Category: Mindset

By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Trying to make sense of these complex issues isn’t easy. It’s something most progressive Jews struggle with constantly. This is very much a personal piece, based on grappling with this situation since I was a small child. I don’t claim that this post speaks for anyone other than myself.

To complicate things, the words “zionism” and “antisemitism” have wildly different meanings to different people. I define zionism as the tenet that Jews, like other ethnic and cultural groups around the world, have the right to a homeland of our own.

The version of zionism I was raised with was an idealistic extrapolation of this principle that embraced the social experiments in Israel, such as intentional communities (notably the kibbutz and the moshav), women’s equality extending even to compulsary military service, and the commitment to agriculture and reforestation that would “make the desert bloom” as it had in biblical times. This happy, upbeat vision even had a soundtrack: happy, upbeat Israeli songs in Modern Hebrew such as “Tzena, Tzena,” popularized here in the US by the politically progressive quartet The Weavers in 1951.

But it was also rooted in the shameful slogan, “a land with no people for a people with no land”: a racist lie that ignored the thousands of years of Palestinian history dating back at least as far as the Old Testament battles with the Philistines, a lie that was used to justify the Naqba (also spelled Nakba)—the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel—and the continuing oppression of Palestinians both within the Green Line that marked Israel’s 1948 borders and in the West Bank and Gaza, which are still majority-Palestinian but have been under Israel’s control since the 1967 war.

Another myth underpinning the idealistic version of zionism is the idea that Israel, the lone democracy and only non-Muslim country in the region, was our democratic outpost, the only place championing human rights in a region that was openly hostile to Jews and to Israel: the little David surrounded by heavily armed Arab Goliaths who wanted to drive Israel into the sea.

The human rights champion part would be great if it were true. But Israel’s society is stratified. In 1986, when we first visited, there was still a clear prejudice in favor of Jews of Eastern European origin or born in Israel or Palestine; Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal were second-class citizens, third class for those from Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries, fourth class for those from Africa—and the non-Jewish Arab populations, whether Muslim, Christian, or Druze, were at the very bottom.

The first two classes had integrated by the time we returned in 2014, but the rest of the stratification remained. Discrimination against Arabs and Palestinians remains rampant. From roadside checkpoints to destruction of their villages and orchards, long imprisonments, and more, Israel has fomented oppressive conditions for the populations under its heel.

This certainly didn’t start under Netanyahu, but he has made it much worse, culminating in the genocide of the Gaza war and its continuing aftermath.

Another strain of zionism is the post-Holocaust push for a Jewish homeland so there would always be a refuge for Jews, historically marginalized, ostracized, expelled, and murdered for more than a thousand years—a way of giving teeth to the “Never again” slogan that sprouted as the truth of those awful years started to come out. It was that experience that gave wings to the dream of a Jewish state.

The movie “Israelism” is a really good analysis of how we Jews in the US were raised to believe we were doing good for the world in our zionism—how good a job the propagandists for Israel did at inculcating these messages and beliefs across US Jewish society—even as our heroes from David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weitzmann to Golda Meir secretly embraced ethnic cleansing and driving the Palestinians out.

*                                   *                                   *

Antisemitism is prejudice against Jews. It’s an odd choice of word, because Arabs are also Semitic peoples. For progressive Jews, it is something completely separate from criticism of Israel or sympathy to the Palestinian cause. I claim a right to criticize Israel, just as I criticize the government of my own country (especially in its brutal and disgusting current incarnation). In fact, I’ve criticized and protested against every US president since Nixon, who was elected when I was eleven—yes, even Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. They all did things I thought were wrong, and I wasn’t shy about writing letters or showing up for—or even organizing—demonstrations or lobbying my elected officials to change those policies.

But in the right-wing Jewish world, any criticism of the Israeli government, even the current genocidal one that by comparison makes even the horribly cruel Stephen Miller look relatively tame, is labeled antisemitism. Ditto any endorsement of the Palestinian cause. Somehow, these people can’t envision a world that has room for both Jewish and Palestinian homelands.

These would-be censors have gone so far as to add a rider to a military spending bill protecting Israel from boycotts. This passed the US House last September but, thankfully, as far as I can tell, has not been taken up in the Senate. We’ve also seen the punishment of pro-Palestinian students such as Lebanese Mahmoud Khalil and Turkish Rumeysa Ozturk, imprisoned and deported (Khalil) or threatened with deportation (Ozturk) over their criticism of Israel.

This ridiculous conflation of opposing the Israeli government with hating Jews goes back decades. In the 80s, I was in a group called New Jewish Agenda that advocated a two-state solution. For this, we were ostracized and marginalized within the mainstream Jewish community. We did not get speaking opportunities at synagogues. I am amazed to watch Jewish Voice for Peace emerge from similar marginalization in recent years to become the main US Jewish voice for Palestinian rights. I’ve been thrilled to see integrated Israeli-Palestinian peace groups such as Combatants for Peace and Standing Together get those synagogue speaking opportunities in the last 20 years or so.

And yet that right-wing narrative is so embedded in mainstream Jewish institutions that I know many people who are in pretty much basic agreement with me on so many other issues but can’t overcome their own Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias. They still see any criticism of Israel, especially from non-Jews, as antisemitism. They call NYC Mayor Sohran Mamdani, who constantly makes pro-Jewish statements and has Jewish advisors, an antisemite even as they paint their signs for the next No Kings march—because Mamdani has accurately called out the Netanyahu government’s war crimes, protection of anti-Arab extremists, and oppression of its own Palestinian population.

In fact, this post was inspired by a conversation on Facebook that started with me praising Mamdani for his comment in response to having higher poll ratings than Netanyahu among NYC Jews: “My focus is on delivering for each and every New Yorker, and I’m proud to be the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country” and pointing out that he has made many pro-Jewish statements in his time campaigning for and serving as Mayor.

That generated two comments from this camp. “I am not at all impressed with him. His stance on Israel and Jews is dangerous and deplorable.” and, in response, “I agree. Look, he’s entitled to his opinion about the Middle East. But keep it to yourself, Zohran. Your job is to make NYC a more liveable city. Focus on that and you’ll get great support. Stop talking about Bibi (who I dislike, too, but for different reasons).”

My immediate response was:

I have actively looked into a bunch of accusations that claim Mamdani is antisemitic. If I could find any, I’d immediately stop supporting him. However, what I find each time are the ACCUSATIONS of antisemitism rather than any actual speech or action that is against Jews. He has been loud and consistent in condemning Netanyahu and Israel’s present government, yes. But that’s not antisemitism. It is condemning genocidal, brutal attacks on Palestinians and Lebanese and claiming to do so in the name of all Jews. Well, I am Jewish and I condemn Netanyahu and his genocide. Just as I speak out as a citizen of the US against the brutal policies of this government and its insistence that the government only has to represent right-wing so-called able-bodied, cis, straight, mostly male Christian Nationalists—who are not Christian, if you read Christ’s words—so I speak out against what is happening in my name over there.
What’s even worse is the way right-wing Jews insist on conflating criticism of Israeli policies with hating Jews. IMHO, that leads directly to more antisemitism, because the haters say, “look, the Jews are telling us that all Jews support Israel’s government and that government represents all Jews. THAT leads to wildly negative outcomes. Ignorant people will ingest that sick messaging and then commit pogroms—just as ignorant people in the US right have attacked immigrants, trans people, and others who got on this administration’s bad side.
This post is a longer response.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, media-general, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Today should have been the joyous 250th anniversary of the world’s first modern-state democracy. (Yes, I know, the structure borrowed heavily from the  Haudenosaunee Confederacy.) Instead, it feels all-too-much like a family gathering at the bedside of someone on life support, someone who may not make it too much longer.

Democracy has taken such a beating in the year and a half since an open fascist, racist, sexist, anti-planet, convicted criminal, self-dealing monster—the greediest and cruelest president in history, a man who has used his office not for good but for personal enrichment and war against his perceived enemies that this anniversary feels like a deathbed watch. He so embodies all the reasons the Colonies left the paternalistic mix of oppression and protection provided by King George that Andy Borowitz wrote this updated Declaration of Independence. Here are the first three of his long list of grivances:

  • He has engaged in corrupt schemes to profit from his office, plunder the Treasury, and steal from the taxpayers.
  • He has desecrated the People’s House and the nation’s capital.
  • He has perverted the Department of Justice to take revenge on his perceived enemies.

But the patient—our democracy—while bleeding profusely and crying out in pain, is not dead. We are in charge of the miracle cure, and it’s called nonviolent resistance.

And this powerful and honorable tradition, which has brought down many governments and reformed many others, goes back thousands of years. The earliest documentation I know of is from Exodus 1:1-19, which tells the story of how the midwives Shifra and Puah disobeyed Pharaoh’s command to kill the Hebrew male babies, telling him that the women gave birth so fast, they couldn’t get there in time. Which is why, today, I chose to wear a t-shirt that proclaims, “Resisting Tyrants Since Pharaoh,” even though the protest march I planned to wear it to was canceled due to an extreme heat advisory.

In recent days, we’ve seen the impact of nonviolent resistance. We’ve seen the impact of mass protests like No Kings in the slow and grudging willingness to resist at least a few of T’s irrational and unconstitutional demands from both the Supreme Court and the Republican majorities in Congress—both of whom could have easily reined in T’s authoritarianism and attacks on democracy just by holding to the settled body of law, as they were more willing to do during his first term. It’s too little and too late, but it’s a sign that the voices of ordinary citizens are being heard even when those in power claim to ignore them.

We’ve also seen the impact of courageous individual actions taken at great personal risk, such as USAF Major Jason Watson, who has 23 honors and decorations in his long military career and was arrested on July 1, in uniform, for holding a sign saying “Impeach Convict Remove” on the steps of the US Capitol. His action could not only cost him his job (three years before retirement). He could also serve considerable prison time and forfeit his retirement pay. Fully aware of the consequences, he carried out the action anyway, in the long tradition of people like Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers, vastly strengthening the peace movement during the Vietnam war) and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Also this week, we’ve had prosecutor Jack Smith finally talking about the cases against T that would have almost certainly resulted in another round of convictions had they been allowed to go to trial. Smith says openly and directly that he “will not be intimidated.” But if the treatment of James Comey, Leticia James, Mark Kelly, and others is any clue, it’s a pretty safe bet that he will be harassed in some powerful way by government stooges who act as if the First Amendment only applies to Trumpistas. The first link is to the video, the second, to a written summary.

These brave actions are perhaps even more important than the mass demonstrations—because they show raw courage and a willingness to sacrifice everything for what’s right. Many have died for these principles, both here in the US and elsewhere. To name four prominent non-US examples: Alexei Navalny in Russia, Salvador Allende in Chile,  Steve Biko in South Africa, Gandhi in India.

This is even more remarkable considering the level of repression this government has engaged in, including:

Yet, we persist. Millions of people in the US have participated in at least one No Kings march or at least one mass organizing call by a broad coalition of progressive groups (among them Public Citizen, MoveOn, Movement Voter Project, 50501, and several others) spearheaded by the Working Families Party. Voting turnouts are high, and many “safe Republican”seats have been switched. Numerous administration policies have been overturned or cancelled under public pressure, though not without doing substantial damage first. Activists from many groups have trained other activists in peaceful protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, finding levers to encourage noncooperation among the officials carrying out these brutal policies, and so much more.

And we have not only inspiration, such as the photos of protests around the country Robert Hubbell publishes daily in his Today’s Edition newsletter (usually a mix of sidewalk and park protests alongside “bridge brigades”displaying banners and signs from highway overpasses.

We also have road maps, such as…

  • An amazing list of 346 nonviolent tactics, the first 198 compiled by Gene Sharp in the pre-Internet, pre-Covid era, and another 148 compiled by Michael Beer of Nonviolence International. Personal note: I’ve been a fan of this list for years and have cited it several times. Two weeks ago, I got to meet Michael, chat with him as we hiked our neighborhood mountain, and have dinner with several others as we hosted a gathering for a mutual friend who was in from California. He told me he could have expanded the list again with many more tactics, but he wasn’t able to keep up with them.
  • The work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, especially Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia University Press, 2011). This scholarly study compares the success of violent versus nonviolent struggles and provides evidence to explain why nonviolent ones have both a higher success record and, usually, more lasting effects. The above link takes you to the book’s page on Bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice, instead of the billionaire who continues to be one of T’s most prominent enablers in the second term. I believe in using our economic power to help accomplish our goals, so I avoid shopping at the world’s largest online store, just as I do most of my searching and much of my web browsing on Ecosia.org, a nonprofit which plants a tree for every search (and I think another tree for every tab opened on its browser).
  •  Chronicles of the current struggle, the history of resistance, and of people you may not have heard of but whose contributions matter. A few among dozens: Waging Nonviolence, Choose Democracy, Black Lives Matter, Rebecca Solnit, Heather Delaney Reese, Heather Cox Richardson, Jessica Craven, especially her Sunday Extra Extra good news roundup, the aforementioned Robert Hubbell (link is above), Black History Stories, A Mighty Girl (feminist history), Josh Helfgott (LGBT and political news), Moments from the Past (Black and general history)…
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, language, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Headlining it “Never think you are too powerless to make a difference!,” I shared a post on Facebook about an elementary school teacher in the then-broke Chicago school system finding a way to fund that system by forcing the city’s utilities to pay their fair share, as required but not enforced under existing law.

Someone commented that this victory could never have happened today, because “The courts are all shills for the other side. They would look at her hand written ledgers and say she made it all up.”

This was my response:

You’re such a pessimist! I’ve been part of enough successful “impossible” struggles that I named my TEDx talk “Impossible” is a Dare! [To watch that talk, click the link above and select “videos” and then “event videos”].

Yes, we lose a lot. But we win sometimes. And if we choose not to bother because we won’t win, we certainly lose. Right now, I’m active on two fronts. The immigration justice work is depressing, because as long as the current federal government is in power, we will always be sticking a finger in the dike to try to prevent a flood: it’s not enough but it’s something. Once in a while, we even win some small victory.  Occasionally, as in the Minneapolis resistance, we win a big one.

I’m a lot more optimistic about the safe energy work, even after hearing the State Senator in charge of the energy bill basically say yesterday that he was going ahead with trying to repeal our nuclear protections.

Why? Because even if we lose the fight to keep the repeal out of the bill (which is likely), we are a long way from done. Any nuclear plant trying to build in MA is going to be confronted in every public hearing, and even if they get their permits, there will be people in front of the construction sites holding big signs and maybe even filling the jails in civil disobedience. There might even be a movement to withhold that portion of the electric bill going to the project.

One of those victories that inspired the TEDx talk was starting the movement that led me to the work I’ve been doing for about 25 years. A developer announced a plan to build 40 McMansions all the way up the mountain right next to a much-loved state park. It wasn’t the plan itself in the newspaper article that moved me to take action, but the quotes from local environmentalists who should have known better, all issuing variations on “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.” When I saw those quotes, I knew I had to prove them wrong.

So I put out a call for the first meeting of Save the Mountain. I rode my bicycle around the neighborhood distributing fliers, announced it in local media, and spread it around to my friends.

From that first press release and flier, I maintained the mindset that we would win. I expected that 20 or 30 people would show up, maybe 5 would get seriously involved, and we’d make the developer’s life miserable for five years or so before our victory.

It was a pleasant shock when 70 people crammed themselves into our dining room, formed a core group of more than 30, assigned ourselves into committees—and won just over a year later. I attribute a lot of both our success and our rapid pace of victory to that success mindset. It was a game changer.

That activist campaign used everything I knew after 20+ years in marketing. After we won, I started pondering what lessons from the activist world could make a difference on the business side, and that’s how I started sharing the message that social and environmental good are business success tools. Four of my ten books are specifically about that, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I’m happy to send you a PDF at no charge if you subscribe to my newsletter and then reply to the welcome message requesting one.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, Gratitude, language, Mindset, People Helping People, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Guest Post by Robert Middleton

Everything we do enters the world.
Not just the big things.
Not just the speeches, votes, donations, protests, books, projects, or public stands.

The small things enter too.
The tone of voice.
The withheld insult.
The patient answer.
The refusal to humiliate.
The decision not to pass along poison.

The moment when we could have added darkness, and did not.
The moment we accepted someone.
The moment we loved.
The moment we reached out in helpfulness and eased a burden, even in a small way.

Nothing disappears.
Every act becomes part of the moral weather someone else has to live in.

This is why decency is not weakness.
Decency is restraint with a spine.

It is the choice to remain human when the world gives you endless reasons to become hard, cynical, cruel, clever, or numb.

And that choice matters more than we think.
Because cruelty spreads.
Contempt spreads.
Fear spreads.
Stupidity spreads.

One person lowers the temperature of a room (or a country), and everyone feels it.
One person makes meanness acceptable, and others begin to copy it.

But the reverse is also true…
Sometimes truer.
Clarity spreads.
Kindness spreads.
Courage spreads.
Calm spreads.

One person refuses to lie, and reality becomes a little easier to see.
One person refuses to mock the vulnerable, and dignity has a place to stand.
One person refuses to give up on goodness, and someone else remembers they do not have to give up either.

We are contagious beings.
What we practice, we transmit.
So the question is not only, “What do I believe?”
The question is:
What am I spreading?

Am I spreading fear, blame, resentment, contempt, despair?
Or am I spreading steadiness, honesty, mercy, courage, and light?

There is no neutral life.
Even silence has weight.
Even avoidance teaches something.
Even doing nothing can shape the world.
So if we are going to affect the world anyway, we might as well take responsibility for the impact we have.

We might as well become people who make things saner instead of crazier.
People who tell the truth without becoming vicious.
People who stand firm without becoming hateful.
People who stay awake without becoming bitter.

People who protect what is decent because decency is one of the last lines between civilization and collapse.

And here is the strongest argument I know:
At the end of the day, and at the end of a life, we will not be able to hide behind our opinions.

We will not be saved by being right.
We will not be measured by how loudly we condemned the darkness.
We will be measured by what we became while facing it.

Did we become smaller, meaner, more frightened, more cruel?
Or did we become clearer, kinder, braver, and more useful?

That is the real test.
Not whether the world was dark.
The world has always had darkness in it.

The question is whether we added to the dark,
Or brought a little more light.

Cheers, Robert

[Editor’s note: Robert originally published this in his email newsletter on May 10 and has now published it on Medium as well.]

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , ,

This post started on Facebook, as a response to replies to this article by an Israeli expat living in the US who’s an expert on genocide, which I posted on April 22. There’s a spirited discussion going on at that post, which you can read by clicking on this sentence. Be sure to read the replies to the comments, and the replies to the replies—and to make sure that you’re viewing either “all comments” or “newest” and not “most relevant,” which will block some of the responses.

What follows is a response to Richard, who defends Zionism as providing a safe haven for Jews in a world that never had one before, a place where Jews can seek refuge from the pogroms of their particular generation—and to Robert, the person he was responding to, who posted that trauma often begets trauma, unless there is a deliberate effort to “alchemize” it into something positive, and who criticizes Zionism as “designed by colonialist and brutally implemented, and is now more ruthless than ever.” It’s posted there as a reply to Robert

This post is a substantial expansion of what I wrote—with considerable updating here but not in the original response, including several links to back up my claims:

Robert, Zionism had two impulses: One was protection against antisemitic violence, as Richard so eloquently describes in his response to you. The other was the one we progressives were hoodwinked into believing: that this was the chance to create a utopia, a place where women and men were equal, a place to recover a desert “land with no people for a people with no land”—(as I was told at the yeshivas [Jewish day schools] I attended as an elementary school student and again in the meetings of the Jewish Student Union at my secular city-wide high school), a semi-socialist endeavor based on cooperation.

It’s a bit hard to find, but the movie, “Israelism,” has an excellent analysis of how that idealism didn’t match the reality on the ground. Something I don’t remember if the movie addresses is the way the land itself was colonized. In my childhood, we were always sending money to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. But just as we didn’t know about the Palestinians forced into exile, we also didn’t know that JNF was ripping out native species to plant non-native pine forests that have not been kind to the ecosystem—and of course, the Israeli government frequently bulldozes Palestinian olive trees in retaliation for perceived injuries, while Israel also often narrows the land of the local Palestnians so the settlers end up harvesting stolen oil.

The racist plans of Golda and Ben-Gurion [Perplexity.ai search for “statements against arabs from David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir made before 1967”, conducted April 24, 2026) were not in the open, and neither was the reality that, ahem, this was NOT “a land with no people.” It was a land whose people had largely been kicked out in 1948. So you had the yin and the yang, protection from evil and creation of good. But the creation of good was largely built on a lie and certainly doesn’t match the cruelty of today’s Israeli government agains tthe people their parents and grandparents threw off their land. Yes, Palestinians within the Green Line can vote and even have representation in the Knesset. But they have been actively discriminated against the whole time, just as Blacks in the US have been. Housing and job opportunities are not equal. Open racism is common.

Richard, I’ve been to Israel twice, in 1986 and again in 2014. Both times, Dina and I have sat and talked with Palestinians—and on the first trip, we interviewed several leaders of different organizations within the Israeli peace movement. We stayed part of the time with a Palestinian family in the Galilee, part of the time with my right-wing settler relatives, and even in an Arab-owned hotel in East Jerusalem. And we visited the ultrareligious Yiddish-speaking branch of my family that had fled to Israel to escape the Holocaust. On the first trip, we stayed in a traditional kibbutz, and on the second trip, a kibbutz for people in the Transcendental Meditation world. My right-wing Orthodox sister made Aliyah [moved to Israel] with her husband and three of their four grown children, who have all had kids born in Israel.

So I have sat down and broken bread with people on all sides of the spectrum—including a man who was ten years old in 1948 when the soldiers told his family they’d be back in their homes in two weeks. That was not a planned encounter; he was conducting a one-person Occupy movement at the one surviving building (the Orthodox church) in his childhood village WITHIN the Green Line, which the Israelis had bulldozed and turned into a national park that he now had to pay to enter.

That interview was conducted in Hebrew and translated for us by our host, a Dutch Holocaust refugee. He and his fellow refugee wife were two of the three Jews in a Druze village (the third was an elderly woman we didn’t get to meet, the last of her line, whose family managed to stay during the Babylonian Exile of 70 A.D. when the Jews were thrown out of present-day Israel). He also took us around to meet a bunch of his neighbors. And this couple were also the custodians of the actual carob tree that sustained Shimon Bar Yochai when he was hiding out from the Romans in a cave, 2000 years ago.

To me, if Zionsm is to remain viable, it MUST “alchemize” into something far more humane—something that would bring reality to the Koolaid we collectively swallowed as the utopian vision that didn’t exist was spooned out to us through a wall of lies, false promises, and exceptionalism. In its current form, not only is it attacking others, it also makes Jews LESS safe around the world. This is in part because conservative elements of the Jewish community insist on conflating antizionism with antisemitism—a conflation that I utterly resist and abhor. This division within the Jewish community is not new. It goes back at least as far as the founding of modern Israel in 1948.

But most Jews who get interviewed on national newscasts—politicians and college presidents, assorted right-wing pundits—claim that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, and punish anti-Zionists (Palestinians especially, but also groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace). At the same time, the current US government has weaponized false claims of antisemitism to extort money from universities and attempt to control college curricula and suppress student activities—while, ironically, waving a banner of free expression.

These actions from the government and from right-leaning Jewish officials give the real enemies of Jews something to cling to and organize around, and creates a climate where hate crimes against Jews are somehow seen as forgivable because those who attack Jews just because they’re Jews can claim that Jews themselves have said that Jews must support the Israeli government’s vicious actions. We Jews are stereotyped as suppoters of an evil empire, and thus fair game for whatever mayhem comes our way. Thus, they claim they’re just opposing the racist and brutal incarnation of Zionism as conducted by the Netanyahu government.

Netanyahu has given advocates of peace and human rights real things to worry about (e.g., the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and looking the other way when Israeli settlers attack Palestinian civilians in the West Bank or within the Green Line)—never mind that a huge percentage of Jews both in Israel (which has had a massive peace movement for decades, though it had to rebuild after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023) and in the Diaspora.

It’s important to note that many of these right-wing ideologues spouting this nonsense identify as so-called Christian Nationalists (not Christian at all, if you read Christ’s teachings, as I have). And many have a public history of antisemitism themselves. Here are some of the president’s anti-Jewish remarks and actions. And here are more of them (slight overlap) along with notes on antisemitism from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, and several other appointees.

I condemn the violence on all sides, including the violence of lies that demonize either people.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Entrepreneurship, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Mindset, Psychology, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Sixteen years after it was published, I’m reading Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin. I read his blog daily and have read several of his books. I also have a copy of an even earlier one, Purple Cow, on my to-read table.

His thesis is that workers should make themselves indispensable—not as prima donnas who nobody can work with, but as innovators who add far more value than they’re paid for because they take joy in it. And that managers should be eager to hire those folks and give them leeway and support to bring their A-game creativity, rather than crushing their souls in a rigid corporate culture.

One of Seth’s mantras has always been “ship your product.” Get it done, send it out into the world, and then tweak it. That’s what Apple and Microsoft both do (as we millions of unwilling beta testers can attest). That’s what Walt Whitman did, with his nine(!) different editions of Leaves of Grass, each time adding poems, changing the typeface, using a different author picture. And that’s what I’ve done with two series of marketing books, each of which started as a small self-published book, went to a major publisher, and then to a smaller publisher. So six of my ten books are actually series, with each new title more comprehensive, more up-to-date. I could easily write a fourth in each series, as a lot has changed since the most recent ones came out.

All well and good. BUT I take issue with Seth’s statement, “the only purpose of starting is to finish.”

I understand why he says this. He says many times in this book that real artists finish projects. His audience for that remark is the dreamers who doodle something amazing but never build it, never test it in the real world, never refine, iterate, or ship. To him, those folks are no better than the corporate cogs. But I do finish projects, when finishing the project makes sense. Thus, for me, starting a project is a way of exploring whether it’s worth completing.

As noted, I’ve written ten books. But I’ve probably written at least a dozen proposals or at least outlines for books I never wrote, not to mention dozens of unfinished blog posts, etc. I’m not a bad person because I didn’t finish those projects. In the 1990s, I wrote proposals like How to Find Your Next 10,000 Ideas and Sunshine on Your Shoulders (an ordinary person’s guide to renewable energy). The idea book was originally aimed at writers and called How to Find Your Next 10,000 Article Ideas.

Then I realized it would also be useful to clergy writing sermons, teachers doing lesson plans, and of course, inventors (among many others). I didn’t want to publish that one myself and I think I did send it around—with a sample chapter on finding ideas in classified ads, so maybe it’s just as well that I had no takers. The chapter would have been obsolete within a few years—and now, you could just ask an AI engine and get back hundreds of ideas per minute.

For the sunshine book, I realized that even though I’d already been doing marketing copywriting for green businesses and nonprofits for more than a decade (and by now,  for more than four decades), I didn’t have the technical knowledge and there was no way to keep up because that world was evolving almost daily. It would have been obsolete before it even went to press. But I had to write the outline to figure that out. Starting and not finishing the proposal was the right choice,  because the proposal made it clear that I didn’t want to put in enough effort to become expert in a sector that was and still is changing constantly.

Around 2003, I started revising my 1995 book on having fun cheaply. I completely overhauled and rewrote a couple of chapters, mostly adding information about Internet resources for things like travel planning. Then it hit me that it had taken me eight years of hard work to sell through a small print run of 2000 copies. I did a lot of things right, had major press coverage from the Christian Science Monitor to Redbook, did tons of radio interviews—but this book had only a very small market, because frugalists don’t like to spend money on books. I asked myself why I was putting so much effort into a book I already knew would be a flop, and I stopped working on the rewrite.

Abandoning all of those incomplete projects were each smart business decisions.

In 2020, during the pandemic, I came up with a great idea for a book: Leveraging the Great Pivot: How the Post-Pandemic Era Could Be Different, and Better: Long-Term Post-COVID Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing. This would have been a huge, sweeping book that had the potential to alter society for the better—IF I could successfully leverage it and get it in front of major influencers.

Again, this wasn’t one I would publish myself. I wrote a strong proposal that included about 90 people I’d try to interview (some famous, some not); annotated competitive title analysis with sales ranks; a summary of the marketing strategy including a named charity partner I’d worked with before, and more. I had the proposal pretty close to finished but never completed it. I suspect that once the first COVID vaccines were announced, I realized that taking one to two years to write the book and the publisher then taking at least another year to publish meant that the book  would be written for a world that no longer existed by the time it came out. And I wasn’t ambitious enough to rush it into production, especially because I recognized that rushing would mean a book of lower quality, that I’d be less proud of, and would be less effective in fostering the creation of that new world.

Instead, I suggested to one of my book shepherding clients that she put her full-length book project on hold until working at offices was a thing again, and instead spend three months to write and publish an ebook on thriving during the crisis. This was quite different from the book I’d have written and was not going to create any moment to completely reinvent the world—but helping her through it satisfied my need to make some difference in that crazy time.

Side question: How might Seth write it differently in today’s AI age? While we’ve evolved from the days where many people had no goal other than to be a replaceable but steadily employed cog in a factory, how do we re-evolve when machines can do almost everything we do, and do it much faster and less expensively (but, so far, not as well). He is a futurist who’s been aware of AI for a long time, and who both uses AI extensively and has a lot of criticisms of it—so maybe it wouldn’t be any different. But maybe it would be completely different.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Mindset, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,
While doing my morning exercise bike ride, I’ve been reading Linchpin, a book Seth Godin wrote more than ten years ago. I got to a part where he shares his view that creative people may not need a résumé to get hired. Since résumé writing was the largest part of my business for ten years, and still something I do (and enjoy), I wrote him a note agreeing that the “boring recitation” he criticizes is generally not helpful—and then explaining how my nontraditional approach actually serves my clients very well, and how it steered me toward writing nontraditional “story-behind-the-story” press releases that also serve my clients well. Writing press releases and book covers got me started in marketing as a career. I still do that kind of copywriting too, though these days, client assignments are more likely to focus on strategy, partnerships, and reaching different audiences with unique messages for each.
This is what I wrote to him:
I’m enjoying the book and hope to finish it in time to review in my mid-April newsletter. Certainly by May.

You might already know that résumé writing was really my bridge to copywriting and that for ten years (1985-95), it was most of my business before clients started hiring me to do PR writing. I struggled hard to write my own first résumé, with seven different career paths, very short job tenures (I went to Antioch, so my life was chopped into three-month sections—but I had lots of experience for a new grad), and a handicap of being perceived as too young. I was 19 when I finished college and 20 when I got my degree the following year, after finishing an incomplete.

I ended up doing a résumé for each career path and one or two others that synthesized two or three of  them and made them feel connected. I got some help from my mom in figuring out that approach but after that, I was off and running and started writing them for other people. My résumés got interviews, which is all they’re supposed to do—but I was too out-of-the-box to get hired and it took me a year to get a job—with what turned out to be a crooked literary agent in NYC, where I quickly got fired for trying to organize my colleagues.
Right from the start, I somehow attracted clients who didn’t fit into traditional workplace culture and had unusual histories. I still prefer working with that sort of client, even though I charge a flat $199 fee for the first two hours and therefore get paid a lot more per hour for writing a straight up teacher/nurse/salesperson résumé that I can knock out in 20 or 30 minutes. Two hours is usually enough, but sometimes it’s two or even three sessions.
A résumé doesn’t have to be the boring recitation you call it. My only résumé writing rule has always been “make the client look as good as possible FOR the types of positions they’re applying for, without lying.” And often, I do a bit of career consulting to open up their minds to possibilities they hadn’t thought of. I never worried if I needed to invent a new format. I once defined a year of travel as a self-directed learning intensive. A lot of what I do is look for connections and patterns that enable me to provide some continuity to a work history that might otherwise look too scant or too scattered. I don’t write for the computer scanners other than to make sure that if my client is applying through corporate channels, the résumé contains the most likely keywords an HR person would enter. But most of my clients aren’t looking for corporate jobs. They apply to places where a human makes the first pass, where they will be treated as a linchpin and not a cog, where their individuality is a strength. Or they are running their own businesses or writing grants, and their clients/funders need their résumé to satisfy their internal protocols. The résumé becomes a way of increasing their self-esteem as well as their employability.
Yes, the project-based approach is important. I’ve been known to put in testimonials and links to portfolios. I focus many of my résumés not on a straight chronological approach but on what my clients have done and can do. Often, that means grouping work experiences into categories that may or may not be chronological within the category but always drive the most relevant skills and accomplishments to the top.
And I love the feeling of empowerment my clients have when we end the Zoom call with a document that opens the doors they want to open and highlights things in their background they may not have seen as important. That’s why I still offer this service and why I keep my prices much lower than my B2B work.
Writing résumés was my “copywriting school.” I don’t think I could have invented the story-behind-the-story press release without those ten years writing mostly résumés and newspaper articles. The press releases I wrote as an activist before starting my business were mostly the boring old 5Ws variety.
And I got this response (fairly typical of his responses—I’m sure he has a ton of mail to respond to and I’m impressed that most of the time I write to him, I get an answer, even if it’s a brief one):
well said, Shel!
quite a journey
To which I replied, not really expecting (and as of this writing a day later, not receiving) a follow-up answer but wanting him to know:
Thanks. Indeed it has been, and it isn’t over yet. My next big project will be a primer on activism for elders. I just got some really good coaching on what I’ve been missing in my search for a charity partner, so I’m hoping that I can now find one quickly and then approach publishers.
One takeaway I hope you get from this exchange is not to be afraid to approach superstars. I’ve been corresponding with Seth for years, but I started out, like so many others, writing a cold email because something in one of his posts resonated and I wanted him to know. I’ve built relationships with quite a few that way, and several have endorsed one or more of my books. And decades ago, I became friends with Dave Dellinger of the Chicago 7 because I went up to him after he gave a terrific speech at a small demonstration. I didn’t know who he was at the time, and maybe that’s a good thing, because I went up to him without any artifice and just told him I appreciated his words.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Innovation, localism/locavore, Mindset, Networking, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

One of the strongest local economy advocates I know is Michael Schuman, who publishes the Main Street Journal. Today, he took on the US president’s attempts to strongarm voters and rig the election. And then he noted that David Plouffe, a key advisor in Obama’s successful “out of nowhere”run for the presidency in 2008, has said that demographically, he can’t win.

Schuman says the way to defeat Plouffee’s defeatism is to get half a million Democrats to move to states where T narrowly squeaked by in 2024. North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana all went GOP by less than 150,000 votes. These states are contiguous with each other—so, if that shift happened, we’d have an entire new liberal REGION bordering progressive Minnesota on the east and with only a thin strip of the Idaho Panhandle separating it from progressive Washington to the northwest. And it’s worth remembering that as recently as 1979, George McGovern—probably still the most progressive major-party presidential candidate in my lifetime—was the more conservative senator from South Dakota.

I agree that Plouffe is wrong. And so are all those pundits who keep howling at us that the Dems need to move way to the right.

But I’m not convinced that Michael Schuman’s solution is the way to get there. First, it’s going to be very hard to find those half million people willing to start their lives over for a hope of shifting their new state blue. Second, it’s going to be even harder to coordinate that effort so that just enough people land in the right districts in each of the swingable states. Third, there’s no guarantee it will work. Republicans would get wind of it and work much harder to get their base out or to recruit new residents of their own.

Fourth, and most importantly, a new culture doesn’t easily impose itself on an already established culture. I am a New York City native living in a rural area, on a working dairy farm in Massachusetts. My neighbors have 600 cows. New YorkCity values and lifestyles won’t work here. You want to build quality relationships with your neighbors, and that doesn’t happen by storming in, taking over, and stomping on the opinions and values of your neighbors. I seasoned for 17 years in a small college town and learned to be “bicultural” before I made the big move to the farm. If the existing communities feel disrespected, there will be no progress.

Here’s what I suggest instead: The Dems could finally figure out how to talk about real issues that working people care about without negating the social equity and environmental justice pieces. They need a lot more candidates like AOC, Bernie, and Mamdani, who’ve shown that we can move mountains if we organize where people are, and we don’t need to sacrifice the justice agenda to do it.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Mindset, Politics, poverty, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The first thing I do when I get online each morning is read a few things:

  • Poems of the day from Rattle, The Academy of American Poets, and Second Coming.
  • Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubble for analysis of the craziness in the US government right now and how people are fighting back.
  • Seth Godin for his deep insight, creative thinking, and common sense in the business and learning worlds, and news roundups from among The Guardian, New York Times, and/or Associated Press. (Disclosure: I donate to The Guardian and Associated Press)
  • Bob Burg, with his daily sermon on succeeding by treating people right, is often on the list.

Today, Godin opened my eyes to a completely new understanding of economics with one sentence:

The price variation in any market reflects not what the market will bear, but what the people in that market can bear to charge.

Brilliant. And I don’t think I’ve come across this anywhere else. It changes everything, doesn’t it?

He backs up his thesis with examples as different as the pricing of luxury handbags and concert tickets. He discusses how rock musicians who allow promoters to scale tickets out of the range of affordability for most of their fans pay a price in loyalty. And he talks about how that particular dynamic came out of outsourcing concert pricing to third party vendors like Ticketmaster who don’t really give a flying f about the fans as long as they can find enough who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars when they could just as easily spend $10 on a movie in the theater or nothing to watch it at home.

I’ve made those choices many times. I paid $6 in 1972, as a 15-year-old without a lot of cash, to see the Rolling Stones in Madison Square Garden. That’s only $46.24 in today’s money. Most of the time, if a concert or theater ticket is more than $100, I will choose a different form of entertainment. I think I have made four exceptions: The Who, my all-time favorite rock band that I had never seen in concert; tickets for touring Broadway productions of “Hamilton” and “Wicked”; also an actual Broadway show, but I’m not sure which one it was.

The three that I remember were actually worth the money and I didn’t regret spending it. But if I had spent that much for some of the mediocre concerts I’ve seen by top acts, I would have been furious, feeling totally ripped off. I saw many of them as either a concert reviewer or an usher, and thus didn’t pay to be ripped off. But it was frustrating even to give up an evening for something that wasn’t worth it and was charging a lot, even though I wasn’t paying. it was an insult to the fans.

But concerts are by definition discretionary purchases. Let’s look at price elasticity in other contexts that Seth didn’t mention—such as necessities.

Many have jumped in price far beyond inflation. Housing is one of them. But housing is something we have to have. Other societies consider housing a basic right. There is no homelessness problem in Cuba. Medical care and higher education, two other sets of services that have shot up in price here in the US, are also provided to everyone there. But they have an authoritarian government and they have deep poverty.

When I visited in 2019, the biggest complaint that I heard, and I heard it from almost everyone I met, is the inability of wages to keep up with the cost of living. Most workers make about $20 US a month. Doctors make $60 or $70. Our guide told us that the only reason his wife is able to afford to be a doctor is because he makes far more than the typical Cuban income from his clients’ tips. Sometimes, it is about trade-offs.

But sometimes, it’s not. Europe proves that decent, democratic governments can afford to treat healthcare as a right and keep higher education extremely affordable as well (housing, not so much). And they’ve also made huge progress in greening the economy.

China also has an authoritarian government. But the streets of its cities are crowded with relatively inexpensive electric cars (which is to say, still totally out of reach for most Chinese—but enough can afford them that massive traffic jams are common). This transition was quite conspicuous between my first trip to China in 2016 and my return in 2024. I rode in several of them and was impressed with how well they seem to be designed. Those stubborn trade-offs with their moral dilemmas.

Yet, for the past year, we have an authoritarian government in the US. The ugliness of its actions and policies would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

But unlike Cuba and China, the benefits are not accruing to ordinary people. This government is about benefiting billionaires and openly, blatantly lining its leader’s and his friends’ pockets while collecting undeserved and insincere tributes from those who understand that they can flatter their way to what they want, even if they want things that are absolutely at odds with the interests of us ordinary people.

Seth’s thesis is not the whole picture, though. It’s a both-and, not an either-or. Price sensitivity is certainly an issue in purchase decisions—but so is sensitivity to what your market could pay without feeling exploited and ripped off. In my own business, I’ve kept my pricing far lower than most, because that makes me affordable to the solopreneurs and microbusinesses I enjoy serving. I don’t want to live in the corporate world enough to charge too much for my preferred clients, and those huge corporations have in-house people who do what I do. I also recognize that money is one means to an end, and there are others—such as what I referred to earlier: volunteering or reviewing instead of buying tickets

It is also quite possible to make a good profit serving the bottom economic tier. I recommend two great books on this: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (out of print; that’s a link to a used copy) and Business Solution to Poverty by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick. That link takes you to bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice instead of lining the pockets of an oligarch who has aided and abetted the authoritarian government that has taken over the US.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Gratitude, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, language, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Mindset, People Helping People, poverty, propaganda, Psychology, Publishing, Science, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

“We have built the safest civilisation in human history while convincing ourselves that we live in the most dangerous. Billions of people experienced measurable improvements in health, safety, and material conditions in 2025. That progress didn’t make the news. But it happened anyway, one vaccine, one school meal, one kilowatt-hour at a time.”
—Angus Hervey, Fix the News

From Fix the News, one of several good-news publications I receive—and one that skews toward science-based progress. This one does start with a depressing summary of the news we’ve all heard—but then moves into a long series of victories that most of us didn’t even now about. It pauses to excoriate mass media for amplifying the negative and superficial (e.g., celebrities) while ignoring unsexy but vital stories such as the amazing ocean treaties and the actual elimination of rampant fatal diseases, country by country. And then it finishes with another long list of victories for humanity and the other creatures we share this amazing planet with.

You won’t be sorry to spend ten minutes with this. https://fixthenews.com/p/the-telemetry?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4861955&post_id=182468358&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=sl4r&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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