Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, General Commentary, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, privacy, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,
Muhammad Ai probably wore gloves like these. Photo by Wojciech Ner.
Our rights are under attack! Photo by Wojciech Ner.

Ever since the upcoming decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, I’ve been stewing on it. Tomorrow, I am going to my second rally to uphold women’s reproductive rights. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is. If we can prevent Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale from moving from a dystopian novel to a description of life in 2020s America, it’s our obligation to do so. I don’t know about you, but I do not want to live in anyplace resembling the theocratic dictatorship of Gilead that she describes.

I will not address the valid question of when does a fetus’s life take precedence over the mother’s because I don’t have the medical qualifications to give an answer that is based on fact. But let me raise a personal liberty argument: I will bring up the extension of the upcoming court decision to other areas, because we know that is coming–and because it personally affects my family. One former National Review editor actually posted on social media, “Next stop Brown vs. Board!” That was the decision that outlawed segregation in 1954. Here’s a screenshot of that post (NOTE: the blog that shows the post is a foul-mouthed screed–but you can see a picture of the post and learn some useful information about the person who wrote that post).
There is no doubt in my mind that they will go after easier marks first: such as the LGBT community and especially the T (trans) part. But they’ve said it out loud (or at least in a Tweet): they will eventually go after interracial couples–and likely, eventually, the ability to even socialize with people of different skin colors (see this analysis from Reuters).
Alito has a long history of speaking out against same-sex marriage and cannot be trusted not to use the same twisted reasoning to go after it. He also authored the Hobby Lobby case, which could be seen as a wedge decision that could eventually be used to eliminate legal contraception. In both of these probable attacks on our rights, it gets personal for me.
  • My younger child identifies as nonbinary, uses they-them pronouns, and is five years into a beautiful relationship with someone who has the same types of body parts and chromosomes but a very different cultural and religious upbringing. I fully support them, their choice of identity, and their wonderful life-partner.
  • My older one married another lovely guy from a different cultural and religious upbringing–who is the product of a White father and a Latina mom who clearly has indigenous ancestry. He is an excellent life partner for my daughter. My wife and I love both of our kids’ partners.
  • My mother, raised in a super-observant Orthodox Jewish family, divorced my father and married a Japanese man who was raised Buddhist. She also did some pretty intense civil rights work, including serving as a tester for the Urban League to determine if those apartments declined to Black families were really “already rented.”
  • I identify as bi and have had relationships before my marriage with both men and women. And I have slept with people who were not the same color as me. If I were my kids’ age, I might well have chosen to identify as nonbinary. While I am now very comfortable in my maleness, I was very UNcomfortable with it in my teens and 20s.
  • I am a survivor of rape by a grown male stranger who literally grabbed me off the street when I was 10 or 11. Fortunately, becoming pregnant was not an issue–but what if I’d been a 15-year-old girl, and had been forced to bear a child whose every moment would remind me of the violence done to me–a violence that was extremely traumatic even without a pregnancy?
Let’s also put this into a wider context: this is the same Supreme Court that recently decided that the Centers for Disease Control does not have the right to control disease by mandating masks in public conveyances–so you could be sitting next to a superspreader on a six-hour flight with no protection other than your own voluntary mask, and a coughing fit on a rush-hour subway car could expose dozens.
In fact, two people I’m very close to, who bought plane tickets before the mask mandate was overturned but flew later, have come down with COVID. I am flying next month, and I’m not happy about it. But my 91-year-old dad no longer travels and it’s important to see him when we can.
Even before that inane ruling, it was necessary to fight for my right to protect myself and the people I pod with. I refused to sit next to someone on a plane who would not mask (while that ruling was still in effect), and he was eventually taken off the plane. And at our official Town Meeting last week, I had to call a Point of Order to demand that the inadequate separation of masked and unmasked on opposite sides of an aisle be enforced, after asking someone to either put on a mask or go sit in the no-mask section. You would think the anti-vax crowd would actually be in favor of masks in public indoor spaces, since they would have lower risk of getting a bad case of COVID–but no. I still don’t understand the way these basic public health measures have been weaponized, even after many prominent mask critics contracted fatal cases. After all, we have seat belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws,  and requirements that school children receive various other vaccines.
The same back-asswards SCOTUS logic that killed the transportation mask mandate could threaten the abilities of OSHA and EPA (and many other agencies) to protect citizens in their domains. This is the same Supreme Court that has upheld discriminatory voting rules in several decisions. Here’s a Fox News report on the decision to hear a case in Arizona where they later decided in favor of the state and against election justice activists— and here’s a report on the actual decision, from C|Net.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Environment, Ethics in Government, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The man who lived in The White House from January 2017 to January 2021 took the US from respected world leader to banana republic serving the whims of an incompetent would-be dictator in an alarmingly short time. We are fortunate to have a new leader who is doing his best—though not enough—to undo the damage, and who steadies our foreign and domestic policy at a time when the need for leadership is clear.

But even though DT is out of power despite every crazy attempt to maintain it, his numerous judicial appointments gave the crazies a scary degree of control that persists today.

Which seems to mean that reproductive rights, environmental protections, the right to be protected from contagious lethal diseases, and the right to vote have had big portions chiseled away, while the rights to carry and use firearms, to infiltrate others’ airspace, and the right of corporations to fund candidates and dictate favorable terms have been enshrined.

While DT’s government made up new and undid longstanding laws and regulations with no regard for precedent or separation of powers, Biden’s attempts to return to normalcy, curtail the pandemic, and govern effectively keep getting shot down by—you guessed it—the appointees of his predecessor.

These judges and Justices invent new legal doctrine out of whole cloth, undermining more than two centuries of settled law, and using truly bizarre reasoning to uphold a “new normal” where skin color, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, and religion are once again grounds to be discriminated against.

At the Supreme Court level, they often (far more often than in the recent past) use a procedural workaround known as “the shadow docket,” which often results in rushed, unsigned decisions with little or no written documentation of the rationale. This was used to implement both the MPP and Texas abortion decisions of right-wing District Judges, explained just below along with some other examples:

  • Early in his term, Biden kept campaign promise to end the MPP Remain in Mexico program—one of several policy pieces that inflicted massive violations of human rights (and international law) in his predecessor’s immigration policy of deliberate cruelty. MPP (and several other immigration changes instituted under DT) put thousands of people at grave risk of kidnapping, rape, and murder at the hands of the cartels they were fleeing.  Even though the policy, developed by the notorious xenophobe Stephen Miller, undid generations of settled procedure without any plausible justification, A DT-appointed judge forced the Biden administration to reinstate this horrible program.
  • Texas’s criminalization of assistance to or performing an abortion and deputization of any citizen to file for redress is so blatantly against the constitution that even right-wing anti-abortionists like this conservative anti-abortion lawyer are screaming “no”—as did Chief Justice Roberts (no friend of the reproductive rights movement).
  • Just this week, another DT-appointed district judge overturned the CDC’s public transportation mask mandate, drastically increasing the risk of COVID spreading when people are next to each other in tightly enclosed spaces for hours at a time. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle is one of many DT-appointed judges (along with Supreme Court Justice Barrett) whose confirmation was rushed through with many other nominations in the closing days of his administration; she was deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m getting on a plane again for a while—and I flew five round-trips since April 2021 when my vaccine took full effect. By what spurious reasoning do you take away the right of the Centers for Disease Control to control disease? Some lawyer should rapidly organize a class-action lawsuit on behalf of people who bought tickets with the understanding that they would be protected by a mask requirement in airports, bus and train terminals, and on the planes, trains, and buses.

Of course, this attack on US law started before Biden. As an example, after two previous attempts were overturned by various courts, the Supreme Court upheld version 3 of DT’s Muslim travel ban. And we all know about SCOTUS’s horrible pre-Biden decisions to block the recount of the Florida presidential results in 2000 (which gave us eight years of a dubiously elected president who was the worst in history until 2017)…to allow corporate donors to trample individual rights in decisions like Citizens United…

Whatever happened to “the land of the free” and “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?

 

Is there anything we can do about this?

Yes. Before I start suggesting things, I need to state that I am not a fan of the Democratic Party, have a long history of supporting electoral reforms that would reduce both Democratic and Republican Party power (like ranked-choice voting and nonpartisan administration of elections), and have written many letters, posts, and articles criticizing the current system. Nevertheless…

The first step is to win enough elections—whether for School Board or Senator—to wrest control of every possible office from the right-wing conspiracy theorists, January 6 conspirators, climate change deniers, bigots who see themselves as legitimized by a Republican Party no longer willing to confront evil and punishing the handful of its members who are still willing to go out on a limb and do the right thing. While I wish we had a viable alternative, under the two-party system, our choice in most races must to support Democrats.

I will not personally give money to a Party that continues to enable the right-wingers—from 11 Democrats voting to confirm Clarence Thomas despite highly credible accusations of sexual harassment to the Party allowing its two most conservative Senators to control the agenda and sabotage so many of the best things Biden has tried to do.

But I do give money to groups like Movement Voter Project that funds progressive grassroots groups to influence elections in swing districts—and reminds politicians who of the promises that got MVP to support them. That creates a progressive sphere of influence in ways normally reserved for powerful corporate donors and wealthy individual contributors in the 1%.

The second step is to reject any nominee endorsed by the Federalist Society, which according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in a 2019 speech, openly attacks the gains made in the last 100 years on a host of issues including labor, environment, civil rights, and more, and not only supplied DT’s pick lists but trained the nominees on how to get through the hearings.

The third step is to consider major reforms like changing the judicial nomination process (perhaps through a non-partisan commission), ending lifetime appointments, and forcing the Supreme Court to apply the same Code of Ethics to itself that other courts require. This will be much more successful if we have accomplished step one.

The fourth step scares me and I wish we had a better alternative. This could come back to bite, and bite hard. But the judiciary has been running roughshod over the rights of average citizens, and especially those with less privilege.

So, reluctantly, we need to consider expanding the Supreme Court. We have to remember that the appointments of three of the six current conservative Justices (Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) were confirmed by brute force with narrow majorities, and that Obama’s nomination of current Attorney General Merrick Garland was denied by brute force—McConnell refused to even hold a hearing and 17 Republican Senators supported him in public statements.

I said at the time and still say that Obama should have pushed back, saying that failure to hold a hearing by a certain date would constitute approval. Thomas and Kavanaugh defended themselves very poorly against credible claims of sexual harassment (Thomas) and sexual assault (Kavanaugh). Barrett was confirmed on October 26, 2020, less than two weeks before the November 3 election—but for these same Senators, March to November, 2016, was too close between nomination and the election.

How little constitutional basis there was to deny the hearing was proven in 2020 when that same McConnell rushed the Barrett nomination through, ignoring his own precedent and her extreme inexperience in the appellate courts, and the Republican hypocrites (who had said in 2016 they’d do the same thing if a Republican president nominated in the last year) reversed themselves and voted her in. Susan Collins was the only Republican voting nay, while Graham, Rubio, and the others who’d spoken out against final-year nominations completely ignored their own earlier comments.

In other words, the Republicans have not earned their 6-3 SCOTUS majority. The consequences of their cheating their way to a majority will be felt for decades unless we find a way to stop them. If we can limit their power through steps 1-3, maybe this “nuclear option” is unnecessary. But given this Court’s avid willingness to throw away settled law, undermine both the legislative and executive branches, and not even bother to justify their decisions with written opinions, I’m expecting we will have to move on this.

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By Posted on Posted in Copywriting, language, Mindset

Here’s the headline and lead from a press release I happened to see:

Continuous Environmental Disinfection System Market Trends, Application Analysis, Regional Outlook, Competitive Strategies And Future Growth Till 2028

The QY Research released a latest market research report on the global and United States Continuous Environmental Disinfection System market, which is segmented by region (country), players, by Type and by Application. Players, stakeholders, and other participants in the global Continuous Environmental Disinfection System market will be able to gain the upper hand as they use the report as a powerful resource. The segmental analysis focuses on revenue and forecast by region (country), by Type and by Application for the period 2017-2028.

Do you have any idea what they’re talking about? I’ve been writing press releases for my marketing clients for decades–and I have NO idea what this one is about. Which means this press release, IMHO, is an abject failure.

Compare that with the clarity of message in the picture. Greta Thunberg pointing an accusatory finger doesn’t even need any words to communicate.

Greta Thunberg on the cover of GQ, with commentary by Marisa Murgatroyd (Instagram screenshot)


A press release should never be a bunch of bland, unintelligible gobbledygook. It should leave the reader with no doubt about what it’s about AND what you want them to do next. And the best press releases tell “the story behind the story.” They give the reader reasons to be involved, to get caught up in the experience, and to think positively about my client.

As an example, when I was hired to write a press release for a new book on electronic privacy, my headline was NOT “Electronic Privacy Expert Releases New Book”–because curing the reader of insomnia didn’t happen to be one of my goals I told the story behind the story, and the headline was “It’s 10 O’Clock. Do You know Where Your Credit History Is?” The book first showed up in the third paragraph. And the reader read that far, because the reader was interested.

Want that sort of magic for your business? Visit this link on my Frugal Marketing site to find out more.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Copywriting, Ethics in Government, language, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Don’t the Republicans ever get tired of their own shameless hypocrisy? A lot of the rest of us are sure tired of it. It’s time for the Dems to focus their messaging on why the Party of Never-if-a-Democrat-proposed-it is no friend of the people.

I offer these as a gift to the Democratic Party, its candidates, and its supporters.

  • Why do Republicans support socializing the costs of billionaires’ mistakes and misdeeds while privatizing their profits? Why should working folks have to pay to clean up their mess when billionaires don’t even pay taxes on much of their wealth?
  • Why do we pay so much more for health care, for university education, for prescription drugs, for so much else–and get less for our money than most other countries? Why did Republicans hold all three branches of government and come up with nothing to address these crises?
  • If we want to free the world of power-mad dictators and thugs like Putin, we need TRUE energy independence from renewable sources like solar, wind, small-scale hydro, and geothermal–so Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries can’t push us around because of our dependence on fossil fuel. That’s also our way out of the carbon crisis.
  • If you want to halt fuel-cost-related inflation, ditto. That will lead to better health outcomes, too.
  • Green energy will continue to create good, well-paying jobs right here in the US–and by the way Biden has presided over the longest steady growth in employment since 1939.
  • If expulsions of immigrants at the border due to fear of COVID–which are against both international law and human decency–aren’t warranted for Ukrainians, there’s no justification for their use to keep Black and Brown people out. Don’t accede to Republicans’ racist demands to hold COVID prevention/protection/treatment funding hostage to keep this cruel, illegal, and discriminatory policy in place.
  • Stop defending domestic terrorists! January 6 was an attempted coup, an attempt to blow up our democracy. Even Republican Secretaries of State admit that the 2020 election was the most fraud-free in history and that Biden won honestly (something we can’t say with certainty about Trump in 2016, since the Republicans blocked recounts in three crucial swing states). And yet you refuse to discipline even the most blatant seditionists in your ranks! Doesn’t democracy mean anything to you anymore?
  • Why are you, the party that claims to believe in freedom, passing laws that take “cancel culture” to levels approaching those of early Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia? How dare you make it a crime to teach or read honest history! How dare you try to suppress the speech rights of whole classes of people! How dare you try to roll back women’s reproductive rights, the right of people of color to vote, and the right to live without fearing violence because of who you are, what way you worship, or what you look like? Stop trying to grasp at your fading power OVER others and focus on your power TO do good in the world (hint: oppressing others is not doing good in the world)
  • Why was it OK to refuse to even hold a hearing on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland because nine months before the election was “too close to the election”–while Barrett was rushed through just weeks before?

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Marketing Trends/News, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , ,

Those of us in the US are probably used to hearing people go on and on about our high status in rankings of desirability. And in some ways, we are. (I am a US citizen and a lifelong resident, so in this post, I’m going to use “we” and “our” when referring to Americans.)File:Life expectancy vs healthcare spending.jpg

  • We are super-cosmopolitan, able to create cities where hundreds of different ethnic, racial, and religious groups not only live and work together but enjoy each other’s food, music, etc.
  • We introduced modern democracy to the world–a huge improvement over the divine right of kings
  • We have enormous diversity in geography, agriculture, weather conditions…whatever you want, you can find it somewhere in the US
  • US technology leadership sparked enormous progress in fields as diverse as computing, clean energy, and space exploration

BUT on a lot of other metrics, we fall alarmingly short. Consider, for instance:

I could go on,  but you get the idea. In metric after metric, the US was once the leader and now lags.

Isn’t it time to reclaim that greatness?Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Mindset, Politics, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Guardian reports on a shameful attempt to criminalize the school district of Texas state capital Austin’s annual LGBT Pride Week!
When is the ultra-right going to recognize that non-heterosexuals are people too?
This is one part of the culture war that they aren’t going to win. Since the legalization of same-sex marriage, conservative heterosexuals have sat next to openly LGBT folks at Parent Teacher Association meetings, worked with them on community issues, and in many cases, discovered that beloved family members and friends and work colleagues were not hetero.
47th Gay Pride Parade, New York City, 2017. Creative Commons photo by Elvert Barnes
AND they noticed the sky hasn’t fallen, the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, and the only thing that has really shifted due to that normalization (something I would not have predicted even as recently as 20 years ago that I’d live to see) is the crumbling of prejudices based on demonizing people they thought they didn’t know.
Sunlight and exposure, as usual, prove the best medicine against prejudice. That genie will no longer fit in the old repressive bottle, no matter how many idiotic laws the right-wing fringe manages to force through their state legislatures–and thats a good thing.
Maybe Putin would have had better luck if instead of invading to “denazify” Ukraine, he tried a nonviolent embarrassment campaign to denazify Texas ;-).
Personal disclosure: I discovered that I am bisexual at age 16 and spent about a decade where LGBT rights was the cause I was most strongly involved with.
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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Consumer Issues, Customer Service as Marketing, language, Mindset, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

I just experienced such a screwed-up customer service encounter that I have to share it.

Do you pass the squeak test? - Victus Catering ConsultancyIn August, I received a letter from my primary care doctor announcing that he was cutting back on his patient hours. He has been my doctor since about 2003. In November, as COVID seemed to be easing, I called to schedule a physical exam for the first time in several years. I explained that I had several concerns and I really trusted my doctor’s diagnostic ability and asked if it was possible, despite his scaling back, to schedule with him. And I was given an appointment for today at 2:40 p.m.

Yesterday, at 4:12 p.m., less than 24 hours before my appointment, I received a call from one of the nurses that they were canceling my appointment because my doctor was scaling back and “needed to reduce his patient panel.” I said that they’d had four months to figure that out, that canceling on less than a day’s notice was extremely rude and unacceptable, that I had been willing to wait so long only because it would be with MY doctor. To their credit, they did offer me an appointment with a different doctor on Friday but I said very politely that I had specific reasons for wanting this practitioner and they had no right to snatch it away at the last moment for an issue they could have fixed at the time the appointment was set. She said the practice manager would call me.

This morning, the practice manager called back. Her customer service skills were atrocious. First she insisted that because I had received the August letter, that “it wasn’t our fault.” I explained repeatedly that I had been willing to wait more than four months only because I was promised an appointment with my chosen doctor. I actually had to say (several times) that while I understood it wasn’t her fault personally, it was absolutely the fault of her organization. I said I wanted a real apology that accepted responsibility organizationally, and she eventually admitted that yes, the organization made an error that was causing harm to me, and that she would review the interaction where I booked the appointment and find out why the person I spoke to had made an appointment that shouldn’t have been allowed.

Then I asked her how she was going to “make me whole.” She didn’t seem to understand what I meant. I said “how are you going to make it right for me?” She said there was nothing she could do. “I can’t talk to the doctor!”

Me: “Why not?”

Her: “I can’t talk to him.”

Me: “Could you explain the circumstances to him and ask that just this once, could he make an exception because of the promise made to me that it would be with him. I could find a new primary care doctor going forward but he really should keep this appointment as a one-time exception. I understand  if it can’t be today. I don’t mind if it’s later this week.”

Her: “The nurse spoke to him after talking with you. He wanted the appointment canceled.”

Me: “I doubt that she explained the full situation to him, that I was willing to wait the four months specifically in order to see him, and that you gave me inadequate notice. Would you please explain the full situation and ask him if under the circumstances, he would make an exception? Again, if it doesn’t work with his schedule today, I can be flexible about when I see him.”

Her: (big sigh). “Okay, I will ask him and call you back.” No word from her.

2-1/2 hours after she called and only 2-1/2 hours before I was due to show up, I called again. After checking their automated confirmation system, which had only the rescheduled appointment with the different doc on Friday. I spoke with a very pleasant receptionist who told me that the practice manager was in a meeting and would call before the end of the business day. I explained that this was about an appointment for today and I really didn’t want to discover after-the-fact that she had reinstated it. The receptionist said she’d have her call within the next hour. I wasn’t holding my breath and was not surprised that she hadn’t called as of the time I would have needed to arrive, or even by the time I probably would have been done. I have no way of checking, but based on her general attitude, I would be very surprised if she actually bothered to communicate with the doctor.

Customer Service is not my primary jam, but it is something I speak and write about fairly often. Done well, it’s an essential marketing function that turns customer problems into loyalists. The flip side of that is that bad or absent service converts loyalists into enemies–people who will speak up and leave poor ratings, tell their friends to avoid that business. Not the sort of messaging you want following your business around.

If I were training this organization, I would:

  1. First instill a culture of actually serving customers (patients, in this case)–of understanding that it’s not about your convenience but about making the customer feel heard and appreciated–and meeting customer needs.
  2. Teach compassionate listening skills and sincere, immediate apologies that accept responsibility.
  3. Empower the staff to offer suitable make-goods and think creatively about what the right make-good is in a particular situation. This is one time to be led by the customer; it’s totally okay to ask, “what can we do to make it up to you?” Often, their answer will be much more modest than you might have expected. In this case, I gave her what I needed: to have her offer to talk to the doc and see if he would reconsider–and even that faced a wall of resistance.
  4. Teach and model appropriate responses that make the customer feel heard.
  5. Teach the importance of keeping promises–as Google did several years ago when they actually went back and re-listened to the customer service call where I was told misinformation and cheerfully refunded the $200+ I’d been charged for following the advice I’d been given. They’ve now kept me as a cell phone customer longer than three previous companies.

As a customer of this organization, I not only had the bad experience above, but my wife has been getting the runaround for months on a chronic problem, with calls not being returned and a generally desultory attitude. At this point, they will be getting negative reviews in public places from us and we will make inquiries about other area practices that are accepting patients. I recognize that our area has a doctor shortage and we might be stuck with them, but we are tired of being kicked around and we certainly won’t recommend them to others.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Peace and War, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Often in this space, I talk about my work to bring social change and environmental responsibility to the business world. But that comes out of my advocacy for wider social change outside the business community. I’d like to take a moment to reflect a bit more on the activist side.

Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook by Shel Horowitz, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook by Shel Horowitz, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz

As a 12-year-old, I went to my first Vietnam War protest on October 15, 1969–a national day of protest called the Moratorium. One of the speakers said it was an undeclared war–and that one sentence changed my whole worldview. The house of cards that I’d learned in school about checks and balances, electoral democracy working for the people, etc. came tumbling down. I started questioning, learning, organizing.

Since then, I’ve been involved in many movements and participated in hundreds of actions, dozens of sustained campaigns. Many were unsuccessful, but I can point to quite a few where the world changed because of a movement I was part of–and a smaller but still significant number (at least 20) where I feel I personally made a difference. The five I’m most proud of are:

1) Founding Save the Mountain, which created a successful movement to protect a threatened mountain in Hampshire County, Massachusetts (where I’ve lived since 1981). We reached out across all sectors of the community, organized on many fronts, and had the mindset that we would win. And win we did–in just 13 months! I always thought we would win–but even I thought it would take five years.

2) Organizing around safe energy for decades, and especially participating in the 1977 Seabrook Occupation that took the safe energy movement national. I’ve written a five-part series on how this action changed the world. Part One is at https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-1/ , and each part links to the next one.

3) My current work on immigration justice through a specifically Jewish lens, as part of a tiny but powerful affinity group. We’ve been working for two years and have created enormous awareness of the issue in our area, coalitioned with many other groups on this and related issues such as prison reform and the welcoming of Jews of color into traditionally white Jewish settings, and spent a week on the border witnessing, listening, organizing, and even teaching two writing workshops for some of the residents of the refugee camp: one for children and one for adults.

4) Roughly 15 years doing extensive LGBT liberation work, working in conservative areas like Georgia and Ohio as well as liberal ones like NYC, Providence, Northampton (MA), and Providence–and seeing attitudes change.

5) Defending democracy and retaking two municipal governments from the conservatives (in my current town, we’ll be doing that again this spring; we lost control because we couldn’t field any candidates last year).

It’s been a wild ride–and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics: General, Innovation, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Marchers at a rally for racial justice and immigrant rights, Holyoke, MA. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Marchers at a rally for racial justice and immigrant rights, Holyoke, MA. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

I’m in Week Four of an 8-week training program from Pachamama Alliance, an environmental and social justice organization that promotes holistic thinking across all sectors while elevating indigenous voices, even in the corridors of power and commerce.

The course has been great so far, and useful even to someone like me with more than 50 years as an activist. And I am so loving this week’s focus, “Grounded Optimism,” that I need to share highlights with you:

From Pachamama’s co-founder, Lynne Twist:

Maybe in each one of these breakdowns — And I assert that it’s true — is the seeds of the greatest breakthroughs that we’ve ever seen. We have the opportunity with the pandemic in particular to rethink, reimagine, recreate, reset, reboot life — our health, our relationship with one another, our understanding of what it means to be at home, home in our homes or home in our hearts, home in ourselves. We have the opportunity to see how we want to be governed, how we want to be educated, how we want our children to live. We have such a huge opportunity in the breakdowns that are taking place now on this planet, which are bigger than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, to recreate life.
From historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States:
It’s clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience.
From Alex Steffen, author of Worldchanging and Carbon Zero:
Optimism, by contrast [with cynicism], especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love one another, and love is an explosive force in politics.
From essayist Rebecca Solnit (latest book: Recollections of My Nonexistence):

The organization Carbon Tracker, whose reports are usually somber reading, just put out a report so stunning the word encouraging is hardly adequate. In sum, current technology could produce a hundred times as much electricity from solar and wind as current global demand; prices on solar continue to drop rapidly and dramatically; and the land required to produce all this energy would take less than is currently given over to fossil fuels. It is a vision of a completely different planet, because if you change how we produce energy you change our geopolitics – for the better – and clean our air and renew our future. The report concludes: “The technical and economic barriers have been crossed and the only impediment to change is political.” Those barriers seemed insurmountable at the end of the last millennium.

A little later in the same essay,

One of the things that’s long been curious about this crisis is that the amateurs and newcomers tend to be more alarmist and defeatist than the insiders and experts. What the climate journalist Emily Atkin calls “first-time climate dudes” put forth long, breathless magazine articles, bestselling books and films announcing that it’s too late and we’re doomed, which is another way to say we don’t have to do a damned thing, which is a way to undermine the people who are doing those things and those who might be moved to do them.

From Christiana Figueres, chief negotiator of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord (and daughter of the Costa Rican president who abolished his country’s army):

Optimism is not about blindly ignoring the realities that surround us, that’s foolishness. It’s also not a naive faith that everything will take care of itself, even if we do nothing. That is irresponsibility. The optimism I’m speaking of is not the result of an achievement, it is the necessary input to meeting a challenge. It is, in fact, the only way to increase our chance of success. Think of the impact of a positive mindset on a personal goal you have set yourself. Running a marathon, learning a new language, creating a new country, like my father, or like me, reaching a global agreement on climate change.

And…

Many now believe it is impossible to cut global emissions in half in this decade. I say, we don’t have the right to give up or let up. Optimism means envisioning our desired future and then actively pulling it closer. Optimism opens the field of possibility, it drives your desire to contribute, to make a difference, it makes you jump out of bed in the morning because you feel challenged and hopeful at the same time.

But it isn’t going to be easy. We will stumble along the way. Many other global urgencies could temper our hope for rapid progress, and our current geopolitical reality could easily dampen our optimism. That’s where stubbornness comes in. Our optimism cannot be a sunny day attitude. It has to be gritty, determined, relentless. It is a choice we have to make every single day. Every barrier must be an indication to try a different way. In radical collaboration with each other, we can do this.

From Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, authors of Active Hope:

The word ‘hope’ has two meanings. The first involves hopefulness, where our preferred outcome seems reasonably likely. If we require this kind of hope before we commit to an action, our response gets blocked in areas where we don’t rate our chances too highly…

The second meaning of hope is about desire…This kind of hope, where we know what we’d like or love to take place, can start us on a journey. But it is what we do with this hope that really makes the difference. Passive hope involves waiting for external agencies to create the future we desire. Active Hope is about becoming active participants in the story of bringing about what we hope for.

Active Hope is a practice. Like t’ai chi and gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps. First, we take in a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for, in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or values we’d like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.

From Otto Scharmer, Co-Founder of the Presencing Institute:

Hope is not to be confused with delusional optimism. Hope and action confidence are grounded in radical realism: a realism that is not only in touch with what currently is, but also in touch with a field of possibility that needs us to manifest. In short: Action confidence is an “inside job” that requires us to tap into our highest (future) Selves.

From Frances Moore Lappé, food and democracy activist, author of Diet for a Small Planet and many other books:

The only choice I don’t have is whether to change the world. Because every choice I’m making consciously, or not making, every single choice is changing the world around me. And so the only choice I have, then, is whether I’m making conscious choices, choices to align, consciously align with nature and human nature. So that’s very freeing to me, to realize then, the power.

And…

So if we see the world through this frame of scarcity and limits, and the bad guys and fear, then that’s all we will see. And if we see the world through this mental map of possibility, of this sense of connectedness, continuous change, and cocreation, then the possibilities open for us. So I think of this as so foundational. We see what we look for. And if we’re not looking for what is life-serving, then we’re really, really not going to see it. And so that is why I try to take so many messages that keep us trapped in a fault filter, if you will, and try to open us to this worldview, mental map that is ecologically aligned…

We know what the solutions are. They are either right here showing up someplace, or they’re just around the corner. I just attended a brilliant conference with scientists from around the world talking about renewable energy. Scientist after scientist said there is no physical obstacle to a hundred percent renewable energy in the next few decades, no physical obstacle. We know how to do this. Germany, cloudy Germany, the size – about the size of Montana, produced half the solar energy in the year 2010. So if Germany can do that, come on already. We know how to do this. So solutions are known, whether they be to hunger or to renewable energy. We know how to do this. And also, I’ve realized that a lot of people care. We think in the United States that we’re so divided on such basic issues like climate change. And yet, when you ask people, the vast majority want more action on the part of the public sphere on climate change, for example. The vast majority want more solutions coming forth on the part of the public spheres for poverty eradication, for example. So there’s a great deal of unity, actually. Beneath all of the images of division, there’s a great deal of unity in view, and a lot of people really care and want to make a difference. I think the problem is, most of us don’t know how. And that’s really why I love this kind of program, because it’s allowing people to say, oh yes, I could do that. I am not powerless.

From psychology-of-positivity researcher Jacqueline Mattis:

Hopeful people do not wish – they imagine and act. They establish clear, achievable goals and make a clear plan. They believe in their agency – that is, their capacity to achieve the outcomes. They recognize that their path will be marked by stresses, roadblocks and failure. According to psychologists such as Snyder and others, people who are hopeful are able to “anticipate these barriers” and they “choose” the right “pathways.”

And for activists involved with long-shot causes?

Research demonstrates that for people working to bring social change, particularly anti-poverty activists, relationships and community provided the reason for hope and ignited their conviction to keep fighting.

Connection to others allowed activists to feel a sense of accountability, to recognize that their work mattered and that they were part of something bigger than themselves…Hopeful people stake their trust in data, particularly in the evidence of history. Research demonstrates, for example, that anti-poverty activists drew hope from knowing that, historically, when people joined together in resistance they were able to create change.

I can validate and add to Mattis’s conclusions about lost causes. I’ve been involved in quite a few that seemed hopeless on the surface, including stopping a development project that was “supposed to” steamroll through the permitting process and ruin a local mountain. Community was extremely important in that effort–and so was mindset. I always knew we would win, even though the “experts” were moaning variations on “this project is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.” And I’ve seen a lot of the causes I’ve worked on these past 50+ years go from fringe to mainstream to successful. I never imagined when I went to my first meeting of my college’s gay-lesbian student group that same-sex relationships would be normalized and same-sex marriages legalized within just a few decades. I never imagined when I took part in the Seabrook occupation of 1977 that we would almost instantly create a national safe energy movement that helped to vastly reduce the risks of nuclear power because no new plants would be built for decades. And I certainly didn’t think that catastrophic climate change would jump out of the scientists’ silos and build an international mass movement.

One of the resources was this wonderful list of good things that happened around the world this year, many of which went unreported in popular media.

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By Posted on Posted in Environment, Networking, Science, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,
Scientist Lynn Margulis, 2005(Photo by Javier Pedreira from La Coruña, Spain, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lynn_Margulis_2005.jpg)
Lynn Margulis,2005. Photo by Javier Pedreira, Creative Commons license.

I love this quote from biologist (and Carl Sagan’s wife) Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan: “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”

Opposing the Darwinian idea that survival of the fittest has to be a competition where one species triumphs while others must retreat, this brief excerpt from Joanna Macy and  Chris Johnstone’s book Active Hope: How to Fix the Mess We’re In without Going Crazy talks instead about symbiosis: different species helping each other, rather than clawing themselves to the top at others’ expense. The quote from Margulis and Sagan is in the very first paragraph.

The world is full of examples of amazing symbiosis–from the macro level of the breath cycle (we take the oxygen that plants emit and convert it to the carbon dioxide they need to flourish) to the micro level: “shrimp and gobies clean fish, receiving nutrients as they remove parasites, dead tissue, and mucous from the hosts.“

Margulis died several years ago, but I heard her give a fascinating talk on bacterial societies (which are quite complex) at an amazing Bioneers conference. I didn’t take great notes on her session, but took substantial notes at other sessions.

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