I finally got around to watching Jon Stewart’s return monologue. Yuck! I was a fan of Jon Stewart but this is ageist crap! Yes, Biden is old. So is Trump, as Stewart admits. While I have plenty of bones to pick with Biden (and I’ve been in the streets protesting some of his policies, especially around immigration and the Gaza war), we don’t have ranked choice voting in US presidential elections. And that means that absent some deep and unpredicted shift in the political landscape, either Biden or Trump will be elected in November.
There are many reasons to vote for Biden over Trump. While flawed (as we all are), he’s a basically decent person who has mostly used his time in office to better the lives of ordinary USArians and to improve the condition of the world. And despite a completely dysfunctional Congress, he has still managed to:
Hire or nominate very competent people who broaden the diversity and visibility of non-white, non-hetero people within our government (three among many examples Black/Asian/female Vice-President Kamala Harris, openly gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Black female US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson)
Emotionally less mature than my 16-month-old grandson (I happen to know a psychiatrist who told me back in 2016 that Trump would be easy to diagnose with a mental illness, but professional ethics standards meant only a doctor who was actually treating him could do that).
Biden is not an existential threat to democracy. Biden was handed a government in complete chaos that had burned bridges with many of its allies and built back a functional government that honors its promises. Biden is about the good of the country, while Trump appears to be mostly concerned with leveraging his position for profit and inflating his already overweight ego. And Biden’s record of accomplishment after three years in office far outstrips Trump’s four years.
So please tell me why the media is constantly dissing Biden because of his age and a perceived lack of mental acuity that by any reasonable standard is in better shape than Trump’s. How is it, for example, that the Washington Post (a liberal newspaper that prides itself on good journalism) actually ran a chart comparing how old Biden would be at the END of a second term with Trump’s age at the BEGINNING of a second term.
Finally, let’s look at five among thousands of models for aging with power:
Grandma Moses had a 25-year career as a painter, BEGINNING AT AGE 76
Pete Seeger was still writing and recording songs well into his 90s
Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa at age 76
My friends Frances Crowe and Arky Markham were both still activists on their 100th birthdays
Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn and sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer were working on the sexuality of old people into their 80s (disclosure: I was a VISTA organizer for the Gray Panthers in 1979-80 and met Maggie once when she was 75)
You are never too old—or too young—to make a difference. Jon Stewart should know better, and so should we. Work to get ranked-choice voting and other reforms such as those outlined at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/its-time-to-talk-about-electoral-reform/ (scroll down to the section entitled “A range of possible electoral reforms”).
Robert Hubbell’s Today’s Edition politics newsletter (which I read daily) quoted a reader who suggested that Democrats label the Republican platform for 2022 as “The Big Steal.” Here is his suggestion, with edits and additions by me:
Vote Republican, and you vote for the “Big Steal”:
Your Social Security will be stolen.
Your Medicare will be stolen.
Your prescription drugs will be stolen.
Your affordable health care will be stolen.
Your right to privacy will be stolen.
Your control over reproductive choices will be stolen.
Your voting rights will be stolen.
Your right to elect leaders will be stolen.
Our democracy will be stolen.
It’s not perfect, but you get the idea. Iterations are endless. Republicans want to take things away (The Big Steal), including personal liberties and equal protection under law. Democrats want to provide Americans the things they need to lead safe, healthy, productive lives—including personal liberties and equal protection under the law. Somewhere in there is a winning message.
Republicans doing The Big Steal is half of the messaging. Yes, absolutely, we need to show that corrupt and greedy party for what it is. But we also need another half, maybe call it The Big Payoff. And the second part will subdivide into two as well.
The first part will be what the Democrats have actively accomplished. They have created jobs in a terrible economy. They have restored us leadership in the world sphere. They have taken some action to mitigate climate change. They have stood up for integrity of the political process and showed that insurrections and coup attempts will not be tolerated here. They have supported Ukraine against Putin’s barbaric war. And they have restored dignity and mission to a corrupt and twisted executive branch.
The second part is the wish list: things Biden and the Democrats tried to do but were blocked by filibusters, judicial opinions, or just plain refusal to cooperate from the Republican side. This would include Build Back Better, protecting the right to vote, protecting women’s right to control their own bodies, meaningful progress on the biggest issues like climate change and immigration reform, and of course, the right of regulatory bodies to regulate. Not only have Republican judges forced the CDC–which stands for, let us remind them, Centers for Disease Control–to give up protecting the public in transit facilities, but other decisions will threaten such rights as environmental protection and labor protection, using that very bad precedent to attack EPA and OSHA. Let’s also talk about the right not to be sitting next to someone who is carrying a concealed weapon. The right to love and marry whom you choose as long as they are above the age of consent. Etc, etc, etc
The sponsoring City Councilor is someone I know, and I wrote her this note:
Thanks for your good work on the plastics ordinance. As you know, I’ve been a green guy for 50 years, write books and give talks on greening business. One of my talks is called “Making Green Sexy.” Thus, the concerns I have with the plastics bill you’re championing are not about the intent. I would like to see potential problems addressed before it becomes law–so we avoid a debacle like the one we just had over the Main Street improvements (which I loved) and their sad, swift demise).
My big concern is that “recyclable” food containers aren’t recyclable, because paper and cardboard with food waste is not recyclable. We already know we’re not supposed to recycle pizza boxes. Any food waste in paper for recycling could cause the whole batch (potentially thousands of pounds) to be landfilled. It would make more sense to 1) require compostable, and 2) provide city composting stations in several neighborhoods as well as multiple ones downtown. It makes no sense to require compostable and do nothing to encourage composting. Many people will eat their food while still downtown and won’t be bothered to bring their compostable containers to their home compost pile or may not have access to composting at home.
Second, on the straw issue [banning plastic drinking straws]. Why not simply make an exemption for people with motor disabilities in their arms or mouth. For most businesses, a box of 100 plastic straws would probably last months.
Please share this note with your committee at today’s meeting.
We see over and over again that good intentions, not thought through, create more problems than they solve. The Main Street issue involved the city making its extremely wide Main Street much friendlier to bicyclists, pedestrians, and patrons of restaurant outdoor dining areas (which, in the pandemic, have increased in number tremendously)—but failing to get buy-in from (or even consult with) affected business owners, who agitated successfully, and the mayor removed all the improvements. This was sad, as a better situation returned to a worse one, wasting significant money in the process.
In my mind, the lesson was to think things through before acting.
I got this response, which shows that the councilors are indeed thinking about these issues:
Hi Shel- thanks for your support and counsel! Straws for those with disabilities are exempt. We are requiring reusable or compostable and are working on composting services and bulk buying.
Which then says to me that they’ve got a marketing challenge. The general public doesn’t know about this exemption. They also had a marketing challenge with the Main Street improvements. Getting affected parties to participate in decisions that affect them is always a good strategy. Putting in improvements only to discover that vested interests will fight them is not. The trick is to win over those vested interests before they dig in their heels.
For decades, the rule has been “no politics nor religion in business.” That’s gone. If you say nothing or try to stay neutral, you’re voting. If a company takes money and does business with an organization a person doesn’t support, this might be grounds to do business elsewhere.
He’s absolutely right. If you don’t declare your values, the world assumes you support the status quo. And when the status quo is untenable, that choice is not good for business.
Have you been dithering about starting a blog? Blogging provides several advantages in your marketing, but a lot of people are scared off by the idea.
It’s not that hard. A no-cost tool called WordPress makes it easy.
WordPress dashboard showing the ribbon, file naming, and text-editing window
WordPress is a terrific platform. I have never heard of it not working on a site, though if your host company doesn’t support it, you’d need to do a manual installation (any web designer could help you with that). Most webhosts have one-click WordPress installation in their CPanels.
You do need to know some things about WP before you set up.
There is WordPress.com, which is hosted on THEIR servers, and WordPress.org, where your content is hosted on YOUR server (you don’t have to own your server–let your hosting company do that). You want .ORG, so you have full control over the content and cant be held hostage over it. Neither one charges money.
WordPress is a very simple shell that uses “themes” to determine the look and feel. There are thousands of themes out there, some at no cost and others for a fee. Find one you like that can incorporate your company branding, but play with it to see how easy it is to work. There are some that nest text inside Java routines as one example) and I have found it’s really tough to find the place I need to be to make minor edits.
Editing in WordPress is really easy, assuming you picked a theme that didn’t have the issue I just described. If you turn off the blocks feature, the interface is similar to Microsoft Word or GMail . So you don’t have to learn any HTML. Instead of using angle brackets to e.g. turn your text bold and then back to regular, you just highlight the text and click the B button in the formatting ribbon. You can see that ribbon at the top of the screenshot.
Find and install a few key plugins: a backup program so if WP utterly collapses, you still have your content; a file-namer that gives your posts a meaningful name taken from your headline (see where it says “Permalink” on the screenshot?), probably some others.
WordPress updates frequently, both to add function and to beef up security. Set yours up to automatically run the updater, but remember to check every now and then to see if you need to update your plugins. Updating is just a few clicks and very intuitive.
You have a choice every time you post new content: a post, which goes at the top of your blog (which posts in reverse chronological order so the newest is on top) or a page, which is part of your permanent website structure and can be organized with menus, etc. Posts can also be sorted by category, so your reader can see everything you’ve put in any particular category just by clicking on the category name. I find it very worth the extra few minutes to add categories, keyword tags (which help people find your post), a picture, and an excerpt.
Consider having a designer set up the site to begin with, making sure they know you want a theme that’s easy to edit posts, and then posting your own content from there.
A marketer friend in Connecticut sent out a wonderful tribute to his 95-year-old mom and used her to illustrate several points about customer-centric marketing and customer service. In the course of this article, he waxed rhapsodic about Amazon. I see Amazon (and some other companies) as not always so wonderful–and the public having blinders on about its predatory practices. This is what I wrote back to my friend. The third link is actually a very complete summary of the issues:
* * *
Great piece! I love the way you take your mom’s everyday activities and spin them into marketing do and don’ts.
While you certainly shouldn’t change it for Mom, you might want to rethink Amazon. It is very much a two-edged sword. It’s great that it has made the Long Tail [the ability to find obscure products that don’t support a large retail base and wouldn’t be stocked in physical stores] a thing and that any author has access to international markets. But…
They are a serious threat to the vibrancy of our downtowns. Can you imagine Stamford with only a few struggling chain stores? Goodbye to that nice falafel shop and Asian restaurant across the street from (Amazon-owned) Whole Foods (I’ve often eaten at one or the other on my way to NYC). Book stores, hardware stores, appliance stores–and all the traffic into town those stores bring–are increasingly shaky in an Amazon-dominated world. And when that foot traffic goes away (assuming it comes back after we’re finally out of quarantine), so do the restaurants, night spots, etc.
Their labor record is very poor. Their treatment of independent publishers is not only very poor but IMHO a violation of monopoly rules. Did you know that Amazon, a retailer, takes the 55% industry-standard wholesaler discount instead of the 40% retailer level for its smaller publishers selling them physical books? (They do have much better deals for publishers on the books their subsidiary KDP prints on demand.) This is one of the two reasons they’re killing the independent bookstores (the other is that they’ve successfully trained the public to think of them first). Also, they present used and new versions of the same title on the same results page, which is a complete stab in the back to publishers–sort of like offering counterfeit designer watches and purses. I have no objection to selling used books (and keeping them out of landfills)–but not in direct competition with the same book, new.
For a long time, Amazon didn’t charge sales tax, which was an especially cruel anticompetitive practice in that it not only hurt businesses who have to collect those taxes, but also reduced the availability of government services by reducing government revenues.
Amazon has actively and repeatedly suppressed competitors. This includes using its enormous data on customer behavior and buying patterns to manufacture its own products, sold through its own channels. And students of the company’s behavior see evidence that once competitors are eliminated or demand spikes (as on household cleaning products during the pandemic), Amazon’s prices rise, sharply.
For these reasons, I buy from my local independent food markets, booksellers, appliance, and hardware stores (on their websites, currently) and shortly after Amazon bought it, I stopped going to Whole Foods even though it’s actually my closest supermarket.
* * *
That was the end of my letter. I love the convenience of online ordering too, but I’m happy to do it at the websites of independent businesses, especially if they’re local to me. What are your thoughts?
We still have a long way to go on eco-friendly packaging. I just finished a box of crackers. I washed out the plastic tray and will add it to the plastics recycling bag when it dries, put the box in the paper recycling bin, and threw away the shrink-wrap around the tray in the actual trash.
Excess packaging: cracker box, tray, and inner shrink-wrap. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Most people won’t bother to do all this. Designers: this is a profit opportunity for you: create packaging that people only have to put in one place when it’s over, and that can be repurposed later–and remember that today’s compostable “solution” is only an alternative if people have access to an industrial compost facility. Most people don’t.
And businesses: as you adopt truly eco-friendly packaging, you’ve got a branding and marketing opportunity.
Elizabeth Warren hugs a woman in front of Homestead Detention Center
Regardless of what you think of her politics, her personality, or anything else, you have to admit she is quite a wordsmith. Personally, I thought Elizabeth Warren was the best presidential candidate I’ve ever had the chance to vote for. But after her dismal Super Tuesday, it was clearly time for her to get out. She used the opportunity to be memorable once again, and to remind us that it was never about her, but about the movement.
Elizabeth Warren hugs a woman in front of Homestead Detention Center
Warren’s amazing pep talk of a withdrawal statement was one of the most remarkable pieces of oratory-in-writing (and, I’m guessing, oratory delivered in person to our campaign staff) I’ve ever seen. Since many readers of this blog are professional communicators, it’s worth analyzing and learning from it. Here it is, with my commentary:
I want to start with the news. I want all of you to hear it first, and I want you to hear it straight from me: today, I’m suspending our campaign for president.
No shilly-shallying, no evasion. Straight to the unpleasant truth.
I know how hard all of you have worked. I know how you disrupted your lives to be part of this. I know you have families and loved ones you could have spent more time with. You missed them and they missed you. And I know you have sacrificed to be here.
Acknowledging how her volunteers and staff have put their lives on hold. Few candidates do this. More should.
So from the bottom of my heart, thank you, for everything you have poured into this campaign.
Not just acknowledging, but giving direct thanks.
I know that when we set out, this was not the call you ever wanted to hear. It is not the call I ever wanted to make. But I refuse to let disappointment blind me – or you – to what we’ve accomplished. We didn’t reach our goal, but what we have done together – what you have done – has made a lasting difference. It’s not the scale of the difference we wanted to make, but it matters – and the changes will have ripples for years to come.
Rooting the disappointment in optimism and accomplishment.
What we have done – and the ideas we have launched into the world, the way we have fought this fight, the relationships we have built – will carry through, carry through for the rest of this election, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Going for the long-term view.
So think about it:
We have shown that it is possible to build a grassroots movement that is accountable to supporters and activists and not to wealthy donors – and to do it fast enough for a first-time candidate to build a viable campaign. Never again can anyone say that the only way that a newcomer can get a chance to be a plausible candidate is to take money from corporate executives and billionaires. That’s done.
Look how she frames this: as a forever improvement to a broken system. Wonderfully bold.
We have also shown that it is possible to inspire people with big ideas, possible to call out what’s wrong and to lay out a path to make this country live up to its promise.
We have also shown that race and justice – economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, criminal justice – are not an afterthought, but are at the heart everything that we do.
And at the heart of this message. This was a campaign based from the start in social justice.
We have shown that a woman can stand up, hold her ground, and stay true to herself – no matter what.
Something we needed a certain amount of assurance about, after the debacle of 2016.
We have shown that we can build plans in collaboration with the people who are most affected. You know just one example: our disability plan is a model for our country, and, even more importantly, the way we relied on the disability communities to help us get it right will be a more important model.
This collaborative approach is rare in political campaigns, especially at the presidential level. Acknowledging the contributions of experts who don’t merely study but actually LIVE the experience in formulating policy.
And one thing more: campaigns take on a life and soul of their own and they are a reflection of the people who work on them.
This campaign became something special, and it wasn’t because of me. It was because of you. I am so proud of how you all fought this fight alongside me: you fought it with empathy and kindness and generosity – and of course, with enormous passion and grit.
Fairly typical kudos to the staff and volunteers. Nicely done, but other candidates have done the same.
Some of you may remember that long before I got into electoral politics, I was asked if I would accept a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was weak and toothless. And I replied that my first choice was a consumer agency that could get real stuff done, and my second choice was no agency and lots of blood and teeth left on the floor. And in this campaign, we have been willing to fight, and, when necessary, we left plenty of blood and teeth on the floor. And I can think of one billionaire who has been denied the chance to buy this election.
Back to the long-haul strategy, the idea that this is a fight that takes time, and that there are victories along the way, from years past to even as recently as this week
Now, campaigns change people. And I know that you will carry the experiences you have had here, the skills you’ve learned, the friendships you have made, will be with you for the rest of your lives. I also want you to know that you have changed me, and I will carry you in my heart for the rest of my life.
Doesn’t she sound like she’s giving a graduation speech? She’s reminding them of the inspiring, even life-changing experience they all had together in support of this larger cause: building a movement.
So if you leave with only one thing you leave with, it must be this: choose to fight only righteous fights, because then when things get tough – and they will – you will know that there is only option ahead of you: nevertheless, you must persist.
A lot going on in these three lines. A command to do what’s right, a reminder that you’ll face deep-seated opposition, and a call-back to the popular meme that sprung up around her after Mitch McConnell refused to let her read Coretta Scott King’s remarks on the Senate floor. McConnell was the one who said, “Nevertheless, she persisted,” and within days, that was on bumper stickers all around the country
You should all be so proud of what we’ve done together – what you have done over this past year.
We built a grassroots campaign that had some of the most ambitious organizing targets ever – and then we turned around and surpassed them.
Our staff and volunteers on the ground knocked on over 22m doors across the country.
They made 20m phone calls and they sent more than 42m texts to voters. That’s truly astonishing. It is.
We fundamentally changed the substance of this race.
Not just listing some of the accomplishments, but quantifying them. She’s reminding them that she is a policy wonk, that she uses data to substantiate her claims and justify her many detailed plans.
You know a year ago, people weren’t talking about a $0.02 wealth tax, universal childcare, cancelling student loan debt for 43 million Americans while reducing the racial wealth gap, or breaking up big tech. Or expanding Social Security. And now they are. And because we did the work of building broad support for all of those ideas across this country, these changes could actually be implemented by the next president.
Again, reminding them how they helped to change the discourse and make space for the next president to put these things into practice.
A year ago, people weren’t talking about corruption, and they still aren’t talking about it enough – but we’ve moved the needle, and a hunk of our anti-corruption plan is already embedded in a House bill that is ready to go when we get a Democratic Senate.
A subtle call to get that Democractic Senate majority, and a subtle reminder of the large pile of bills passed by the House but in limbo in the Senate.
We also advocated for fixing our rigged system in a way that will make it work better for everyone – regardless of your race, or gender, or religion, regardless of whether you’re straight or LGBTQ. And that wasn’t an afterthought, it was built into everything we did.
A universalist call for inclusion and intersectionality that manages to avoid insulting white working class straight Christian men, who are just as much “everyone” as those who identify as other than that.
And we did all of this without selling access for money. Together 1.25 million people gave more than $112m to support this campaign. And we did it without selling one minute of my time to the highest bidder. People said that would be impossible. But you did that.
Again, she is rewriting the expectation of what’s not only possible but can become normal.
And we also did it by having fun and by staying true to ourselves. We ran from the heart. We ran on our values. We ran on treating everyone with respect and dignity.
Social change can be fun! As Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”
You know liberty green everything was key here – my personal favorites included the liberty green boas, liberty green sneakers, liberty green make up, liberty green hair, and liberty green glitter liberally applied. But it was so much more.
A bit of branding. In truth, I hadn’t noticed this. Warren’s signs have been blue-and-white for years (I live in Massachusetts and I’ve seen them since 2012).
Four-hour selfie lines and pinky promises with little girls.
In other words, what you staff and volunteers did helps to shape the next generation. A strong claim to deeper meaning.
And a wedding at one of our town halls. And we were joyful and positive through all of it.
Celebratory! And a talking point: what other candidate would inspire a wedding at a Town Hall, and what other candidate would make space for that to happen?
We ran a campaign not to put people down, but to lift them up –
Another message of empowerment, and a huge contrast with the incumbent.
So take some time to be with your friends and family, to get some sleep, maybe to get that haircut you’ve been putting off – you know who I’m talking about.
Humor in the face of stress and disappointment, followed by…
Do things to take care of yourselves, gather up your energy, because I know you are coming back. I know you – and I know that you aren’t ready to leave this fight.
Another call to stay active and involved.
You know, I used to hate goodbyes. Whenever I taught my last class or when we moved to a new city, those final goodbyes used to wrench my heart. But then I realized that there is no goodbye for much of what we do. When I left one place, I took everything I’d learned before and all the good ideas that were tucked into my brain and all the good friends that were tucked in my heart, and I brought it all forward with me –
Reiterating that the fight goes on, and so do the policy wins and the friendships.
and it became part of what I did next. This campaign is no different. I may not be in the race for president in 2020, but this fight – our fight – is not over. And our place in this fight has not ended.
Because for every young person who is drowning in student debt, for every family struggling to pay the bills on two incomes, for every mom worried about paying for prescriptions or putting food on the table, this fight goes on. For every immigrant and African American and Muslim and Jewish person and Latinx and trans woman who sees the rise in attacks on people who look or sound or worship like them, this fight goes on.
Reiterating the intersectionality piece, the economic and social justice pieces, and the importance of defending the most vulnerable members of society.
And for every person alarmed by the speed with which climate change is bearing down upon us, this fight goes on. And for every American who desperately wants to see our nation healed and some decency and honor restored to our government, this fight goes on. And sure, the fight may take a new form, but I will be in that fight, and I want you in this fight with me. We will persist.
Bringing in the environment, which hadn’t shown up here so far. And again, reminding of how low the bar has fallen.
One last story. One last story. When I voted yesterday at the elementary school down the street, a mom came up to me. And she said she has two small children, and they have a nightly ritual. After the kids have brushed teeth and read books and gotten that last sip of water and done all the other bedtime routines, they do one last thing before the two little ones go to sleep. Mama leans over them and whispers, “Dream big.” And the children together reply, “Fight hard.”
A big, emotional close. Showing how the campaign’s motto is changing lives into the next generation. I would have ended it there but she has one more inspirational line:
Our work continues, the fight goes on and big dreams never die.
Along with much of the nation, I get to decide what vision for the next four years inspires me. As a progressive, I have many friends in both the Warren and Sanders camps.
But my big worry with Bernie is he may get elected but be functionally unable to govern, because the Dem establishment will block his agenda at every turn, as the Repubs promised but failed to do with DT. Bernie is not a team player or a negotiator and he will get sabotaged.
I also think Elizabeth is smarter and her plans are more well-thought-out. She would prove that HRC didn’t lose because she’s a woman but because she 1) came with a whole lot of negative baggage, such as the pay-to-play scandal, 2) ran a terrible campaign (as just one example: failing to visit Wisconsin even once between the convention and the election, despite losing hugely to Sanders in the Wisconsin primary), and 3) faced a disinformation campaign funded by at least one foreign government. I voted proudly for Bernie in the primary four years ago (and not-so-proudly for HRC in November), but I’m voting for Warren tomorrow. I live in Massachusetts and feel she’s done an excellent job as my Senator.
I do agree with my Bernie-supporter friends that if she does poorly on Super Tuesday, it’s time for her to endorse Bernie and get out.
I have to wonder yet again why the Dems didn’t bring us mandatory hand-countable paper ballots (I wrote that post back in 2007) and ranked-choice voting when they had the chance in ’09. I don’t think DT would be squatting in the Oval Office if there had not been active voter suppression (see that top link in this post again) and if there were paper-ballot recounts in those three very marginal states that put him over the top–and yet the Dems ignored (and may have actually sabotaged) Jill Stein’s effort to get recounts there. Their failure means I and millions of others do not accept the 2016 results as legitimate. It would have been healthy for the country to settle the question of who actually one.
I also don’t believe DT would be president if we’d had ranked choice four years ago. We might have President Hillary Clinton, President Ted Cruz, or President Bernie Sanders–but we would not have this lying, cheating, mean-spirited sociopathic bully destroying our foreign policy, our environment, our education, and our human rights.
Q: Bernie supporters told me that a vote for Elizabeth is a vote for Biden. Is that true?
A: No. A vote for Elizabeth is a vote for Elizabeth. Bernie’s camp is reasonably worried that nobody will have a majority of delegates when they get to the convention this summer?.
There are rules in place that Bernie helped write in 2016. Under those rules, on the first vote at the convention, pledged delegates must vote according to our primaries. If nobody has a majority, then there will be a second vote. On the second vote, delegates can realign. And so on.
It’s quite likely that neither Bernie nor Biden nor Warren will have a majority at the outset. So, all three of them will be viable and there will be some serious horse trading.
Please join me in voting for the future we want, and not any kind of “lesser evil.” We might have to do that in November, but we certainly don’t have to do it now.
Every year, bestselling author and social media visionary Chris Brogan challenges his huge reader base to come up with three words to provide focus for the coming year. This year, I decided to take the challenge for the first time since 2016. And this time, I’m going to emblazon them on a printout in huge type, and post it where I can see my words every day. My three words are:
Clarity
Justice
Healing
Clarity
I’ll discuss Justice in Part 2 (with lots of links(), and Healing–including a deeply personal experience that happened to me this month–in Part 3.eye chart reminds me of having clarity in this year of 20//20 Clarity, 2020 AD
The year 2020 reminds me of 20/20 vision: seeing with perfect clarity. While I don’t expect to achieve perfect clarity, even with the new glasses I’ve just been prescribed ;-), I do want to focus on seeing and acting as clearly as possible.
It’s been several years since I changed the focus of my business toward helping other businesses (and other types of organizations such as nonprofits) find the sweet spot where profitability intersects with environmental and social good.
I now market myself as the person who can help any organization discover opportunities to do go in the world by creating, identifying and re-purposing, and/or marketing profitable products and services that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
I’ve gotten a lot clearer in my messaging since starting this quest in the summer of 2013, since giving my TEDx talk in 2014, and even since publishing my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, in 2016 (which Chris Brogan endorsed, along with Seth Godin, Jack Canfield, and many others).
But I’m still nowhere near as clear as I need to be about:
Who wants to pay me to do this work?
Which services they most want, and to achieve what goals?
How to set a price structure that’s fair both to solopreneurs and large corporations?
Who do I most want to serve?
I’m beginning to figure out the answers. I’ve settled on pricing based on the size of the organization, which seems reasonably fair because larger organizations are more complex and therefore a task such as a marketing plan our outlining a product development campaign will take a lot more of my time–but I’m not sure I’ve got all the bugs worked out yet. I’ve realized that I’d rather work with small entities than large ones, but I am very open to being farmed out by a larger entity to their smaller customers, suppliers, or business units–and to the larger entities sponsoring me in other ways, such as funding my speaking to organizations that can’t otherwise afford me.
Hopefully, seeing that message of clarity on the wall of my workspace every day will inspire me to figure all this out, and to make my message so clear that everyone understands exactly how I can help and why it’s important.
I’ll discuss Justice in Part 2 (with lots of links), and Healing–including a deeply personal experience that happened to me this month–in Part 3.
