Category: Activism

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 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 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 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 Activism, Eco-friendly, Environment, Mindset, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , ,

I found myself deeply touched by Jennifer Atkinson’s essay arguing that grief is necessary not just when a loved one departs, but when we act as climate allies. “In similar ways, when we openly grieve for the loss of other species or forests or rivers, we’re asserting that nonhuman lives are also worthy of mourning. We refuse to accept their exclusion from human circles of compassion.”

She goes on to discuss the connection between grief and love–and even to claim that grief is an aspect of love.

It’s short and only took me two or three minutes to read. Well worth it.



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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Gratitude, language, Mindset, People Helping People, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,
I went through a course from Pachamama Alliance called “Awakening the Dreamer,” a prerequisite for an activist training course I signed up for.
Near the end, I was asked, “Identify and write down the actions you will take to express your commitment to creating a thriving, just, and sustainable future.
And, for added effectiveness, include the date by which you will complete the action.”
My response has a lot to do with who I am, who I have been, who I hope to become, and why I do what I do. I’m sharing it in full:
  • Continue to work on immigration justice through Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice (ongoing since 2019).
  • Continue my career path of showing business that meaningfully addressing climate change, hunger/poverty, racism/otherism, war, etc. through core products, services, and mindset can be a success path (ongoing since 2003).
  • Continue to nurture democratic impulses in my own town/region and help some of them run for local office (ongoing since 1983).
  • Continue using my writing, speaking, and organizing skills to spotlight important issues locally, regionally, nationally, and globally (ongoing since 1972)–and strengthening these skills through continuous learning (which is why I signed up for this training).
  • Continue to be an activist who shows up to make a difference and be counted whenever practical (and sometimes when it’s not).
  • Continue to act on my belief that each of us can make a difference, and that difference is greatly amplified by working with others.
  • Continue to celebrate the victories I help achieve or passively support.
  • Continue to find ways to evolve as a person: to be more supportive of others, to recognize barriers others may face, and to face new experiences with gratitude and enjoyment.
None of these have completed-by dates. Most will not be completed in my lifetime.. I will do this work as long as I can.
<End of my response>
Three quick takeaways I want to leave you with:
  1. Each of us can have an impact, especially if we go about our work with focus and determination
  2. That work is amplified when we collaborate with others in an organized way
  3. We are all growing and changing and evolving–ideally, into our best selves; that journey never stops

For the past few years, I’ve been doing Chris Brogan’s exercise of picking three words to guide my year. In 2020, they were Clarity (20/20 vision), Justice, and (perhaps presciently) Healing. Last year, Rethink, Pivot, Transform.

This year, I’ve picked a single word after reading this article by my friend and mentor Sam Horn. My Word for the Year is EVOLVE–and it’s an acronym:

Enthusiasm

Vision

Optimism

Leverage (getting my message in front of more influencers, and more people generally)

Victories along the way (which we achieve through both small and large steps toward a more just, eco-friendly society)

Evolution (a better world)

 

And how are you framing YOUR 2022? May it be a blessed one for you your loved ones, and all of us.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Environment, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

George Lakey, nonviolent theorist, author, and activist, speaks on “How We Win, 2018

I listened to a great 2018 talk, “How We Win,” by one of my many mentors, nonviolence theorist George Lakey (that’s the first chunk. You’ll see a link on that page to Part 2.). How We Win is also the name of his latest book at the time.

Lakey sees the increasing polarization of modern US society as a forge: a way of generating the heat necessary to create lasting social change (toward freedom and equality or toward authoritarianism—“the forge doesn’t care”).

This is not a new trend. The Scandinavian countries had their huge social revolution of the 1930s in times of great polarization (something he chronicled in his earlier book, Viking Economics). The trick is to harness that energy and channel it toward gaining mass support. He walks his talk, too; in the summer and fall of 2020, he led or co-led numerous workshops on what to do if the Trumpists tried to seize power after losing the election, training thousands of people.

He charges us to express our best concepts—not just what’s wrong with the system but the vision to make it better—in ways that feel like common sense to working-class people who want the system to work for them, too. After all, most of us actually do want a system that promotes equal access, a fair economy, and real democracy. We have to show them that our vision “has a spot for you,” even if that “you” finds the movement’s tactics disruptive and uncomfortable.

But he says progressives have largely lost that vision since the 1970s; we need to get it back. If we can get the diverse movements working together to confront their common opponents, we foster an intersectional “movement of movements” capable of creating real change—as the Scandinavians did then, with farmers, unionists, and students joining together to drive the moneyed elite from power. He warns us that polarization will get worse, because economic inequality is built so strongly into the culture. He says that we should consider organizing campaigns as “training for [nonviolent] combat.”

And we should expect those campaigns to take a while. Campaigns are well-planned (but adaptable) and sustained over time. It might take years, but you can win. One-offs (like the Women’s March at Trump’s inauguration) don’t typically accomplish change on their own. Traffic disruptions don’t make change; they just piss potential allies off. Disrupting banking operations is much more strategic because the bank is the perpetrator of the evil. How is the specific goal of the campaign advanced by this action? If it doesn’t advance the cause, don’t do it. A campaign he was involved with moved $5 million into credit unions and cooperative enterprises in one campaign that started in a living room and grew to encompass 13 states.

Oppression is only one lens we can look at things through—there are many others (he didn’t elaborate). The elite seeks to divide us (by color, gender, values, etc.)—but canny organizers look for the cracks in those divisions, and expand them. And stays optimistic, not getting stuck in “can’t be done” but figuring out how to do it.

Campaigns often start small. We can build our skills when the stakes are lower and make our mistakes then. Later, as the big challenges arise, we know how to handle them. You can lose a lot of battles and still win the campaign (eventually). And any tactic will be greeted with “this will never work” skepticism. But “Anyone who is arguing for impossibility” should remember the Mississippi Summer volunteers. When news got out of the abduction of Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney, Lakey (a trainer of volunteers for trhat movement) expected most of the next volunteer wave to abandon their commitments—but nearly all of them stayed, mentored by Black SNCC activists who had been living with the overt racism for decades.

The best-known antidote to terror is social solidarity. Get close to people. Organize campaigns not just with those who share your goals but those who are “willing to be human with you.” Make your peace with the personal risk, face it head-on. We risk by driving on the highway, we risk by NOT meaningfully addressing climate change. Accepting the possibility that you might die in service of the common good is liberating (and it’s not the worst way to die).

SNCC survived in the Deep South without guns; they would not have survived with them. Erica Chenoweth shows us that nonviolent movements have twice the success rate of violent ones.

Framing is crucial. The Movement for Black Lives put out a mission statement that was so well framed, even American Friends Service Committee signed on [I think it might be this one].

If you want innovation, conflict helps to get you there. Yet, conflict resolution is a crucial skill, and it’s expanded enormously in recent decadesWe need those tools and people who will jump into the fray (to use them). But if our tools are too highly structured, you need to add interventions in informal settings.

Lakey expects surveillance and isn’t worried about it: “I think it’s a wonderful thing. We take that as pride: we are so important that they put staff time and energy into knowing what we’re up to—so we’re making a difference. Gandhi told India, if you gave up fear of them, the British would be gone. If people spread fears about Trump, invoice him for the hours because you’re doing his work.”Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , ,

At a recent conference, Jane Goodall said,

We are repeatedly told to ‘think globally, act locally’ but it should be the other way around. If you think globally first, you’ll get depressed. But if you think about what you can do locally, if you take action with friends and find that you’re making a difference, that’ll give you more hope and make you to take more action.

I love the idea of acting locally and have done it (and written and spoken about it) for decades. My biggest success in 50 years as an activist was a local campaign that saved a threatened mountain. Your chances of winning are often higher, it’s easy to reach those most affected, and you can parley your success into much greater influence on the future direction of your community. And yes, it can be empowering.

BUT…we also have to do the long, hard work on the big-picture stuff. It took 100 years of hard organizing to end legalized slavery for non-criminals in the US (and by the way, the exemption for convicted criminals has been used shamefully in too many instances). It took decades to get national civil rights legislation, the right of women and people of color to vote, the right of same-sex couples to marry…pretty much anything worth fighting for. And sometimes, even large-scale victories happen surprisingly quickly. As an example, the safe energy movement took only five or six years to make nuclear power unbuildable.

And those local victories can inspire the national and international work–which often gets done most effectively at the local level, by existing organizations and coalitions.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Entrepreneurship, Environment, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Mindset, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I love this post from the Changemaker Institute, How to Change The World By Meeting People Where They Care. I love it because it approaches social change through a marketing lens. It starts by revisiting the famous Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case of 1967, which struck down longstanding bans on marrying across the color line. Pointing out how Richard and Mildred Loving got people to care, the post goes on to ask how to get people to care about what you’re doing–and answers with a business-oriented focus on outcomes of your social change action, which you arrive at through these questions (quoting directly from the post):

  • What does it take to get an investor to believe in your business and invest in your mission?
  • What does it take to get customers to believe in your product or service and invest in it?
  • What does it take to get your employees to believe in your company’s mission and invest time and energy in supporting it?
  • What does it take to get people to support your vision for a better world? [end of quote]
Seet spot and 3 words posters in Shel's office, where he sees them every day
Shel’s inspirational posters describing his “sweet spot” institutional mission and his 2020 and 2021 sets of three words to inspire his year

This intersection is so important to me that on the wall behind my computer monitor, where I see it many times a day, I have a poster that reminds me, “I help businesses find their unique sweet spot where profitability meets environmental and social progress.” It’s important enough that I’ve written four books making the profitability case for business to deeply embrace social change and planetary healing, and have also written about the success lessons activists can take from business. It’s the basis for much of my consulting and speaking.

To take it a step further: I see getting out of the silo, rubbing shoulders with people who are not like you and examining different ideas from different industries or different sectors of the same industry as crucial is testing your own ideas, sharpening them enough to really get inside someone’s head and cause enough discomfort with the status quo to embrace the brighter future you propose. Whether you’re marketing a business or a movement, that’s a pretty important thing to do.

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