Chris Brogan borrowed an idea from James Altucher: “Write a list of ten things every day. They can be 10 anythings. Ten terrible dates. Ten places to visit. Ten desserts I want to eat this year. Whatever.”

I won’t commit to making a list daily, but I was inspired to create these two after reading Chris’s post (which includes several samples of his own lists).

 

World Issues
  1. Help figure out how the 30-40% of food that’s wasted can instead be rechanneled to feed those who are starving–and help that get implemented (perhaps this is a place I can target my speaking; see Personal Goal #2, below)
  2. Help amplify the voices of those better qualified than I am to show countries how to solve disputes without going to war
  3. Help build more bridges between/among Left and Right/”woke” and “non-woke”/Muslims and Jews and Christians, etc.
  4. Corollary #1 to #3: Explore and amplify alternatives to counterproductive communication styles: calling-in instead of calling out, respect and listening while searching for common ground instead of shaming
  5. Corollary #2 to #3: Help people to understand that they are not stuck–that just because they have been caught in bad patterns doesn’t mean they are trapped there forever
  6. Continue to demonstrate that baking environmental and social justice directly into companies’ products, services, and mindsets can be highly profitable–find ways for this idea to gain much more traction in the mainstream business world (without having to join that world)
  7. Expose more companies to principles such as biomimicry, multiple function, and circular economy so that they can better understand the financial benefits of deep reimagining, deep re-invention, and regenerativity
  8. Show companies that solving these big problems while increasing profitability requires a mixture of Great Leaps and Kaizen, different in different situations–and that they can do both at once
  9. Corollary to #5: Bring the holistic and systemic analysis that helps determine the right solutions in the right situations, and recommend implementation strategies
  10. Help change mindsets from despair to active, participatory hope: helping everyone I meet understand that he/she/they have the power to effect meaningful change, in their own lives AND in the wider world. Show how ordinary people (usually working with others) have created movements that changed history.
Personal Issues
  1. Probe, discover, and overcome whatever internal barriers are still preventing me from achieving at a higher level–both in terms of impact and revenue–made good progress on this but clearly still have work to do
  2. Book more speaking gigs that pay a fee, whether virtual or live-stage or hybrid–especially international speaking that allows me to explore more parts of the world
  3. Land two or three new long-term consulting clients in the profitable social/environmental justice part of my business
  4. Find steady, decently-paying markets for articles or other types of content, as I had before
  5. Create the right offer for more readers/viewers/listeners to engage with me and come into my orbit
  6. Implement more of the enormous amount of good advice I’ve been given over the past few years
  7. Pick one of the several projects I’ve been tossing around, start it and run it: launch the retreat, the course, the pay-to-participate mastermind/mentoring group OR (not and) the resume-method licensing program
  8. Address issues of fatigue and focus, including lack of motivation, lack of follow-through, and more
  9. Keep up with the torrent of email, LI and FB messages, etc. and figure out a way to spot and respond to the important ones
  10. Continue to be a force in my grandson’s life, even if his parents move out of the area

 

And what are yours?

Please feel welcome to comment with some of your own goal lists. You don’t need ten things. Even one or two. And yes, you can share a whole list of ten if you want to. Just keep in mind that comments will be moderated and abusive or spammy ones will be removed.

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Someone on Quora asked, “How do you tell someone their name is wrong?”

A kindergarten classroom similar to what I experienced in 1961. Via Wikimedia Commons, credited to Yogurt yeah. Full attribution: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kindergarten_class_early_1970s.jpg
A kindergarten classroom similar to what I experienced in 1961. Via Wikimedia Commons, credited to Yogurt yeah. Full attribution: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kindergarten_class_early_1970s.jpg

That question brought up a painful long-ago memory. I responded, “Two weeks into kindergarten, I was transferred to a new school. On my arrival day, the teacher said, “I hope you spell your name S-h-e-l-d-o-n, because that’s how we spell it here.” Even at not-yet-five-years-old, I was outraged. I thought but did not say, “Who the #*^%& are you to tell ME how to spell MY name?”

I don’t think that at four years old I even knew a good cuss word to put in the string of symbols but I did know she was messed up. It was an assault on my identity, even though it was not an identity I’d chosen or even liked; in high school, I shortened my name to Shel. But in kindergarten, that was a long way in the future. 

It happened that her spelling was correct—but if it had not been, I’d have gone home and complained to my parents. A few years later, I would have politely told the teacher that her spelling wasn’t the right one, and that I did know how to spell my name. She did get the spelling right—but I tuned that teacher out to the point where it is the ONLY memory I had of her because she had established herself in my head as an ‘authority figure’ of zero importance to me. I went through the motions of kindergarten. I may have wasted a whole year of schooling because she discredited herself to me on my first day.

In today’s world, where the same root name can have a dozen wildly variant spellings, we should not only honor the names people use (whether given or chosen), but also their choice of pronouns. As the parent of a grown child who identifies as nonbinary, I can assure you that they see every intentional use of the pronouns they rejected as a similar assault on their personhood. Five years since the pronoun change, I still goof up once in a while–but they know it’s unintentional and that I’m doing my best to overcome 25 years of programming that associated them with pronouns that were biologically determined.

My kid even wrote a song about the experience of being misgendered repeatedly by a stranger–a waiter in a restaurant. Their website is Flight or Visibility.

And if you’re one of those people that pride yourself on fighting the “culture wars” to preserve heteronormative CIS-gendered lifestyles as the only choice, I’ve got a few questions for you:

  1. Why is the way some other people are wired threatening to you?
  2. Why do you need to stop other people from living the life that feels not just natural to them but their destiny?
  3. How would you feel if it was your personal lifestyle being attacked by people in the centers of power?
  4. Why do you choose actions that invalidate their personhood as mine was invalidated by that kindergarten teacher and my kid’s by that waiter? Does it make you feel superior to put other people down?
  5. If this were not natural, why have non-hetero and gender-queer people of all sorts existed throughout history, even in openly scornful or even repressive societies? Even into the late 1960s, there was basically no support for queer people of any sort, and in many parts of the world, it’s still an anathema that can lead to long prison terms. Yet people persist. They are willing to take on the burdens because they cannot deny who they are. Unlike the homophobes, they are not trying to “recruit” or “convert” others, just trying to live their lives. Why do you try to deny them?
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We’ve all heard toxic, disempowering, dream-stomping clichés like

  • “You can’t fight City Hall”
  • “We’ve always done it this other way”
  • “That’s impossible”
  • “You’ll always be a failure”
“We call B.S.!”
That’s the appropriate response, made famous by X Gonzales, at the time an 18-year-old survivor of the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just three days earlier. That same year, they co-organized (and spoke at) a huge national march on Washington and helped to shepherd through the first meaningful gun safety law in gun-loving Florida in this century.
And we all have to “call B.S.” when anyone tries to destroy our self-esteem, our calling, and our power.

18-year-old X Gonzales gives the "Call B.S." speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigleaftropicals/40463975301, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66778488
18-year-old X Gonzales (center) gives the “Call B.S.” speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia.

Like Gonzales, we must embrace our ability to make change and join with others, nonviolently, to achieve that change.
For some, including me, becoming an activist is a way to do that. For others, the path takes different forms, such as being a parent or teacher or health care professional—or, for that matter, an accountant, manufacturer, or prison administrator—and carrying out those duties in ways that build up others, help them achieve those dreams, and help THEM build up others—to build a community, and a planet, based on the worth of every individual. Because to focus only on building yourself up is narcissism, even sociopathic.
This post was inspired by a private note admiring my activism but saying the writer got too depressed to do this kind of work. Here’s s my response, exactly as I wrote it, except I broke it up into more paragraphs and added more specific locations:
I’m sure you make the world better in other ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist–it’s a path where 90 percent or more of your efforts seem to be for naught (though often, change IS happening but not visible in the moment).
Because I focus on the positive, I’m able to find the strength to continue. I keep in mind that when I was born in December, 1956, half of the US was still officially segregated and racism still ruled most of the rest. Women and people of color had very few career opportunities. White women were mostly teachers and nurses while people of color were channeled into laborer, domestic, sanitation worker.
Male-on-female domestic violence and casual sexual harassment were considered normal and acceptable. People were still getting fired or even imprisoned for being in a same-sex or interracial relationship. There was close to zero awareness of pollution, climate change and making our ecosystems more resilient. Decent food was very difficult to find. And the last well-known nonviolent revolution had been in India almost a decade earlier.
Except that OFFICIAL segregation had ended, most of that was still true on October 15, 1969, when one casual comment within a speech at the first Vietnam peace demonstration I ever attended set me on a lifetime path of activism. Yet, in 53 years–a nanosecond in geologic time or even in human history–all of that has shifted. So things ARE getting better because of activism.
The other thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that MY OWN ACTIONS have made a difference several times.
Here are my top three: 1) I founded Save the Mountain, the group that kept a particularly offensive luxury housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range [Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA] a mile and a half from my house. Even experts within the environmental movement locally had given up hope. I went in with the attitude that we would win–but even I thought it would take us five years. We did it in just 13 months–because all of us worked on different pieces where we had expertise, and because we had mass support from area residents.
2) I was one of the 1414 people arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook [New Hampshire, USA] nuclear power plant in 1977. By the time the last of us was released two weeks later, a national safe energy movement had been born, most of it adopting the nonviolent resistance techniques and consensus decision making that we used in Clamshell Alliance here in New England. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the lasting shifts in the culture that movement created: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/. And while we ultimately lost the battle to keep Seabrook from being built, we basically put a halt to the development of new nukes (unfortunately, we have to fight that battle again–but keeping these unsafe and unnecessary monsters off the drawing boards and out of the power grids for nearly 40 years is a pretty good outcome. And this time, I have great confidence that we will win.)
3) My work in local electoral politics [Hampshire County, Massachusetts] has helped to bring about a lasting progressive majority and a series of four progressive mayors in a row in Northampton, and this April took back the Hadley Select Board again after losing to a Trumpian majority in 2021 when we couldn’t find anyone willing to run. I think we’ve taken control of the board three times. Two for sure.
Again, I recognize that my path of activism isn’t for everyone. Neither is my parallel path of working within the business community to spread the message that solving our biggest problems, like hunger, poverty, racism, othering, and even catastrophic climate change and war, can be a profit path for business.
But each and every one of us can find our personal way to make a difference, to brighten the light for all of us, and to help bring into being the planet we want to pass on to subsequent generations.
If this post inspires you, please post a comment about what you’re already doing, or what you will start doing.

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Purity illustration: Jesus Baptism by Waiting for the World. Licensed through Creative Commons.
Purity illustration: Jesus Baptism by Waiting for the World. Licensed through Creative Commons.

When I was a kid, Proctor and Gamble was still running TV ads claiming Ivory Soap was “99 and 44/00 percent pure.” (Digression: Here’s a link to a quick, fun article on the origins of this marketing slogan, which dates back to 1881.) Even back then, I found this absurd–because I  already understood that even just over half a percentage point of impurity meant it wasn’t pure at all. It was actually pretty contaminated. After all, sewage is 99 percent water–and I don’t know anyone who would want a glass of that.

In daily living, 100% purity is a rare thing indeed. In science and in business, we’re often very appropriately guided by the slogan, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

A typical process would be:

  1. Design.
  2. Test.
  3. Debug.
  4. Redesign.
  5. Ship.
  6. Receive user feedback and debug, then iterate again.

That process works far better than holding out for an illusory perfection that can’t even exist until real-world conditions show us the flaw. So why do we demand it in our politics? I read a New York Times article this morning about a controversy over naming one of its telescopes for 50s-60s-era NASA head James Webb because he may or may not have been homophobic. The article makes it abundantly clear that whether he was or not is a matter of debate–but he was clearly antiracist at a time when that was far from popular, and provided many career opportunities for people of color. It also reminds us that homophobia was the official policy of the US government at that time.

We humans are an evolving species. The LGBT movement as it existed in that era was mostly quiet, clandestine, and not in the mainstream consciousness. The Stonewall Riots, considered the birth of the modern LGBT movement, didn’t take place until 1969. I was very active in that movement from 1973 through 1986 and remain supportive of its goals. But I dont think we should fault Mr. Webb for not being an out-front visionary advocate of LGBT liberation at a time when gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans people were ridiculed or assaulted if they entered the mainstream consciousness at all. Rather we should take pride that as a society, we’ve grown to accept that LGBT folks are entitled to civil rights, to choose their families, and even to marry. When I attended my first same-sex weddings in the late 1970s, I never imagined that legal same-sex marriage would be achieved in my lifetime, let alone in less than 40 years–less than 30 in my own state of Massachusetts.

And for the most part I don’t fault our politicians when they compromise on other issues to get some good things passed into law, as long as they come away with significant progress. (I do get tired of the Democrats’ frequent and problematic tendency to negotiate away far more than they have to to try to get bipartisan support that is usually not forthcoming–but once that fails, they don’t go back to the original stronger versions. This is what Obama did with the ACA, and whatBiden has done on issues like immigration and climate.)

When we pass a week or insufficient law, we have to recognize that we will have the next iteration and the one after that–and we can work to strengthen our hand. Change is more often gradual than sweeping. Even the loathsome Bill Clinton-era “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about gays in the military was a huge improvement over the dishonorable discharges and possible prison terms that were official policy before that change–though I’m very glad to see it go away, and to see the Respect for Marriage Act become law just six days ago. (Another digression: here’s an academic essay from the quite recent past–2021–arguing that don’t ask, don’t tell” should be overturned. Warning: it looks like it might be a term paper mill site.) 

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Screenshot: Opening lines of the poem, "Sometimes the Wolf Cries Girl": Sometimes the hero stumbles/ and falls right off the page./Sometimes the princess…
Opening lines of the poem, “Sometimes the Wolf Cries Girl”

Recently, I posted this poem on Facebook:

A cynical friend responded, “Sometimes…none of this is true.” And I replied,

But all of it is, sometimes. Sometimes is the anchor word here, that allows us to play with our perceptions. All of it is true once in a while, but all of it is not true often enough that the inability to go there feels normative to you. As someone who has spent some big chunks of my life on the margins for various reasons, I can assure you that the narrow, normative, conformist version of reality isn’t real for a big percentage of the population—but who’s in and who’s out might vary over time.

My “margins” experience is both direct and indirect. Directly, I’ve been treated as marginal—”othered”—for living in poverty in my younger years…for not being into sports, hypermasculinity, or TV celebrity culture…for being Jewish…for being bisexual…for being a Northerner in Georgia and an Easterner in Southwest Ohio…And I’ve confronted ageism against both the young and the old—which started when I was very young and has continued now that people are beginning to think of me as old.

But I’ve also worked with a lot of groups that were marginalized in ways outside of my own direct experience of it. In college in the 1970s—long before same-sex couples were socially acceptable—I ran the campus Gay Center and started two more in cities where I had college co-op jobs and went to my first same-sex wedding in 1978 or ’79. I did community organizing around the environment and safe energy all the way back to 1971, when I was a 14-year-old high school junior—and that consciousness didn’t really become mainstream until THIS century.  I worked as a paid organizer for an elders’ rights organization at 22 and 23. I had my consciousness raised about a whole bunch of disability rights and minority rights issues during the six years in the 1990s when I served on my city’s official disability access committee (helping public spaces like theaters and restaurants meet accessibility codes) and simultaneously on the District Attorney’s Civil Rights Advisory Board (sensitizing lawyers, cops, and criminal justice workers to the needs of marginalized communities). I worked for 15 years in that city and 24 years in the neighboring small town where I live now on opening up the electoral process and city/town government to disenfranchised voices. And for more than three years, I’ve been deeply involved with immigration/refugee justice work, including an extended visit to the US-Mexico border where we visited a huge refugee camp daily and heard the stories of some of the most marginalized people in the world. 

This diversity of experience may seem very random—but certain common threads hold it all together into a larger whole that feels coherent and meaningful to me. A few examples:

  • All of this work is about empowering people who have felt powerless
  • All of it embraces the same construct that the poet presents: that just because something is a certain way doesn’t at all mean it’s impossible to change it (I even did a TEDx talk on this called “‘Impossible’ Is A Dare” (it’s 15 minutes long, riffs on a quote by Muhammad Ali that I misattributed at the time, and discusses how socially and environmentally conscious businesses can change the world—to watch, click the link and then click again on “event videos”)
  • All of it works on the theory that change happens faster and more fully when it becomes a movement—while acknowledging that acting alone can still make a significant difference. (I’m very proud of my one-person, three-day demonstration against the US bombing of Libya that drew middle fingers and jeers on the first day, but supportive honks and waves on the third day, as well as many individual conversations with people who thought differently, sometimes reaching common ground and always de-demonizing each other—but I’m even prouder of the broad-based movement I founded that saved an endangered local mountain.)
  • It all recognizes that change happens both internally, inside your own heart and brain, and externally, as the actions of one person or a movement ripple out into the wider world–and as these movements find common ground and begin to work together, discovering their intersectionality: their common struggle.
  • As these movements begin to combine like an amoeba merging with its neighbor, it becomes easier to achieve drastic restructuring of society as people begin to look at solutions to our biggest problems as interrelated, holistic, and systemic.

So yes, we have the power to change ourselves and the world. As the poem says in its final lines,

just because it’s what we’ve been told
doesn’t make it true.

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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, etcFacebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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

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

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

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

Isn’t it time to reclaim that greatness?Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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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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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