Never Under-Estimate the Immune System | John Hagel warns us of the almost reflex rejection of new ideas by the innately conservative culture of organizations, and which may be the central weakness of organizations to the world of today:
Every large and successful institution has an immune system– a collection of individuals who are prepared to mobilize at the slightest sign of any “outside” ideas or people in order to ensure that these foreign bodies are neutralized and that the existing institution survives intact and can continue on course. Just like the immune system all organisms have, this institutional immune system is adept at recognizing foreign bodies as soon as they appear and very effective at protecting the institution from infection. It is in fact what has helped large institutions to survive – they are in fact “built to last.”
But here’s the paradox: the immune system that has given large institutions extraordinary resilience in the past may be the very thing that makes these institutions so vulnerable today.
I clicked through to the original article. Hagel continues:
In more stable times, institutional immune systems are very effective at keeping institutions focused and on course, resistant to the distractions that might lead to their downfall. In more rapidly changing and volatile signs, this same immune system can become deadly by resisting the very changes that are required for the survival of the institution…
I’ve been involved in large scale transformation efforts for decades now and there’s only one lesson that I really have to share from all that experience: never, ever under-estimate the power of the immune system of a large existing institution…
[W]e need to craft approaches to transformation that have the ability to respect the power of the immune system and find ways to minimize the risk that the immune system will mobilize to crush the transformation effort. [emphasis in original]
Pointing out that threat-based change increases resistance, Hagel lays out a detailed transformational change action map that positions change as an opportunity. It’s worth reading.
Progressives and environmentalists often try to motivate negatively: through guilt, shame, and fear. And as I think about it, I realize the Right also uses negative motivations, notably fear and greed. Both sides are Chicken Littles, screaming that the world will end. So the far-Left gets people sunk and worried that the world will end, while the far-Right gets people on a treadmill of hatred, xenophobia, etc.
Neither of these approaches create positive social change. But Hagel’s focus on showing the opportunities does.
Boyd focuses on workforce issues, Hagel apparently on organizational transformation. My own focus is on opportunities for transformational social/environmental change to intersect and overlap with business profitability. In my own work, I often talk about the need to motivate positively. I’ve spent the last five years demonstrating those opportunities. I show business how to identify/create/market profitable offerings that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance–not through guilt, shame, and fear, but through enlightened organizational and personal self-interest. Thus, my speaking and writing focuses on building profitability through those social and environmental change products and services. A successful initiative:
Finds money in making the world better
Creates brand loyalty leading to repeat and ever-larger purchases
Encourages customers to spread the word about your good work, inspiring an army of unpaid brand ambassadors
Reduces operating costs and internal resource consumption (in keeping with Hagel’s challenge to avoid igniting the corporate immune system by minimizing new initiative’s need for resources )
And of course, actually does improve things for those suffering the consequences of crises like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change
Guest Post by Wayne Stevenson Thomas, in San Antonio, Texas
[Editor’s note: We stayed with Wayne on our first trip to San Antonio many years ago, and have stayed in contact. I am always looking for examples of for-profit businesses that serve a greater good. If you’ve got an example and would like to guest-blog, please write to me through this site.]
Thrift Shop Interior
Cliff Morgan was an executive at the local St. Vincent de Paul. They had a big operation of recycling the items they couldn’t sell or give to the poor. But he and the St. Vincent board found that the not-for-profit model didn’t allow him the flexibility he needed to operate. (Something about how all contracts or agreements had to go to the board as well as any expenditures above a fairly low number.)
So St. Vincent decided to spin off the operation into a for-profit, which Cliff owns. SA3 Community Recycling serves three communities of interest: Nonprofits who receive donations they cannot use, nonprofits who need items, and citizens (as represented by our governmental organizations).
He collects unneeded items from providing nonprofits. He pays them for clothing, shoes and bundled cardboard, generating a small revenue stream for them while allowing them to concentrate on their mission, rather than on disposing or selling unwanted material.
He contacts receiver nonprofits to provide them exactly the items they need from the stream of items he receives from the provider nonprofits. He provides exactly what they need. For instance, Dress for Success might need 5 size 16 Women’s business suits. SA3 would pull exactly that out of their stream and no more.
For the citizens as a whole, he contracts with governmental organizations to keep items out of the landfill. For instance he accepts cathode ray tube TVs from the providing nonprofits and disassembles them. He does the same with other electronics (if he doesn’t have another nonprofit that can use them.)
He generates income (as I understand it) by selling the clothing and cardboard for a bit more than he pays for it, and by selling the metal and other material captured from the electronics. He pays his staff, who do the pick-ups and supervise the volunteers who help sort the items that come through the door.
Among the nonprofits he provides with items from his stream are: Habitat for Humanity (building material), the Diaper Bank (loose and packaged diapers), Dress for Success, Spare Parts (an arts nonprofit that provides used and repurposed items to local art educators) and Samministries (household items for families leaving shelters). He also provides items as needed to several St. Vincent operations in South Texas. I believe he sincerely wants to recycle as much as he can within the community (and have connected him with several other receiver organizations).
Wayne Stevenson Thomas is a former volunteer and assistant manager at Jefferson Thrift Store in San Antonio.
Since March, I’ve been writing a Gratitude Journal every day and posting it on Facebook. I’ve gotten a lot of benefit out of doing this, and I make the time no matter how busy I am, and no matter how rotten a day I’ve had. Even the worst days have things I can appreciate.
We do lead an amazing life. But rather than jealousy (and I know you’re speaking in hyperbole), think about what steps you can take to have a more amazing life. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
1) Decide, consciously, to have a happy life; this is something I did in my 20s and I always refer to it as my best decision ever. Even better than my wonderful marriage—because it made that marriage a success.
happy people leaping for joy
2) Frame things positively. This gratitude journal is an example: I had to find good things to say the day we lost a Peru vacation day when our connecting flight from Ft. Lauderdale was canceled, the day [Supreme Court nominee Brett] Kavanaugh was confirmed, and even the day Yoshi [my stepfather] was killed by a careless motorist as he crossed in the crosswalk with the flashing light engaged. Seek out the benefits of every experience.
3) Dedicate one four-hour block per month (to start) to do something amazing. Climb a mountain, go to a spa, start a movement to change something you don’t like…whatever. Everyone can find that much time to create amazingness in your own life.
4) Dedicate some small bit of time every day, even 15 or 30 minutes, to doing something you love and that feels important: read a book, get a little time outside, cook a cool new food…endless possibilities.
5) Notice and appreciate the beauty of ordinary things. I find one of the things I get out of the Gratitude Journal is I’m always on the lookout for what I’m going to write about, so I pay a lot more attention to the beauty around me, and take pictures to help me remember and share that beauty.
And here’s a sixth I should have included: have something in your life that’s bigger than you and gives you purpose. Mine is to help businesses identify, create, and market products and services that address things like hunger, poverty war, and catastrophic climate change–and make a profit. When I discovered this purpose, at age 57, I felt like I finally had an answer for “what do you want to do when you grow up?”
#WeBeleiveHer demonstration supporting Christine Blasey Ford -Northampton, MA, 9-27-18. Photo by Shel Horowitz
This month, in my newsletter, I’ll be reviewing Our Search for Belonging: How Our Need to Connect is Tearing Us Apart, by Howard J. Ross with Jonrobert Tartaglione. Ross, of course, wrote well before Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court. But as I was reading, the relevance of his work to the Kavanaugh/Ford hearings stood out for me.
I am a survivor of childhood sexual assault. The attack happened when I was 10 or 11, but I didn’t tell anyone until I was 16. That didn’t make it any less real or any less painful. It was the defining trauma of my life.
The Senate hearings brought something home to me:
White, straight men with economic privilege attacked Dr. Ford for speaking out, for not speaking out right away, for not presenting enough evidence (when the Republicans refused her attempts to call witnesses or have an outside investigation). White, straight men with power were in such a great rush to vote in someone who made obvious lies under oath and may well have been a serial sexual assailant that they belittled her and lionized him. Meanwhile, white, straight men without economic privilege made death threats against her and forced her from her home. White, straight men defended the high school and college rape culture even while accepting Kavanaugh’s unconvincing explanation that he was far too pure to have participated in that oppressive culture–despite considerable evidence to the contrary on his own calendars and yearbook.
In Ross’s paradigm, those white straight men have set up an us versus them situation. They’ve turned Dr. Ford–and by extension, any survivor of sexual assault, including me–into “other”–something to marginalize, ignore, and/or discredit (my choice not to say “someone” is deliberate, because dehumanizing is a lot of what happens in these “other” situations). While both the Left and the Right engage in this kind of behavior, from my point of view, the Right uses the tactic both more viciously and more consistently).
Watching the highlight video clips, I found Ford quite credible. Watching Kavanaugh attack her, I perceived a sense of entitlement, attempts to dehumanize, and even the tired old tactic of calling the whole thing out as a partisan attack–not to mention that his testimony was crammed with false statements. It sickened me, just as watching Clarence Thomas use similar tactics to deflect similar accusations against him sickened me in 1991. To the Kavanuaghs and Thomases of the world, as a survivor of sexual assault, I will always be an outsider, even though I am male.
In Ross’s view, one key piece of identity politics is the difference in perception between members of the dominant and non-dominant groups: members of dominant groups typically don’t often think about the experience of those in non-dominant groups. Yet, a person of color or a woman or someone who identifies as another type of minority experiences daily reminders that society puts up physical, psychological, economic, and other barriers.
The Kavanaugh/Ford hearings illustrate that difference in perception really well.
I think many of us perceive ourselves or are perceived by others as outsiders in various ways. I have certainly experienced that as a Jew, as a northeastern progressive, as an activist, as someone involved in various liberation struggles. Yet, to a person of color or a Muslim, I would be perceived as part of the in-group that excludes them. That these categorizations are fluid was brought home to me when I ran for City Council in my town, in 1985. I knocked on the door of a man who said, “You’re Jewish, I’m Polish. We’re both Eastern European. We have to stick together against the Irish and Italians who run this town.” I had seen the Polish population as very much a part of the majority culture in this area, and I, as a Jew, was an outsider; he saw it differently, and that opened my eyes.
In the Kavanaugh case, the ignoring strategy no longer worked, so he moved to attempts to discredit, presenting a wide range of emotional behaviors in the process.
Back when I was representing domestic violence survivors in their family law cases, I witnessed a very high proportion of the abusive men on the other side cry in court. For a long time, I thought it was intentionally manipulative, but after a while I came to see it as genuine decompensation as they confronted for perhaps the first time their inability to control the realities they had constructed. For once, someone else — their victims, the court — was writing the script, and they simply couldn’t handle it. The mirror held up to their behavior undid them, at least temporarily; even more so, the loss of control over their little worlds.
If I had had any doubts previously about the truth of the allegations against Kavanaugh, they disappeared when I heard him sniffling his way through the small part of the hearings I listened to yesterday. The angry outbursts I read about later further sealed the deal. I found myself not just certain the assaultive behavior had occurred, but concerned about his wife and daughters — a man who would come that undone during high profile hearings is almost certainly still engaging in those behaviors, in my experience, and I’d wager he’s still a problem drinker as well.
The old white guys in the Senate, and the one in the White House, are similarly breaking down. They are grasping desperately at their control of the world, the reality they have lived for decades, and they are angrily and sometimes tearfully acting out as it is slowly but certainly removed from their collective grip.
The fall of white male supremacy really is happening right now, in painful slow motion, and it is deadly for sure: survivors of domestic violence are at the most risk when they finally decide to leave.
Now more than ever, we need to support one another, we need to make collective safety plans, and we need to keep working to leave white male supremacy behind.
As the primary author of two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series (Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World and Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green) and a speaker at the recent Guerrilla Marketing Summit, I was very interested in how the digital marketing pioneer Hubspot views the whole Guerrilla Marketing concept and brand.
In their seven examples, I was particularly thrilled that they included UNICEF’s super-successful Dirty Water campaign.
Screenshot of a still from the UNICEF “Dirty Water” video
After all, my two Guerrilla books are the ones that extend the Guerrilla Marketing concepts to the worlds of social change of environmentalism. This was a bit of a gamble for UNICEF; there were obviously significant costs in everything from developing the branding to shipping the filthy water. I hope they’re replicating the campaign in other cities, and creating strong follow-up messaging targeted specifically to those touched by this campaign, to keep them donating into the future.
My definition of Guerrilla Marketing is a lot broader than Hubspot’s. To me, Guerrilla Marketing has three main parts:
Being nimble in our thinking and actions, seizing opportunities quickly, including news tie-ins
Going outside and beyond conventional thinking patterns–disrupting the mental flow to get noticed, to move people to action, but in ways that don’t feel obnoxiously intrusive
Focusing not on how great your brand is (the mistake I see so many marketers make. I call it “we, we, we all the way home) but on the results: the benefits, the problems solved, the pain relieved, the wants and needs met or exceeded–whether for the individual customer or for the planet and the species that live on it.
Hubspot’s choice of the Bounty sculpture is a beautiful example.
Ideally, Guerrilla Marketing will be done at little cost, too. But, as the UNICEF and Grammy examples show, there are plenty of Guerrilla Marketing opportunities that aren’t necessarily cheap.
Let’s look at those two more closely, because they offer us very different lessons. It will take you exactly three minutes and 40 seconds to watch the two videos. Go ahead; I’ll wait.
UNICEF
This elaborate campaign involved creating a brand, bottling filthy brown water, and offering it on the streets of New York. The goal: to increase awareness that the clean, drinkable water we take for granted in most of the US (and the developed world generally) is unimaginable luxury for people at the margins in developing countries. Many have to drink filthy, disease-causing water, and many get very sick. The campaign encouraged people to use the money they currently spend on bottled water to provide clean water for those who don’t have it. Each dollar could supply a thirsty child for 40 days. The video documents the whole campaign, in a fast-paced three minutes.
I found this very effective. I love the way they were able to not just raise awareness, but funds. The negative branding is definitely a Guerrilla tactic, and the results are clearly positive. Bravo!
Grammy Ad
This was an expensive missed opportunity. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but this one really didn’t work for me. Great concept, but terrible execution. I want the protagonist be moved and touched by what he’s seeing, but he strolls through the talking posters, blithe and indifferent. He’s not even glancing at the posters! What’s going on in HIS head? We don’t even get a hint. Have the talking portraits of Harry Potter and the constant animations of things people didn’t animate in the past made a talking poster no-longer-special? And while my wife frequently accuses me of ADD, I found that I hadn’t even processed and recognized one song before it switched after a few seconds to something else. (And OK, I confess, this was not music I’m familiar with anyway). Some of the problem was that the songs all sounded so similar and all seemed to have the exact same beat.
I also think the choice of having multiple copies of each poster was unfortunate. Yes, I recognize that’s a common way to display posters in urban environments. It has NEVER worked for me. I’ve studied some of the advertising masters like David Ogilvy, and they taught me the importance of white space: of having one central object (or person, animal, tree…) able to stand out from what’s around it, because of that empty space around it. If I were buying billboards, instead of, say, 9 medium-sized repeated pictures, I’d use the space for one much larger version of the image. I’d use that white space and not add to the clutter.
Imagine walking down the street and seeing a 20-foot billboard suddenly start to sing with its one and only mouth! Imagine hearing snippets of three or four songs that each have a clear identity, in a true medley, each sung by one giant poster of an artist you recognize instantly. Would you be as blase as the protagonist? I doubt it!
So maybe the commercial would need a full minute instead of 39 seconds. That’s OK. In print copywriting, it’s perfectly OK to take as much time as you need to tell the story; I’ve seen emails with links to 40-page sales letters. Even in broadcast, even though airtime is expensive, we’ve seen many successful commercials that ran an hour (they’re called infomercials and they run on shopping channels). The UNICEF video was three entire minutes and I watched without multitasking, because I was interested both in their message and how they promoted it. If you can’t get it done in less than a minute, either buy more airtime, or script a commercial that CAN get it done in the time you bought.
When an American father-to-be asked Dear Abby for advice because his Indian wife wanted to use an ethnic-heritage name and he didn’t, she responded:
…Not only can foreign names be difficult to pronounce and spell, but they can also cause a child to be teased unmercifully…Why saddle a kid with a name he or she will have to explain or correct…from childhood into adulthood?
Seeing this as a social justice issue, I could not let her answer go unchallenged. Here’s what I wrote:
Abby, I’ve been reading your column since 1981, but your answer to “Making Life Easy” made me cringe! Part of what makes the US great is our habit of celebrating our cultural diversity, with festivals, ethnic cooking, and yes, our children’s names.
First, every culture will have names that are hard to pronounce and spell–but also easier ones. My own children’s names, Alana and Rafael, are both derived from Hebrew and celebrate their Jewish heritage. Honoring that culture felt all the more important because we live in a community where Jewish is exotic. We rejected names that were too hard to pronounce, like Chanoch; Recognizing that most Americans can’t pronounce the ch, I didn’t want my son to be “Hano.” “Making Life Easy”‘ and his wife will have hundreds of beautiful, pronounceable Indian names to choose from, such as Priya or Krishna.
This beautiful anti-bullying poster came from the US military’s health site, health.mil
Second, the argument about teasing is weak. Bullies will find a reason to tease. If the kids have ordinary names, bullies will pick on them for their skin color or ethnic background, for their good grades or their bad grades, for whatever point of difference they find. And bullies also tease kids about Western names (growing up as Sheldon, I speak from personal, painful experience; names like Sheldon and Norman were often chosen by American Jewish families that wanted to seem more assimilated). The way around this is not to remove any possible fuel for their bad actions–impossible anyhow–but to create a culture in the home and school that teaches respect for and acceptance of difference. This responsibility falls on both parents and educators. My own kids attended a school with zero tolerance around bullying, a school that created a welcoming and accepting culture for all types of children–and we reinforced this in the home, as my mother reinforced it for me when I was growing up.
I believe the self-acceptance I developed as the parent of self-accepting kids proud of their heritage and happy to celebrate the heritage of others helped me find my way to the work I do: working with businesses to identify/create/market profitable offerings that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. I could not have thought so big if I hadn’t learned to feel pride in who I am and my power to make a difference.
Not ashamed to sign my real name.
Shel Horowitz, Hadley, MA
PS: whether or not you publish this letter, please share it with “Making Life Easy.” Ignoring his wife’s wishes could cause both marital discord and shame in the child’s culture of origin.
<End of my letter>.
What do you think? Please add your comment, below. And BTW, I found this list of 100 recommended but unusual boy names, which features ethnic choices such as Arian, Bodhi, Camilo, Cortez, Dimitri, Dangelo, and Enoch–in just the A through E part of the list, and just one gender.
Let’s just pretend for a moment that the climate deniers are right and nearly the entire scientific community is wrong. We spend a lot of time and effort so humans can continue living on this planet of ours–and it turns out we didn’t need to do all that. Let’s say all that happens is we switch to clean energy and super-efficient design, improve our air and water quality, dramatically reduce pollution-related illness, free up more spending power among people who are no longer buying fossil fuels, create hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs, and so on–but it doesn’t affect the climate, or the climate continues to be just fine for humans. Let’s say that ending our reliance on fossil fuels changes our foreign policy away from resource-based wars and toward peace, quality-of-life improvements around the world, and international cooperation.
A storm-damaged pier. Courtesy freeimages.com
You know what? I’d be pretty happy with those outcomes. It would be worth making that effort even if climate change were not an issue.
BUT…what if the climate scientists are right? What if our future is full of massive flooding, wildfires, severe storms, food riots, and all the rest of it? I’m not actually worried that much about the planet. The planet has survived climate upheaval many times before, and it will again. So will the cockroaches. But I AM worried about our planet’s capacity to sustain human and mammal life, and the plants that we all rely on for our survival. The planet is indifferent to whether humans survive and thrive. It looks to me that the planet has begun to fight back over the past ten or twenty years; “global weirding” has become a thing, around the world. The climate we’ve been used to for a couple of centuries is not the one we have anymore. If we continue blindly down the path of climate denial and inaction, explorers from other planets will land here to discover that the cockroaches are in charge, and humans are either extinct or a tiny remnant living lives of deprivation in scattered little bands.
Don’t take my word about those consequences. Follow these links and listen to the real experts: scientists.
A more scientific but still relatively readable report from NASA
And finally, a more technical piece from the Union of Concerned Scientists (a group I’ve been paying attention to for about 40 years and for whom I have a great deal of respect) outlining why humans need to own the responsibility for climate change
Are natural causes also contributing to climate change? Sure. Volcanoes, earthquakes, massive forest fires and floods…all of those have an effect on climate. But it’s important to keep four things in mind about natural disasters:
Humans still have a huge effect; nature issuing “corrections” doesn’t let us off the hook
When we put not just buildings but massive-scale infrastructure using risky technologies into at-risk locations, the consequences can magnify alarmingly
As an example of that last point, consider the accident at Fukushima in 2011. Seismic activity caused a tsunami, which flooded one of the largest concentrations of nuclear power plants in the world (6 plants at the Fukushima Daiichi site and another 4 at Fukushima Daini, just 7 miles away), which led to explosions in at least four of the Daiichi plants, which led to a meltdown, which contaminated a wide swath and forced thousands to evacuate.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is another example. Around the world, numerous oil rigs, nuclear plants, chemical refineries, etc. sit on earthquake faults or next to large bodies of water. And this is simply nuts!
We’ve had 200 years to watch this crisis coming. We have plenty of technology to reduce our need for energy AND to generate clean, safe energy to power our world. If we’d started to get serious about dealing with climate change even as recently as 50 years ago, by now, we could have easily moved to 100% renewables, and if we had any sense, we would have. The good news: we could still convert to 100% renewables by 2050, or perhaps even sooner. The bad news: we may not have the luxury of 30+ years to figure this out, and at the moment, the US at least has a federal government that is actively hostile to climate science and puts dollars in the pockets of big business ahead of the health, safety, and livability of people and planet.
Multilingual polling place sign, courtesy of USDOJ
Here in Western Massachusetts, four adjacent State House of Representatives seats and an overlapping State Senate seat have no incumbent. So we are challenged by a loss of continuity and institutional memory–but blessed by a plethora of great candidates in both local and state races. In some of these races, I could support as many as three candidates and it’s very tough to make a choice. But since we unfortunately don’t have Ranked Choice Voting, which allows you to pick a second and third choice, etc., we have to support someone.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past several months attending candidate forums and house parties, reading about the candidates in the newspaper and on social media, and, having individual meetings, calls, and correspondence with some of them. So I feel I’m making informed decisions, and I’d like to share my choices with you–and why I picked these folks. For the two candidates in my own local districts, I’m including links to their websites and/or Facebook campaign pages.
The Democratic primary is September 4, just one day after Labor Day. If you’re registered to vote, please mark your calendar and exercise your rights on that day.
First, the races where I get to vote, and then the neighboring ones.
State Senate (to replace Stan Rosenberg, who resigned): Jo Comerford (write-in). Of the original six candidates, four remain, three of whom I know personally. I feel any of those three would do a good job, and probably so would the fourth. But Jo is a cut above. She has the perfect resume for a State Senator in a district full of activists. I first met her when she began running the American Friends Service Committee office in Northampton, after Frances Crowe (who started the local branch in her basement back in the 1960s) finally retired. From there, she took over from the late Greg Speeter as director of the National Priorities Project, the organization that shows cities and towns dollar for dollar what they send to the military, and how they might use that money at home instead. NPP has been a resource to academics and activists for decades, and I’m so proud that they’re based here in the Valley (along with several other wonderful national organizations). Her next job was at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, which gave her direct experience with the issues people in our area face around hunger and poverty, as well as highly relevant experience working with local farmers. Then she went to MoveOn, where she was a national campaign director for four years, stepping down only to run for this seat. Jo is humble and clearly in the race as a way to serve. She’s also highly organized, has mobilized a veritable army of volunteers, and brought in a bunch of awesome endorsements (including progressive commentator and former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who has personal connections with Northampton). Her other endorsements include Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz, former State Rep. Ellen Story, former Congressman John Olver, as well a whole host of peace and justice, environmental, and labor groups. While election officials are supposed to count votes for Jo Comerford, Northampton, it’s best if you write in Joanne Comerford, 186 Federal Street, Northampton. Visit Jo Comerford’s campaign Facebook page for more information.
State House (to replace retiring John Scibak in Hadley, South Hadley, Easthampton, part of Granby): Marie McCourt. I see Marie first off as grounded in the experience of marginalized people who learn to make the system work through painful trial and error. Between her own disabilities and her son’s special needs, she has had to be an advocate her entire adult life. I also see her as very willing to listen, to be thoughtful, to look at an issue from many sides. And I see her as a passionate representative of her constituents; she is in the race to be of service. Of the three candidates, Marie appears to have the strongest grasp of the different personalities and issues in the four communities–because she has gone out and listened to people in all of them. Marie is a protege of both long-time State Reps Ellen Story (who has endorsed her) and John Scibak (who is not publicly endorsing anyone), and received the strongest candidate endorsement I can ever remember the Daily Hampshire Gazette giving any candidate in the 36+ years I’ve been reading the paper. I didn’t know Marie before Scibak announced his retirement, but I have met with her in-depth several times, hosted a house party with her, and been part of her strategy group. That’s how impressed I am with her. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mccourt4rep/
State-Wide races: Governor (to run against Charlie Baker in the November general election): Bob Massie. Massie impressed me when I met him while he was running for statewide office many years ago, and he impresses me still. He has a terrific record on the environment, personal experience with the challenges of our health system (and also experience of the European single-payer model), and as strong a commitment to social and environmental justice issues as any gubernatorial candidate I can remember, similar to Robert Reich (who ran for governor several years ago) . He is more openly progressive and considerably more charismatic than his opponent, and I think he has a better chance of beating Baker, who is surprisingly popular. But if Gonzales is the nominee, I will have no problem supporting him in November.
Lieutenant Governor (to run against Karen Polito on a slate with the primary winner for governor in the November general election): Quentin Palfrey. Again, two fine candidates with good politics and good grasp of policy, and I will happily support the primary winner in November. My only exposure to Jimmy Tingle was at the Democratic Convention in June, while I’ve heard Palfrey two other times: once at a meeting of an activist group in Northampton, and once at an a rally against the White House policies on separating families of immigrants. To me, it’s very important that he shows up to progressive events and sees us as integral to the Democratic Party, and he knows the state extends past Route 128 and even I-495. I know he’s been out here in western Massachusetts several other times during the campaign, while I’m only aware of one Tingle appearance in the area. It also helps that I see myself in complete agreement with everything I read on Palfrey’s policy page.
Secretary of State (running against incumbent Democrat William Galvin): Josh Zakim. This is a very clear choice. The incumbent, first elected in 1994, has been good about holding corporate interests accountable to consumers, but otherwise has kept a very low profile. He is wishy-washy on a number of electoral reforms that would open up the process, while Zakim, currently a Boston City Councilor, unashamedly embraces them.
US Congress, Massachusetts 2nd District: no primary. Supporting incumbent Jim McGovern in the general election. McGovern’s been great on defending SNAP and other hunger programs, standing for meaningful action on climate change, and opposing the racist, anti-consumer white House agenda at every turn. He comes to the western part of the state frequently and maintains a district office in Northampton. I consider him one of the best people in the entire Congress and am proud to be in his district.
Adjoining districts:
To replace the late Rep. Peter Kocot (Northampton/Hatfield): Lindsay Sabadosa. Lindsay is a progressive activist who has had a high profile in the Valley, organizing the local chapter of the Women’s March and active in numerous progressive activities. She also knows her way around the Statehouse and has built progressive issue-oriented coalitions. Her opponent, who ran Kokot’s district office, seems quite decent but doesn’t seem to bring the passion and energy. I also worry that some of the people in her camp are openly hostile to a progressive agenda.
To replace retiring Rep. Solomon Goldstein-Rose (Amherst, Pelham, part of Granby): Mindy Domb. Two good candidates for this seat. I give the edge to Domb on the basis of her passion and the level of support I see in the community. When Goldstein-Rose bowed out of the race, he endorsed Domb.
To replace retiring Rep. Steve Kulik (western Hilltowns and Deerfield/Sunderland): I see three good candidates. While I have not followed this one as closely as the others, I dealt with Nataie Blais when she worked for Congressman McGovern and found her very professional. She also has Kulik’s endorsement. Thus, she edges out Francia Wisnewski and Kate Albright-Hanna for my support in this eight-way(!) race.
US Congress, Massachusetts 1st District: Tahirah Amatul-Wadud (running against incumbent Democrat Richie Neal for a seat that includes all of Hampden and Berkshire Counties and big chunks of Hampshire and Franklin). Tahirah is a fresh face in local politics, whom I met shortly after the DT inauguration and quickly became friends with. I’ve been advising her campaign and I’m very much in favor of her candidacy. I used to live in Neal’s district. He seldom came to any of the other counties besides his base in Hampden County, did little on most issues, and only got me to vote for him once–because he’d voted no on the Iraq war. It is the only vote of courage I can remember him taking. Tahirah has been getting to know the geographically vast district and its very diverse voters, listening hard to people’s concerns, doing her research, speaking with issue experts…and to me, that leadership is worth sacrificing Neal’s power through seniority, as one of the longer-serving MOCs
In November, Massachusetts voters also have three ballot questions. I recommend voting Yes on Questions 2 and 3–but after much research (and confusion) I’ve changed my mind on Question 1 and plan to vote no:
Question 1 has a laudible goal of redcuce the burden on overworked nurses, and I had been a strong supporter of Question 1–until I started educating myself. However, the bill–yes, I’ve read it–is very poorly drafted. Specifically, the definition of what constitutes a finable incident is alarmingly vague. While the intent of the bill is laudable, it is so poorly written that I am convinced it will do more harm than good. It could result in community hospitals like Northampton’s Cooley Dickinson (my nearest hospital) being forced to close. Reluctantly, I am now a no vote.
Question 2 will take the first steps to get Massachusetts, at least, out from under the thumb of big corporate money in politics and give our state at least a little bit of protection from the horrible Citizens United US Supreme Court decision of several years ago that allowed dark money in politics, pretty much without restriction–and puts the wheels in motion to create a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United. Please vote Yes!
Question 3 protects against an attack on the rights of transgender people. A yes vote maintains the present protective law, while a no vote removes protections from a class of people who have done nothing criminal. Please vote Yes!
Some progressives have wondered, as a life-long grassroots activist, why I’m getting so involved in electoral politics. Because we need to do both. In 1975, I put a sign in my yard that said “Don’t vote. It only encourages them.” But like Obama’s position on same-sex marriage, my position has evolved. I was only 18 and didn’t see the use of a system that had little use for me as a youth, that under both LBJ (Democrat) and Nixon (Republican) was sending people just slightly older than me to fight and die in the far-away jungles of Vietnam, was despoiling the earth, and was not responsive (in my opinion at the time) to citizen needs.
But by 1983, I was of a different mind. I began to follow local politics closely that year, and since that time have been involved in many local, state, and national campaigns. I even ran for local office three times and managed a successful campaign to get a progressive insurgent on the City Council. He beat the three-term incumbent conservative by seven votes! I still do the grassroots work and see it as important. I go into electoral politics with my eyes open, knowing that no candidate will be the savior, that the pressures on elected officials to side with the powerful are immense, and increase the more you go up the ladder from municipal to county to in-state region to state to national region to president. But I also see good people all the way along the ladder. I think Obama and Carter and Kennedy were good people. They had plenty of flaws, but they had heart.
And if we have learned nothing from the horrible policies and horrible statements emanating from Washington the past two years, we know now without any doubt that our votes make a difference, that staying home or voting third-party in a swing state is not an option under the current electoral system, and that we could have beaten back this nightmare if more people had understood what was at stake.
So, Massachusetts residents, get out there and vote on September 4. So, all US citizens, get out there again to vote on November 6.
After I posted something opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, I received this comment from someone who prefers not to be named:
I voted for Hillary and most Democrats. Hillary lost. Trump won. The Republicans won. They get to govern and part of governing is choosing and confirming a judges. You can voice opposition, but when you are not in the majority, there is little else you can do. You are best advised to stop tilting at windmills with meaningless protests, petitions, and propaganda and instead find better candidates, finance them, work your precincts, get out your vote, win your elections, and become the majority again.
US Supreme Court building, Washington, DC
This is my response:
1. A little history lesson. Judges on both sides of the spectrum have been successfully blocked if enough people see them as extremist. Nixon failed to get Hainsworth and Carswell. LBJ couldn’t get sitting SCOTUS Justice Abe Fortas into the Chief Justice seat. Reagan failed with Bork.
2. Kavanaugh’s positions on presidential power alone disqualify him as extremist. He wants to preclude any possibility that DT can be held accountable for his many crimes. Even some Republicans are saying Helsinki was treasonous. And DT was fully aware on the day he took office that he was violating the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses of the Constitution. And then there are DT’s consistent violations of so many other laws. (Click here for a listing of specifically criminal activity and here for an Atlantic Magazine piece on DT scandals, many of which involve criminal activity; both contain several source links–and both were published well before the current kerfluffle.) Since he is an Executive Branch absolutist, it would not surprise me if Kavanaugh even wanted to overturn 215 years of precedent and say that the courts have no power to declare something unconstitutional–something John Marshall created as Chief Justice during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency in his ruling in Marbury v. Madison, 1803 and does not actually appear in the Constitution. Right now, the courts are our best check on executive overreach or criminal behavior other than public pressure.
3. Lawrence Tribe, noted legal scholar, has stated that a president under investigation should not be allowed to appoint the person who will ultimately decide his fate. This has gained some traction and makes more sense to me than attempting to use the despicable McConnell precedent that allowed the theft of one seat from the Democrats (with the cooperation of Obama, who should have fought it much harder).
4. You talk about majorities. Let’s remember that even as weak a candidate as she was, Hillary won the popular vote with about 3,000,000 more than DT. If that group were a city, it would be bigger than the in-city-limits population of every city in the country other than NYC or L.A.. Bigger than Chicago or Houston, nearly twice as big as Philadelphia.
Why This Matters: A Metaphor for Something Much Deeper
Why am I going on about this? Why does it matter? Isn’t it just some people having fun making a feel-good film?
Answer: I do marketing and strategic profitability consulting for green and social change organizations, as well as for authors and publishers–and I’m also a lifelong activist. This combination of activism and marketing gives me another set of lenses to filter things, as well as a magnificent toolkit to make the world better. My activism also brings a strong sense of ethics into the marketing side.
Both as a marketer and an activist, I pay careful attention to how we motivate people to take action–to the psychology of messaging, One category for this post is psychology; click on that category to get posts going back many years. I worry deeply about our tendency as a society to crowd out facts with emotions. (I also worry about another tendency, to crowd out emotions with facts, but that’s a different post.)
And this is an example of crowding out facts with emotion. While this particular instance is innocuous as far as I can tell, we see examples of overreach on both the left and right, and they work to push us apart from each other, talk at each other instead of seeking common ground, and push real solutions farther and farther out of reach.
My inbox is full of scare-tactic emails from progressive, environmental, or Democratic Party organizations. Because I’m in the biz and understand what they’re doing, I leave most of them unopened. I just searched my unread emails for subject lines that contain the word “Breaking” and came with hundreds, including this one from a group called Win Without War:
An unarmed man with a small flag stops four Chinese tanks in Tiannanmen Square, Beijing,
It’s a clear attempt to generate hysteria, to have people perceiving tanks in the streets with their guns pointed at dissenters.
Only in the body of the email do we find out what’s really going on:
Shel —
Last night, the Washington Post broke the story that Donald Trump has ordered a giant military parade with tanks, guns, and troops taking over the streets of our nation’s capital. [1] This is the kind of parade that dictators around the world use to intimidate their enemies and, more importantly, their own citizens.
This is what authoritarian dictatorships look like.
But Trump can’t change the fact that we still live in a democracy — which means Washington, D.C.’s local government gets to have a say before Donald Trump’s tanks roll down its streets.
Note the use of mail merge software to appear personal. Does that really fool anybody anymore? But OK, even when you know it’s a mail merge, it still generates at least a small warm fuzzy.
More importantly, note that the actual content is totally different from the expectation in the headline. We can argue the foolishness of Trump wanting a military parade (I think it’s foolish, and an expensive attempt to stroke his ego)–but in no way is this the same as attacking demonstrators in the streets of Washington, DC.
The right wing is at least as bad. I don’t subscribe to their e-blasts, but I found this juicy example (with an introduction and then a rebuttal by the site hosting this post) in about ten seconds of searching.
And then there are DT’s own Tweets, news conferences, and speeches, both during the campaign and since he took the oath to uphold the constitution as President of the United States (an oath he has been in violation of every single day of his term). They are full of lies, misrepresentations, name-calling, bullying, and fear-mongering. They are hate speech. I will not give them legitimacy by quoting them here; they’re easy enough to find.
As a country, we are better than this..
How You Can “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Sensationalist Fear-mongering
Before sharing any news story or meme, run through a series of questions to help you identify if it’s real.And if it passes that test, pop on rumor-checking site Snopes and check its status. For that matter, go through a similar questions for advertising claims.
The questions will vary by the situation. Here are a few to get you started:
Does the post link to documentation? Are most of the linked sites reputable? If they advance a specific agenda, does the post disclose this? (Note that THIS post links to several reputable sites, including NPR, New York Times, history.com, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, CNN, Snopes, and my own goingbeyondsustainability.com and greenandprofitable.com. Yes, I am aware of the issues in using Wikipedia or Youtube as the only source. I am also aware that Google gives them a tremendous amount of “link juice” because on the whole, they are considered authoritative. For both those citations, I had plenty of documentation from major news sites.) Strong documentation linking to known and respected sources is a sign to take the post seriously.
Does the post name-drop without specifics? See how the Win Without War letter mentions the Washington Post but leaves out the link? Remember that ancient email hoax citing longtime NPR reporter Nina Totenberg? Name-dropping to buy unsusbstantiated respect is not a good sign.
Are the language and tone calm and rational, or screaming and sensationalist or even salacious?
Is the post attributed? Can you easily contact the creator?
And last but far from least, the most important question: Who benefits from the post’s point of view ? What are their relationships to the post’s creator? (Hello, Russian trollbots!). Don’t just follow the money. Follow the power dynamics, too.
I could go on but you get the idea. Please share your reactions in the comments.
