It’s worth reading the original accusations in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that we mark today; many sound amazingly relevant, especially if Trump manages to gain power again.
Like our forbears of 1776, we are once again called to resist tyranny. But today, we know that nonviolent resistance is more effective and longer lasting than armed struggle. And we know more than 200 ways to be nonviolent activists. In the pre-Internet, pre-pandemic era. Gene Sharp identified 198 ways. Many more have been found in recent years. The challenges are figuring out what makes strategic sense against a corrupt Supreme Court, how to organize to prevent a Trump victory, and what to do if he does take power again.
Yes, it’s true. Thursday’s “debate” was a debacle, an atrocity. And yes, Democrats have a right to indulge in some panic. But a more helpful response is to demand that the mainstream media start covering the real issue in this campaign: That American democracy is under threat by Donald Trump, who was the worst president in history according to experts and who has devolved into a raving lunatic who has openly talked about the totalitarian regime he would impose this time.
For months, much of the mainstream media has consistently painted Biden in a poor light while for the most part refusing to set the same standard in evaluating Trump. A particularly horrific example was the time one of the Washington Post’s newsletters made a chart that compared how old Biden would be at the END of a second term with how old Trump would be at the BEGINNING of a second term. They are only 3-1/2 years apart.
Yet, while the New York Times and Washington Post were going on about the need for Biden to step aside, the Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the few voices in the mainstream press saying that Trump, not Biden, is the one who should leave the race. Their reasons are not just the 30+ lies he confidently uttered during the event (you can’t really call it a debate). It’s everything he’s done in the last several years. The man is a felon, a self-admitted sexual predator, an inciter of a treasonous riot, an open bigot, a thuggish bully, and a narcissistic example of Id running amok with no Superego to rein it in. Trump is known for confidently putting out total bullshit—kind of like some AI tools that tell us to eat a rock every day. Trump wanted us to drink chlorine bleach during the pandemic, after all.
While under both the insurrection and incompetence clauses of the Constitution Trump shouldn’t have even been allowed on the ballot, he’s there. And if he leaves, we may not like the results. If, say, Nikki Haley were to replace him as the Republican candidate, she could actually win on the basis that she wouldn’t be as bad as Trump. And she wouldn’t–but she might very likely be as bad as or worse than the second-worst president, George W. Bush.
Meanwhile, as Lawrence O’Donnell points out, the Dems have no viable candidate in reserve. When LBJ left the race much earlier in the cycle, in March, 1968, Humphrey didn’t have enough time to gather accolades or dollars. He also notes that there was pressure on Bill Clinton to withdraw in 1992 and on Trump to do so in 2016, yet both men won. AND he faults the debate moderators for failing to ask important questions like what the heck Trump was doing during those three hours of silence on January 6, 2021, or to probe deeper on Trump’s nonsensical answers and outright lies, including his obvious lack of understanding of what a tariff is.
The Dems would start by attacking each other in a “circular firing squad” that only helps the Republicans. Any convention result will leave a wide swath of disaffected voters. It just doesn’t make sense.
Mind, I’m no fan of Biden. There’s a long list of betrayals of progressives that I’m not at all happy with. But I believe that this race is much less about who we want to be president than whether we want democracy or fascism, and what the Supreme Court will look like. It’s also about who progressives would rather be pressuring, and there’s no question that we’d secure more wins under Biden than Trump.
It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.
So instead of trying to dump Biden, let’s demand that the media:
Point out every lie either candidate utters
Give some space to Trump’s crazy “word salad” campaign speeches that make absolutely no sense
Examine the consequences of each of his fascist-inspired policy proposals
Fact-check the next debate in REAL TIME.
And let’s remind everyone we know that this election is not about choosing a saint but choosing the better opponent who will enable the most positive change.
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”).
DT is likely to win the nomination, yes. And should he win in November, a second DT presidency would be far, far worse than the train wreck of his 2017-2021 term. The one thing DT tends to be truthful about is his penchant for cruelty and vengeance. His own and his advisors’ statements have made it clear that they intend to destroy the surviving parts of US democracy, seek revenge on anyone they see as an enemy, and create an authoritarian state that would imprison or deport opponents.
But Kagan is forgetting something really important: Winning the nomination is not the same as winning the election.
It is true that Biden will be a hold-your-nose choice for many. I am not happy with his horrible immigration policies, his greenlighting of environmentally destructive fossil fuel projects, and his lack of ability to curb violence against civilians in other parts of the world. But we don’t have ranked-choice voting in the US, and until we do, a vote for a third-party or a choice not to vote is a vote for DT, for authoritarianism, and quite possibly for fascism. I think enough people will realize this truth that if voters are allowed to vote and votes are counted honestly, DT will not win.
Today, I spent two hours with my heartstrings tugged at a concert of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus—where Palestinian teens and 20-somethings from East Jerusalem sing—and compose—together with their Israeli Jewish counterparts from West Jerusalem. In June 2014 (a time of relative peace), I attended an equally moving concert in the Galilee (northern Israel) by Diwan Saz, a modern combo whose performers that night included a 10-year-old Bedouin boy (with a gorgeous voice) and a Chassidic rabbi, among others.
Those hopeful events seem far away an out of reach as we mourn the tragic and avoidable loss of over 4000 lives on both sides this month.
We have to somehow prevent even greater losses of life—and to reset!
Ultraorthodox Jews protest in London for Palestinian rights. Photo by Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Let’s start with some points I hope everyone can agree on:
Innocent people have been killed and hurt for decades, and nothing will bring them back
The violence has not worked, no matter who commits it
Both Arabs and Jews have claims on the land going back thousands of years
They also claim common ancestry with both honoring a heritage that started with Abraham. They eat very similar foods, speak languages with many cognates, and have both had to adapt to the harsh desert that surrounds them.
It is long past time to find a workable solution
From that very rudimentary framework, could we perhaps evolve to:
We all are carrying deep hurts. An eye for an eye doesn’t just leave everyone blind, because it will eventually leap from eyes to other things. So an eye for an eye, ultimately, leaves no one standing. Can we accept not only that the past is filled with violence, cruelty, and the spewing of hatred/dehumanization—but that all sides would benefit from moving past this?
Can we look to the world for other examples of long-standing hostility and violence transforming into something better—such as the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa and Sierra Leone and the peace process in Northern Ireland?
Can we finally break the cycles of fear, hatred, and grief that seem to lock everyone into ever-deeper and more destructive cycles of violence?
Can the barriers—both physical and psychological—between the two cultures be removed so that Israelis and Palestinians who are kept apart by laws and physical barricades learn to work, play, and live together; there already are several small projects that are a great start, such as:
Combatants for Peace, which presents touring programs featuring one person who fought in the Israeli army and another who was involved in the Palestinian resistance, now working together for peace despite some of them experiencing injuries, imprisonment, and all of them mourning the loss of friends and family members in the conflict
It takes great courage to organize for peace when the leaders of both communities feed their population an unending diet of hatred for the other side. In the Middle East and around the world, many people have been killed for trying to make peace.
I have visited Israel and Palestine twice and have family and friends (both Palestinian and Israeli) in both Israel and Palestine (in the West Bank). I’ve stayed in the homes and hotels of Palestinians, with a Chassidic family, in a Druze village, a Transcendental Meditation village, a kibbutz, and an Israeli settler community on the West Bank. I’ve met with a blogger in Ramallah and with leaders of several Israeli peace organizations. I’ve also participated in Middle East peace groups in the US going back to the early 1980s. The vast majority I’ve talked to over the years, no matter what their ethnic or religious heritage, just want peace. The governments are not giving it to them. Surely there are better ways to solve things than yet another war in a long and brutal series of wars!
Raise the cost to politicians of doing the wrong thing
Heighten awareness both of the issue and that the issue has a constituency of people who care about it enough to take time out of their day
Build momentum toward change, even systemic change (she notes Erica Chenoweth’s research that shows that a government will crumble if just 3-1/2 percent of the population engages in nonviolent resistance)
Help participants feel less isolated
Inspire others to show up, especially if you carry signs about why you’re marching
Provide cathartic release: what she calls “a national scream”
Create opportunities to get involved with organizations working on causes that matter to you
Offers a voice to oppressed and powerless groups that would risk to much if they were actively protesting
Allow even very small numbers to bear witness (I personally have conducted some one-person protests, so this resonates deeply with me)
Facilitate ways to harness your skills, beliefs, and connections to make bigger and more lasting change
It’s a great list, but it’s only the beginning. Here are ten more that I came up with very quickly. I’d love you to add to the list as well:
1) Sometimes, demonstrations and protests actually change things. A few among many examples:
• The 1963 civil rights March on Washington (the “I Have a Dream” march, which my late mother attended)
• 1977’s occupation of the Seabrook nuclear plant construction site, which birthed the modern US safe energy movement. I participated, and I wrote extensively about HOW this action changed the world (that link takes you to part 1 of a 5-part series I wrote about it, and each one links to the next installment at the end)
• Arab Spring brought down multiple repressive governments within just a few months
• The Save the Mountain movement I co-founded resulted in thirteen months of continuous public opposition to a development project–and succeeded! I expected to win, but even I thought it would take five years.
2) Not only do protests show the demonstrators we are not alone, but it emboldens sympathizers who have not taken action before to do so.
3) We don’t always know the effects of our actions in influencing others until afterwards–but later we may have found that we created a shift in public opinion and in willingness to take action.
4) Demonstrations offer chances to learn about not-very-visible parts of your own community–some disenfranchised and needing to tell their stories, others doing great work but out of the limelight.
5) Protests reinforce the idea that powerful, well-thought-out nonviolent action can create sustained change.
6) Sometimes, amazing performers and speakers participate. I have heard John Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon (several times), Paul Winter, Stevie Wonder, Holly Near, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary, Orleans, Jackson Browne, and many others. I learned news and ideas from speakers that changed my way of thinking. In fact, at my very first peace demonstration on October 15, 1969, 12-year-old me heard a speaker say that the Vietnam war was undeclared. When I discovered he was correct, it changed my whole way of looking at the world and turned me into an activist–because everything I’d been led to believe about the US system of checks and balances came crashing down around me.
7) Participation is empowering! You know you’re working for peace, justice, a green planet, etc.–and you feel ready to take on the world.
8 ) You get to enjoy the creativity of signs, puppet shows, songs and chants, etc. that spotlight the issue of the day.
9) It’s a way to build your personal community. If you’ve been doing this a while, you get to catch up with your friends. If you’re new to protesting, you can make new friends.
10) More often than not, participating in a protest is actually fun.
While Emily wrote her list back in 2019, it’s all still not only true but relevant. A few things have changed, though–some good, some bad:
Dozens of new ways of protesting were invented or popularized during the pandemic, adding to more than 200 we already had
Repressive right-wing governments have been forced from power in countries such as the US and Brazil–but took or consolidated power in Israel, Hungary, Turkey, and India
Putin has started a criminal and brutal war against Ukraine
In the US, the ultra-right has taken over the Supreme Court and several state legislatures, catalyzing a whole new generation of activists–and in election after election, progressives are winning big in places they weren’t expected to
Black Lives Matter and reproductive rights protests reached critical mass
Do you notice anything unusual about the front page of yesterday’s Daily Hampshire Gazette (my local paper, covering Hampshire County, Massachusetts and neighboring areas)?
Take a moment to click on the picture (to enlarge it) and make your guess, then scroll down to discover what I saw.
Here it is” Of the four stories on the front page, 100% represent a positive report on a people’s struggle for a better world, either concerning environmental or social justice issues. Two of the stories are about a movement to ban plastic bags, one reports on local Juneteenth events held the previous day, and one chronicles an attempt to establish a state holiday honoring Indigenous people.
As a lifelong activist who got my start at age 12, and the parent of two people in their thirties who each took their first steps toward activism at age 6 (five years apart) and have remained active into adulthood, I’m proud of what’s happening one town away from me. I’ve said for many years that you are never too young or too old to be an activist. I had two friends, Rose “Arky” Markham and Frances Crowe, who were still activists on their 100th birthdays (three years apart). And proud of my local newspaper for giving oxygen to important movements, especially when kids take leadership. Too often, kid activists are pushed aside and told that their voices, their actions, don’t matter. Listen to the voices of both age and youth. they both have a lot to share.
Bothsidesim, as you might have guessed, is the mainstream media’s tendency to pretend that reporting objectively requires covering “both sides” with equal weight. But here are a few problems with that approach:
Often, there are many more than two sides. Bothsidesism pushes other voices and more nuanced analysis to the margins, just as the two-party system that drives most US politics. Not everything can be separated into either/or, black/white, environmentally friendly/environmentally harmful. A great example would be US Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s, where Justices would frequently write concurring opinions that raised issues and perspectives outside the “official” opinion (this is less true of the current court, which disposes of many cases in the “shadow docket“).
When there are just two sides, one side may be well-reasoned and make a compelling case, while the other puts forth “alternative facts“–in other words, lies–to build a case based on demagoguery or deceit. (The link goes to an NBC clip of then presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway, 2 minutes in, introducing the term in an interview early in the term of the 45th US president–and the interviewer, Chuck Todd, calling her out immediately.)
Bothsidesim turns any contest of ideas into a “horse race” where the issues get swept aside in favor of who appears to be the better debater.
The current “debate” over DT’s federal indictment in the document-hiding case shows what happens when bothsidesim runs amok–and this is NOT about Republican vs. Democrat. While some media fall all over themselves to cry, “both sides did this,” quoting hyperpartisan pols like Ted Cruz, there is a lot of similarity between the approaches of Republican former VP Mike Pence and Democratic former VP (now president) Joe Biden, and basically none between either of them and DT.
DT falsely claimed all the documents had already been turned in and stalled so long that the government sent in the FBI to retrieve them. Also, DT’s document trove reportedly includes important military secrets, and DT showed these to people who were not authorized to see them–potentially putting our country and its military at risk.
The astute historian Heather Cox Richardson provides an equally current example thousands of miles outside the US. She quotes Timothy Snyder, a Yale scholar of authoritarianism on the recent Russian attack on Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka Dam:
Snyder warned journalists not to “bothsides” the story by offering equal time to both sides. “What Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests a false equality,” he wrote. “The story doesn’t start at the moment the dam explodes. For the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive.” “Objectivity does not mean treating an event as a coin flip between two public statements,” he said. “It demands thinking about the objects and the settings that readers require for understanding amidst uncertainty.”
Let’s hope that becomes the mantra for journalists everywhere.
Today, along with feeling gratitude for those millions of people over the US’s history who served in the military to defend democratic ideals, I’m feeling troubled that so much of the world still sees war as a way to solve problems.
War only creates problems. It doesn’t solve them. But when someone else starts an aggressive war, are there other choices?
The war in Ukraine has been going on for about 15 months, since Putin’s invasion. Some people say it’s been going on since 2014, when he annexed the Crimea. Putin certainly had other choices–but once he invaded, did Ukraine?
Yesterday, I came across two very different perspectives that both feel to me like they have validity, even though they contradict each other.
A withdrawal of US support from Ukraine at this point would not lead to peace; it would lead to the most horrifying climax of the war. Russia would simply deliver its final brutal blow to Ukraine, pummeling it to the point where it would no longer exist as a separate nation…
Regardless how we got here, our only choice at this point is to either support Ukraine or to not. While the United States should do everything possible to support a negotiated settlement, our goal should also be a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine still has a chance to exist.
But she recognizes the need to address the root causes:
The best way to solve conflicts is to prevent them from occurring to begin with, and if I had had the choice, I would have made very different foreign policy decisions related to Russia over the last 40 years. We must set an entirely new and different trajectory of military involvement in the world, one in which we are not the world’s policeman but rather the world’s collaborator in creating a world in which war is no more.
Zunes however further cautioned against intervention. “Before we start talking about fighting dictatorships, we should stop propping up dictators”, he advised, highlighting the fact that 57% of the world’s dictatorships receive arms from the US. Instead, he appealed to the success of nonviolent methods.
Meanwhile, one of the other team members arguing against militarized intervention pointed out that the US’s claim that it’s a democracy is a lot weaker than it was:
Closing the debate, Peter Galbraith argued that we must use the effectiveness test when determining whether to fight for democracy. “Yes, there are times we should fight and we have fought successfully,” he proclaimed, but “the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate why it is not feasible to fight for democracy outside the West.” He criticised the Reagan administration’s embracing of Pinochet, under which Bolton served at the time.
Galbraith further argued that both an independent judiciary and political parties accepting election results are essential features of a successful democracy – neither of which the US possesses. He claimed that the Supreme Court has “become more partisan, more extreme right wing, more an instrument of the Republican Party” since 2000. This is referencing George W Bush’s electoral victory in Florida, where a divisive landmark Supreme Court ruling stopped the recount of votes. If the count hadn’t been stopped, Bush’s opponent Al Gore could potentially have won…
Galbraith concluded: “Rather than looking for authoritarian dragons to slay far from home, America should be fighting to save our democracy at home.”
Ramadan started Wednesday. Passover starts next Wednesday. Easter weekend begins two days after Passover. And today, the Wednesday halfway between the starts of these sacred Muslim and Jewish celebrations, we mourn. Again.
As a Jew, I’ll be celebrating Passover Seders next week with family and friends. Part of the Seder is a song called “Dayenu,” which means “It would have been enough for us.” The song thanks God for many miracles involving the exodus from Egypt and the journey across the desert.
Many Jews also add a second text: “Lo Dayenu”: It is NOT Enough for Us.” In the modern Midrashic tradition, lots of people have written their own versions. I like this “Lo Dayenu,” by Joy Stember.
Social Justice “Lo Dayenu” Seder reading by Joy Stember
With the six deaths in Nashville yesterday, the grisly total of people in the US killed in school mass shootings from Columbine in 1999 through yesterday has grown again. It reached 554 10 months ago. 554 children and adults who died for no reason other than a broken political process that gets in the way of even the most basic protection from gun violence. While they are quick to offer another round of “thoughts and prayers,” they offer no action. It is easier to get an assault rifle than a license to cut hair.
Interestingly, many of the guns-uber-alles crowd are the same people who suddenly discover that life is sacred after all, as long as it’s a life inside a pregnant woman (a position that happens to violate several religious traditions that consider the life of the mother more important than the life of an unborn fetus). But apparently, once these kids are born, they’re no longer important.
Here’s a basic human decency rule I’d love to see taught in every classroom, reinforced in every workplace and community gathering: Freedom TO take an action stops when it interferes with another person’s freedom FROM harm. By my logic, the freedom to own or use an assault rifle–a weapon of mass destruction–is overridden by the freedom from being randomly shot.
And here are a few “Lo Dayenu” verses I just wrote:
If we could block killers from having access to assault rifles,
But allow them to enter schools, cultural venues, places of worship, and public spaces with other murder weapons, Lo dayenu. It would not be enough for us.
If we could have international peace meetings and far-reaching agreements,
But still “solve” international disputes with war, Lo dayenu. It would not be enough for us.
If we address the violence of mass shootings,
But not address the violence of poverty and starvation, or of rape and beatings, Lo dayenu. It would not be enough for us.
If we reach the ability of people around the world to live in harmony with each other,
But fail to curb violence against the planet, Lo dayenu. It would not be enough for us.
Please feel welcome to add other verses in the comments.
May whatever holidays you celebrate be joyous, despite the troubled world we share. And may we come together with both our Dayenus of gratitude and our Lo Dayenus of work that we still need to do.
