform. At this point, I am stepping away from the work of public persuasion and allowing the ideas to speak for themselves.
The platform is yours.
I am grateful that I was able to bring it this far, even though it is not, and cannot be, complete. One person cannot solve every problem, and I have never claimed that I could.
When I was younger, during years that were hectic, imperfect, and often joyful, I carried an arrogance that continues to humble and haunt me. I believed that a sufficiently strong idea would naturally bring people together. I believed people would recognize what was possible and begin building it.
Life has taught me otherwise.
That realization has brought tears, but humility requires accepting what life teaches us. An idea does not build itself. A plan does not become real merely because it could improve people’s lives. Human beings must choose to carry it, test it, correct it, and make it real.
Please also respect one firm boundary: leave my family and friends alone.
They did not create this platform, authorize its statements, or ask to become public participants in it. Their contribution was more personal and, in many ways, more important. Through their love, experiences, sacrifices, disagreements, kindness, and presence in my life, they made it possible for me to think these thoughts and place them before you.
They have doubted me with love, just as many of you have.
I am begging you: do not contact, question, confront, investigate, or involve them because of anything I have written.
I am stepping back from being the public messenger. I am not stepping back from the work, from gratitude, or from the belief that people can still choose to care for one another.
To those of you in the channels, communities, and platforms where I have shared this work: do something positive that changes your life and improves the lives of those around you.
The work remains.
Take what is useful. Improve what is incomplete. Correct what needs correcting. Build what your community needs. Protect one another. Protect the children and elders. Protect the planet.
In the names and memories of the friends who helped shape the person I am, I leave this work with gratitude. Planet Ocean needs us to be one people.
In health,
Geoff Barrett