Under the guise of protecting small business from frivolous lawsuits, the House of Representatives just gutted the Americans With Disabilities Act—a major piece of civil rights legislation signed by George H.W. Bush. I have to say, I’m on a LOT of small business discussion boards, and I haven’t heard any business owners screaming about hardship. Small businesses in pre-ADA buildings are exempt unless they do major renovations.
One way to rethink transportation for wheelchair users
It’s up to us to make sure the Senate doesn’t follow along. Contact your Senators and let them know this is a vote where you will hold them accountable. And if your Rep was one who voted Aye, give them a piece of your mind too.
Of course, we’ll be tempted to argue on the basis of compassion. But remember who we’re dealing with here. These people have a long history of NOT acting out of compassion, often of doing the opposite. So compassion arguments “ain’t gonna cut it.” We have to get to them on the things they will listen to: costs to taxpayers, personal hardship to them, and of course, voting and campaigning for and donating to their opponents.
Don’t Waste My Tax Dollars: How dare you make it harder for productive citizens to work, just because they have disabilities. If you think I want my tax dollars squandered on welfare payments to people who could have had a job until you made it impossible to get to work, you’d better think again.
Don’t Hurt the Economy by Hurting Disabled People: For new construction, it’s really easy to design in ADA compliance from the ground up. By allowing builders to take shortcuts because you took away the teeth of this legislation, you’re encouraging them to stop designing in ramps and wider doorways, setting aside parking, making elevators disabled-friendly, etc have you noticed how many people with disabilities who in pre-ADA days had to sit home and be a burden have gone on to start job-creating companies making our economy better (like the personal-transportation vehicle for wheelchair users in the photo—designed by a wheelchair-using Texas woman)? There’s even an organization of disabled business owners that was named one of President George H.W. Bush’s 1000 Points of Light. Do you really want the blame for squashing that on your shoulders?
Protect Our Veterans: Do you realize that veterans have much higher disability rates than the general population (due to war wounds), and that many have a hard time finding work and frequently start their own businesses? Thus, many of these job creators are veterans.You are hurting the people who served our country and defended our freedom.
Pointless Government Meddling: The ADA has been around since 1990. Most public buildings are already accessible. This is bringing in the government to break a system that’s working just fine right now, and that has enabled millions of people to be productive members of society. And if buildings are allowed to come online without meeting current ADA code, it will be expensive to retrofit them later, when (not if) this weakening of the law is repealed.
Personal Inconvenience to the Senator (this one takes a wee bit of research): I noticed that [name a family member of theirs with a disability] uses a wheelchair [cane, walker, seeing-eye dog, whatever]. Do you really want to be called away from important Senate business every time [name]has to go to the bank? How do you think I’m going to feel as a [business owner, manager, productive employee supporting my family] if I have to leave work to help my Aunt Mary do things she could have done for herself until you put obstacles in her way? And what’s going to happen to you, 20 years from now, when you may not be able-bodied yourself?
Vote No or You’ll Organize to Defeat the Senator During the Next Election: Don’t just pledge to vote for your Senator’s opponent. Say you’ll be willing to campaign and fundraise for someone who understands that disability rights are important. If you’ve voted, donated, or volunteered for your Senator in the past, be sure to let them know.
Some marketers are engaged in a vigorous debate between people who identify as “thought leaders” and those whose skins crawl when they hear the term.
Whether you love or hate the term, “thought leader”, marketing by showing leadership through content and letting people meaningfully engage with those ideas is undeniably powerful.
That type of marketing hooked me when I first tried it, as a 15-year-old 3rd-year high school student, and I’ve been using it ever since. First, I used it only to spread my ideas. Later, I also marketed products and services based on those ideas. And those ideas built me a decent following (and, eventually, a decent consulting practice)—sharing them through my books, articles, presentations, interviews, media coverage, etc.
This takes time and energy, and I know many people who do it better than me. But it certainly can be done. One of my book launches garnered over 1,000,000 short-term Google hits (for the book title, an exact-match four word string that wouldn’t show up in any other context). It’s the only time anything I’ve done got a million hits on Google.
I’ve even managed to help shift several mindsets at the international or national or local level.
My biggest success was changing the attitude about a proposed local mountaintop housing development from “this is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” to “of course we’ll win! The question is how.” This campaign took just over a year and used everything I knew in 1999-2000 about marketing AND community organizing (and the knowledge/labor of many others)—but the mindset shift took only four or five months. And that mindset shift created the conditions for our victory.
Lawn sign from the Save the Mountain campaign in Hadley, MA, in front of Mount Holyoke (a state park next to the mountain we saved)
I also like to think I helped change the idea that business has to be evil. Of the five books I’ve published since 2003 (and the 10 since my first book came out in 1980), four show how business can profitably address issues ranging from business ethics to ending poverty—while reversing environmental destruction. I’ve given dozens of “Making Green Sexy”, “Impossible is a Dare,” and other talks on how business can be heroes.) And it’s been years since I’ve heard “business ethics? That’s an oxymoron!” When I first started talking about business ethics as a success strategy, I heard that false “wisdom” constantly.
I like to think my activity is part of WHY I no longer hear that horrible sentence.
Leading with ideas means finding others who will amplify those ideas. It’s not a coincidence that I actively seek out media coverage, endorsements, and more.
My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World has a blurb from Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield on the front cover, another from Seth Godin on the back, and some 50 endorsements on the front pages. It has 4 guest essays from best-selling authors. These are some of the ways I’ve built credibility and gotten people interested, even though the book no longer has a current-year copyright.
One review of that book didn’t appear until 17 months after publication—and I’ve gotten reviews on books that were up to eight years old at the time. When you write about issues and do so with substance, your book can attract interest for years.
Of course, events can shift the relevance. If you try to repurpose articles on how to survive the coming Y2K crisis or books on the presidencies of Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, or Al Gore, thought leadership is not the image you’ll project. 😉
Thank you, Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel for speaking truth to power. Since this is published on the FCC website, Clyburn’s is an official federal document, and thus automatically in the public domain. Please reprint widely. Rosenworcel’s may be as well, but I found it on CNET so am linking, not reprinting.
Note: I met Commissioner Clyburn several years ago when she addressed a National Conference on Media Reform. I was impressed with her as a speaker Now I am impressed with her as a writer, too.
DISSENTING STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER MIGNON CLYBURN Re: Destroying Internet Freedom, WC Docket No. 17-108
Dissenting FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn in 2014 (courtesy Wikipedia)
“I dissent. I dissent from this fiercely spun, legally lightweight, consumer-harming, corporate-enabling Destroying Internet Freedom Order.
“I dissent, because I am among the millions who is outraged. Outraged, because the FCC pulls its own teeth, abdicating responsibility to protect the nation’s broadband consumers. Why are we witnessing such an unprecedented groundswell of public support, for keeping the 2015 net neutrality protections in place? Because the public can plainly see, that a soon-to-be-toothless FCC is handing the keys to the internet — the internet, one of the most remarkable, empowering, enabling inventions of our lifetime — over to a handful of multibillion dollar corporations. And if past is prologue, those very same broadband internet service providers, that the majority says you should trust to do right by you, will put profits and shareholder returns above what is best for you.
“Each of us raised our right hands when we were sworn in as FCC Commissioners, took an oath and promised to uphold our duties and responsibilities ‘to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination… a rapid, efficient, nationwide and worldwide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.’ Today the FCC majority officially abandons that pledge and millions have taken note.
“I do not believe that there are any FCC or Congressional offices immune to the deluge of consumer outcry. We are even hearing about state and local offices fielding calls and what is always newsworthy is that at last count, five Republican Members of Congress went on the record in calling for a halt of today’s vote. Why such a bipartisan outcry? Because the large majority of Americans are in favor of keeping strong net neutrality rules in place. The sad thing about this commentary, it pains me to say, is what I can only describe as the new norm at the FCC: a majority that is ignoring the will of the people. A majority that will stand idly by while the people they serve lose.
“We have heard story after story of what net neutrality means to consumers and small businesses from places as diverse as Los Angeles’ Skid Row and Marietta, Ohio. I hold in my hand letters that plead with the FCC to keep our net neutrality rules in place but what is striking and in keeping with the new norm, despite the millions of comments, letters and calls received, this Order cites not even one. That speaks volumes about the direction the FCC is heading. That speaks volumes about just who is being heard.
“Sole proprietors, whose entire business model, depends on an open internet, are worried that the absence of clear and enforceable net neutrality protections will result in higher costs and fewer benefits because you see: they are not able to pay tolls for premium access. Even large online businesses have weighed in, expressing concern about being subject to added charges as they simply try to reach their own customers. Engineers have submitted comments including many of the internet’s pioneers, sharing with the FCC majority, the fundamentals of how the internet works because from where they sit, there is no way that an item like this would ever see the light of day, if the majority understood the platform some of them helped to create.
“I have heard from innovators, worried that we are standing up a mother-may-I regime, where the broadband provider becomes arbiter of acceptable online business models. And yes, I have heard from consumers, who are worried given that their broadband provider has already shown that they will charge inscrutable below-the-line fees, raise prices unexpectedly and put consumers on hold for hours at a time. Who will have their best interests at heart in a world without clear and enforceable rules overseen by an agency with clear enforcement authority? A toothless FCC?
“There has been a darker side to all of this over the past few weeks. Threats and intimidation. Personal attacks. Nazis cheering. Russian influence. Fake comments. Those are unacceptable. Some are illegal. They all are to be rejected. But what is also not acceptable is the FCC’s refusal to cooperate with state attorney general investigations, or allow evidence in the record that would undercut a preordained outcome.
“Many have asked, what happens next? How will all of this — net neutrality, my internet experience — look after today? My answer is simple. When the current protections are abandoned, and the rules that have been officially in place since 2015 are repealed, we will have a Cheshire cat version of net neutrality. We will be in a world where regulatory substance fades to black, and all that is left is a broadband provider’s toothy grin and those oh so comforting words: We have every incentive to do the right thing. What they will soon have is every incentive to do their own thing.
“Now the results of throwing out your net neutrality protections may not be felt right away. Most of us will get up tomorrow morning and over the next week wade through hundreds of headlines, turn away from those endless prognosticators and submerge ourselves in a sea of holiday bliss. But what we have wrought will one day be apparent and by then, when you really see what has changed, I fear, it may not only be too late to do anything about it, because there will be no agency empowered to address your concerns. This item insidiously ensures the FCC will never be able to fully grasp the harm it may have unleashed on the internet ecosystem. And that inability might lead decision-makers to conclude, that the next internet startup that failed to flourish and attempted to seek relief, simply had a bad business plan, when in fact what was missing was a level playing field online.
“Particularly damning is what today’s repeal will mean for marginalized groups, like communities of color, that rely on platforms like the internet to communicate, because traditional outlets do not consider their issues or concerns worthy of any coverage. It was through social media that the world first heard about Ferguson, Missouri, because legacy news outlets did not consider it important until the hashtag started trending. It has been through online video services that targeted entertainment has thrived, where stories are finally being told because those same programming were repeatedly rejected by mainstream distribution and media outlets. And it has been through secure messaging platforms, where activists have communicated and organized for justice without gatekeepers with differing opinions blocking them.
“Where will the next significant attack on internet freedom come from? Maybe from a broadband provider allowing its network to congest, making a high-traffic video provider ask what more can it pay to make the pain stop. That will never happen you say? Well it already has. The difference now, is the open question of what is stopping them? The difference after today’s vote, is that no one will be able to stop them.
“Maybe several providers will quietly roll out paid prioritization packages that enable deep-pocketed players to cut the queue. Maybe a vertically integrated broadband provider decides that it will favor its own apps and services. Or some high-value internet-of-things traffic will be subject to an additional fee. Maybe some of these actions will be cloaked under nondisclosure agreements and wrapped up in mandatory arbitration clauses so that it will be a breach of contract to disclose these publicly or take the provider to court over any wrongdoing. Some may say ‘Of Course this will never happen?” After today’s vote, what will be in place to stop them?
“What we do know, is that broadband providers did not even wait for the ink to dry on this Order before making their moves. One broadband provider, who had in the past promised to not engage in paid prioritization, has now quietly dropped that promise from its list of commitments on its website. What’s next? Blocking or throttling? That will never happen? After today’s vote, exactly who is the cop of the beat that can or will stop them?
“And just who will be impacted the most? Consumers and small businesses, that’s who. The internet continues to evolve and has become ever more critical for every participant in our 21st century ecosystem: Government services have migrated online, as have educational opportunities and job notices and applications, but at the same time, broadband providers have continued to consolidate, becoming bigger. They own their own content, they own media companies and they own or have an interest in other types of services.
“Why are millions so alarmed? Because they understand the risks this all poses and even those who may not know what Title II authority is, know that they will be at risk without it.
“I have been asking myself repeatedly, why the majority is so singularly focused on overturning these wildly popular rules? Is it simply because they felt that the 2015 net neutrality order, which threw out over 700 rules and dispensed with more than 25 provisions, was too heavy-handed? Is this a ploy to create a ‘need’ for legislation where there was none before? Or is it to establish uncertainty where little previously existed?
“Is it a tactic to undermine the net neutrality protections adopted in 2015 that are currently parked at the Supreme Court? You know, the same rules that were resoundingly upheld by the DC Circuit last year? No doubt, we will see a rush to the courthouse, asking the Supreme Court to vacate and remand the substantive rules we fought so hard for over the past few years, because today, the FCC uses legally suspect means to clear the decks of substantive protections for consumers and competition.
“It is abundantly clear why we see so much bad process with this item: because the fix was already in. There is no real mention of the thousands of net neutrality complaints filed by consumers. Why? The majority has refused to put them in the record while maintaining the rhetoric that there have been no real violations. Record evidence of the massive incentives and abilities of broadband providers to act in anti-competitive ways are missing from the docket? Why? Because they have refused to use the data and knowledge the agency does have, and has relied upon in the past to inform our merger reviews. As the majority has shown again and again, the views of individuals do not matter, including the views of those who care deeply about the substance, but are not Washington insiders.
“There is a basic fallacy underlying the majority’s actions and rhetoric today: the assumption of what is best for broadband providers is best for America. Breathless claims about unshackling broadband services from unnecessary regulation are only about ensuring that broadband providers have the keys to the internet. Assertions that this is merely a return to some imaginary status quo ante, cannot hide the fact, that this is the very first time that the FCC has disavowed substantive protections for consumers online.
“And when the current, 2015 net neutrality rules are laid to waste, we may be left with no single authority with the power to protect consumers. Now this Order loudly crows about handing over authority of broadband to the FTC, but what is absent from the Order and glossed over in that haphazardly issued afterthought of a Memorandum of Understanding or MOU, is that the FTC is an agency, with no technical expertise in telecommunications; the FTC is an agency that may not even have authority over broadband providers in the first instance; the FTC is an agency that if you can even reach that high bar of proving unfair or deceptive practices and that there is substantialconsumer injury, it will take years upon years to remedy. But don’t just take my word for it: even one of the FTC’s own Commissioners has articulated these very concerns. And if you’re wondering why the FCC is preempting state consumer protection laws in this item without notice, let me help you with a simple jingle that you can easily commit to memory: If it benefits industry, preemption is good; if it benefits consumers, preemption is bad.
“Reclassification of broadband will do more than wreak havoc on net neutrality. It will also undermine our universal service construct for years to come, something which the Order implicitly acknowledges. It will undermine the Lifeline program. It will weaken our ability to support robust broadband infrastructure deployment. And what we will soon find out, is what a broadband market unencumbered by robust consumer protections will look like. I suspect the result will not be pretty.
“I know there are many questions on the mind of Americans right now, including what the repeal of net neutrality will mean for them. To help answer outstanding questions I will host a town hall through Twitter next Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET. What saddens me is that the agency that is supposed to protect you is abandoning you, but what I am pleased to be able to say is the fight to save net neutrality does not end today. This agency does not have, the final word. Thank goodness.
“As I close my eulogy of our 2015 net neutrality rules, carefully crafted rules that struck an appropriate balance in providing consumer protections and enabling opportunities and investment, I take ironic comfort in the words of then Commissioner Pai from 2015, because I believe this will ring true about this Destroying Internet Freedom Order:
I am optimistic, that we will look back on today’s vote as an aberration, a temporary deviation from the bipartisan path, that has served us so well. I don’t know whether this plan will be vacated by a court, reversed by Congress, or overturned by a future Commission. But I do believe that its days are numbered.
Tragic as it is, the wipeout of Puerto Rico’s fossil-based infrastructure via Hurricane Maria creates a powerful opportunity to do it right the second time. With its vast solar and wind resources, why not make this sunny, breezy island the pilot project to develop 100% renewability in buildings for a populous island—using microgrids to build in resiliency, so if part of the system goes down, the rest still delivers power?
Of course, converting PR to renewables requires the re-invention of funding. We need mechanisms that allow a bankrupt country (technically part of the US) to front-load a huge infrastructure and then repay out of savings even when many pressing needs will be competing for those funds. The private sector won’t step up if they don’t have complete confidence that they’ll get paid back. Eco-economists, this is your moment!
But also, justice demands that a big chunk of financing come from outright grants, from the US government and various foundations and disaster relief agencies—just is occurred in storm recovery after other superstorms like Katrina, Rita, Sandy, and Irene. Even the heartless occupant of the White House, possibly the least compassionate and least competent man ever to hold that office, must not be allowed to marginalize Puerto Rico just because the population is Latina/Latino and the language is Spanish.
And wouldn’t it be cool if someone (Elon Musk perhaps?) stepped forward to fund a switch of the vehicle fleet to non-carbon-emitting sources? If the island had solar on every sunny room, it would be easy enough to supply the vehicles as well.
In some ways, converting the entire island to clean, renewable, resilient energy would actually make rebuilding cheaper and easier. Fossil fuel infrastructure is expensive, complex, and subject to environmental catastrophe. But if the money that would have gone to build tanker ports and refineries went to establishing on-island solar panel factories and training installers and to bringing in the raw materials to make millions of high-efficiency panels to deploy in every neighborhood in the Commonwealth, it’s doable.
I’m not the only and certainly not the first to say this. In addition to Musk, Time Magazine, Renewable Energy World, safe energy activist/author Harvey Wasserman, the deep-story news outlet Democracy Now, to name a few, have all said this is possible and desirable.
This post was going to be about political correctness overreach and a children’s librarian calling Dr. Seuss racist. That’s the story as a lot of right-wing bloggers and media outlets tell it.
But the real story is about something even bigger: the need to discover the truth. And sometimes that means we have to go to primary sources. Several pieces are in play here, and most of the news coverage is focusing on only one (different sources, different pieces). I thank my journalism training for preventing me from embarrassing myself
Yes, A Librarian Refused the Donation
Melania (the current US First Lady) donated books to one school in every state.
Melania’s letter accompanying the book donation
Most of us will agree that’s a good thing. But as Newsweek reports,
Liz Phipps Soeiro, the school librarian for Cambridgeport [Massachusetts] Elementary School, announced in an open letter to [Melania] that she would not be accepting the gift because her school was not in need of the additional books, also telling the first lady that “Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché.” Dr. Seuss!
But Soeiro Had a Good Reason to Refuse the Donation
But here’s the part where I agree with Soeiro, and I had to go to the original Horn Book post to find it: Melania selected only one school in each state. Soeiro found the criteria on the White House website:
“working with the Department of Education to identify schools with programs that have achieved high standards of excellence, recognized by State and National awards and Blue Ribbon Awards…”
Soeiro quite appropriately criticized this process, noting that it transfers more resources to those who already have the most, while schools that would be desperate for books and thrilled to get this donation—schools that are educating their kids with a fraction of the resources wealthy Cambridge (home of Harvard University and MIT) can deploy—are left out because they don’t win awards for excellence. In my opinion, this is like so much else in the DT family agenda. The rich get richer and the poor have 30 or 40 kids in a class and low-quality instructional materials.
Soeiro says,
Are those kids any less deserving of books simply because of circumstances beyond their control? Why not go out of your way to gift books to underfunded and underprivileged communities that continue to be marginalized and maligned by policies put in place by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos? Why not reflect on those “high standards of excellence” beyond only what the numbers suggest? Secretary DeVos would do well to scaffold and lift schools instead of punishing them with closures and slashed budgets.
And she mailed back the books to the White House.
But wouldn’t it have been more effective to mail those books to one of those deserving schools that don’t win awards? Soeiro could have mailed them, just as publicly, to one of the districts she cites as suffering—Philadelphia, Chicago, or Detroit—or to an underserved community right in Massachusetts, like Holyoke, Springfield (whose mayor said publicly they’d be glad to have the books), or Lawrence. She could have been just as public and gotten just as much attention. Melania will just give them to the next rich runner-up.
Yes, Soeiro Claimed Seuss Promoted Racism
That Newsweek article doesn’t quote another part of Soeiro’s letter, published as a blog on the Horn Book children’s lit site (though this article attributed to Newsweek but published on Yahoo does)—but this is the part that has conservatives in a dither:
Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. [emphasis mine]
OK, let’s talk about the difference between opinion and fact. A fact is something that can be proven (and there’s no such thing as “alternative facts”). A person may have a viewpoint about that fact, and that’s opinion.
Sometimes people discover that their “facts” aren’t actual facts. When my house was built in 1743, the accepted wisdom among colonists of British ancestry was that tomatoes can be lethal, and nobody can go faster than a horse. Anyone stating otherwise would have been called insane.
Of course, these turned out to be opinions. Wrong ones. We know now that tomatoes are not poisonous—and humans can fly around the earth (in the space station) at more than 17,000 miles per hour.
The fact: Seuss’s post-WWII illustrations demonstrate a wide diversity of races and cultures, including many “races” that he made up entirely. Taking his work as a body, humans are only a modest portion of his characters, even his main characters.
Soeiro says his books are based on stereotyping. That’s her opinion and that of the scholars she cites. My opinion is that his books were promoting cultural diversity, acceptance of differences, and a society based in cooperation. I base this on reading many of his works. I’ve read Dr. Seuss books that ridicule…
Racism (The Sneetches and Other Stories, published way back in 1953)
Dictatorships (Yertle the Turtle)
Conformism (Horton Hears aWho)
War (The Butter Battle Book)
I’ve also read a number of Seuss books that defend underdogs and the environment (The Lorax)—to name just four of his many books espousing a progressive agenda.
And just as Soeiro cites sources that bolster her opinion, I can cite sources that bolster mine. For example, this profile of Seuss in Tikkun highlights many of his progressive activities and works (although it acknowledges that during WWII, his drawings for adults had a distinctly racist cast when it came to the Japanese. I’m not excusing that but the evidence is strong that he grew out of this attitude, especially in his horror over the Hiroshima bombing).
One not-so-nice thing about our world is that things get all out of proportion because the Internet amplifies opinions better than it amplifies facts. But one very good thing is how easy it is to go to the primary sources. Even if Newsweek hadn’t included the link, it was easy to find Soeiro’s original piece in Horn Book (it came up in the same search results page as the Newsweek article, in fact). And it was just as easy to find the Tikkun piece that mostly supported my position.
So…in any controversy, before you jump up and down and wave banners, take a couple of minutes to determine the facts. Look for coverage in reputable mainstream media whose trained and experienced reporters are vetting stories. Use a fact-checking site like Snopes. And do your part to keep the society-wide conversation focused on the truth and not on wild accusations. Often, as in this case, things are much more nuanced than they seem.
My heart goes out to all those impacted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the flooding in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia (not much in the US news but also very severe), or the out-of-control fires in the American West (a friend in Oregon told me, “the whole state is on fire. I can’t go out of my house because of the smoke.”
Every bit of research I’ve seen concludes that all these catastrophes are far worse than they would have been without human intervention. Humans have raised the temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico through our industry, agriculture, and architecture, and those warmer waters vastly increased the severity of the storms. And because of numerous social choices over decades if not centuries, disaster impacts tend to fall most heavily on those who can least afford it.
Storm Flooding. Photo by Gabriel Bulla, freeimages.com
This pattern has been increasing dramatically since at least 2005, starting with the Asian typhoon and continuing through Katrina and Rita, Irene and Sandy, and now Harvey and Irma. Humans have built flood-vulnerable buildings in low-lying places where flooding, sooner or later, is inevitable. So not only are the storms more severe measuring just their force, but they impact the human-built landscape where that humanscape ignores nature’s principles.
To think of it another way, the planet is fighting back against the human assault. The planet doesn’t really care about humans as a species, or even individual ecosystems. The planet just wants to survive, and it acts to protect the “macro-ecosystem”: the planet as a whole. It has already survived extinctions of millions of species, including some that were the dominant lifeforms before earlier, non-human-caused catastrophic climate events. If humans are wiped out and cockroaches rule the earth, Earth won’t care.
But we care. We want a world whose treasured heritage and powerful promise we can pass on to many generations.
Please talk to your friends, colleagues, neighbors, and especially your legislators. Help them understand that human-caused catastrophic climate change is real, and that *there are things we can do to mitigate the impact and even reverse the terrible trends.*
We can take individual actions, from switching to organic foods and eating less meat to insulating our homes and workplaces and using LED lighting. And we can also take action as a society. With no help from the US federal government, individual cities and states can still participate in the Paris Accords (and many have). For bottom-line revenue-building and expense reducing reasons, companies can design buildings that create at least as much energy as they use, from clean renewable sources (and many have).
But still, government must have a role: in funding not just disaster relief but preventive measures such as dam inspections and humane ones such as fair labor practice enforcement (both stripped of much of their funding by the current administration). In encouraging clean energy. In understanding that foreign policy needs to factor in who uses what resources in which ways, and that domestic policy has to focus on creating jobs in industries that will remain relevant (unlike, for instance, coal and nuclear, neither of which are economically viable in the current world).
I could go on for much longer, but I’ll just say, thanks for listening, talk to your network, write letters to the editor, and contact your legislators.
There are hundreds more I could honor. These 10 are all people I knew personally. I chose them somewhat randomly, basically who came top of mind first. I am grateful to all of them even if the interaction was painful when it happened.
My mom, whose commitment to racial justice extended to desegregating the apartment building we lived in. She was also a tester for the Urban League, making sure that when a black family was told an apartment was already rented that it was really rented—by applying to live there.
Walking my mother, Gloria Yoshida, into her 65th-birthday surprise party, 1998
The speaker I heard when I 12, at my first peace demonstration, who told me the Vietnam war was undeclared—and brought my false reality crashing down around me.
The idiot who made me sit in the children’s section of a movie theater with my full-price adult ticket (also age 12) and gave me my first experience of discrimination-based injustice (for being part of a class of people). I started a boycott of that cinema that has now continued for 48 years, and thus had the first experience of recognizing that I had power to change things.
Mrs. Ehrlich of the Bronx High School of Science English Department in the 1970s, who believed the lie I’d told that I had turned in an assignment. Horrified, she said she’d never lost a student paper before. I felt intense guilt and realized that my action had hurt someone innocent. I’ve done my best not to repeat that and to take responsibility for my actions even when I don’t like the consequences.
My first grade teacher, Mrs. Gross of Westchester Day School in the 1960s, who recognized that I was already a good reader and sat me in the back of the room with a 4th grade geography text while she inflicted Sally-Dick-and-Jane on the rest of the class. I still love reading, still love maps, and that was probably the first time I recognized how fascinating the world is, how people lived so differently in different parts of it.
The college classmate who yelled at me that I was extremely and consistently selfish. It hurt like hell at the time, but on reflection, I realized he was right. And I changed my behavior! (Years later, I went up to him at a reunion and thanked him. He didn’t even remember the incident.)
Dr. Jeffrey Lant, who was the first person to help me discover you-centered, benefit-focused marketing.
Dean Cycon, CEO of Dean’s Beans, who combined the strongest moral compass and the best sense of humor of any business owner I know. (I never got to meet the late Ray Anderson; he might have topped Dean in his commitment).
Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, who started a whole social movement after mandatory retirement forced her out of a quiet job within the Presbyterian Church.
Pete Seeger, who was probably the first to show me that the arts could change people’s minds and create action for social and environmental justice.
This Facebook Live video by Brené Brown, “We need to keep talking about Charlottesville,” posted August 15, might be the best thing I’ve ever come across on how to combat oppressive language without heaping guilt and shame on the other person, building bridges instead. I’d known her name but not her work. This video made me a fan. Strongly recommended.
She has an unusual perspective: a white anti-racist raised in the South, often mistaken for black by people who hadn’t met her, on the basis of her full legal name.
Can we create a world where these girls will be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”? Photo by Anissa Thompson, freeimages.com
I’ve been saying for many years that guilt and shame are not effective in making change (and in my work to create social change in the business world, I do my best to harness other motives, like enlightened self-interest). The example she gives of the young man confronting his father shows exactly why they don’t work. Not to confront racism or other isms, and not to protect the planet.
Brené is a better communicator than I am. As I engage in dialogue with “the other side,” I will do my best to remember her communications lessons, and those of Van Jones, whose wonderful riff on how to talk to Tea Partiers I wrote about several years ago.
In the aftermath of the Charlottesville Massacre (a massacre that kills one person is still a massacre in my opinion, if deliberately intending to harm many—19 were injured by the madman’s car), an activist friend posted a cry for help. This is a piece of it:
…how can I fight this if I’m scared? And if I’m scared and it immobilizes me then who else will be able to face that fear and take action? And we must take action. We white people must take action. We must be at the forefront of this fight. With our sisters and brothers of color.
All my life I have fought for justice, for people, for equity. How do I step up to this fight with my full self and do what has to be done? How are you doing it?
Here’s what I wrote (slightly edited):Singer, actor, activist and athlete Paul Robeson. Courtesy NY Public Library Digital Collections.
It’s OK to be scared, and then do the work anyway—that’s what courage is. I know you already know this, but maybe others reading here will take inspiration.
The times in my life when I’ve done this, and there have been several, have been among the most meaningful moments of my life. But I’m no great hero—and the times when I failed to step up and do the right but scary thing are some of my few regrets. Here are two successes and one failure that I’m thinking about in particular.
1. In 1975 and 1976, I ran the Gay Center (that’s what we called it back then) at Antioch College. I left when the semester was over and began a summer-long hitchhiking trip. A few weeks later, on July 5, 1976, I stopped by for a short visit. I still had the Gay Center key and was crashing there. During that visit, some creep threw a rock through the center’s window, wrapped in a vile hate-speech note with a swastika drawn on it. I not only went to the police [and the campus authorities], but I wrote a letter to the school paper, including the full text of the foul note, and called out the perpetrator. Nobody offered any protection [nor did I request any] and I kept sleeping there until I pushed west.
2. When the US bombed Libya in the early 1990s, I called up [local peace activist] Frances Crowe and asked her where and when the demonstration would be. She said she didn’t know of one. I said “noon at the courthouse.” I was out there by myself the first day, and the passers-by were hostile enough that I was worried for my safety. But I was back the next day with a handful of others, and the day after that with about 20 folks, and I watched the tide turn. By that third day, supporters passing by far outnumbered hostiles. I felt my actions had made a real difference.
The regrets are mostly about not having the strength to verbally interrupt oppression. I’ve gotten better at this over the years. Many of the incidents were when I was a child or teen and didn’t have the strength or the skills to do this in a positive way. But I particularly regret one incident in 1986 when I should have been able to think and act differently: I failed to interrupt a neighbor’s racist comment. We had just moved in next door and I was in his living room at that moment, getting acquainted. I let the comment go by as if I hadn’t heard it. 31 years later, I still feel shame about that.
As an activist for more than 40 years, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve really only risked my life or serious injury a dozen times or so. I’ve never had to spend time in a real jail; my one and only arrest (Seabrook, NH, 1977) was part of a movement too big for the state’s corrections system, so I spent a week in a large National Guard Armory room with 700 other comrades and we made it a school of nonviolence theory and practice.
But my greatest successes bore no personal risk. I faced no serious repercussions when I started the movement that saved our local mountain, or when I set the wheels in motion for the first nonsmokers rights regulations in the city where I was living. Nobody was going to crack a nightstick over my head while I was being paid to organize the Gray Panther chapter in Brooklyn, NY.
I realize just how privileged my place of activism has been when I think of the nonviolent warriors who fought for their rights in places like Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. I think of my long-dead friends and comrades Dave Dellinger and Wally Nelson, who served had time in prison for refusing to fight in World War II. I think of another dead friend, Adele Lerner, who came to the US to escape the Nazis and who was present at the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York that when the Klan attacked—and who was responsible for a lot of my political and cultural awareness in the early 1970s.She turned me on to Leadbelly (who’d been a friend of hers), Malvina Reynolds, and real cheese, to name three among many. I think of labor organizers, LGBT activists, and so many others who gave their lives so that my generation could have our freedom to protest. Their actions give me the courage to continue to work for a better world.
And I think about the power of ordinary people to step through the door that cracks open for a moment, to step into their greatness and change the world. The seamstress, Rosa Parks. The shipyard electrician, Lech Walesa. The activist serving a life sentence, Nelson Mandela. The humble priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who spent so many years in jail for direct action against the military. These and many other heroes put their lives on the line in a way I never had to.
Mind, I’m not beating myself up. I’ve chosen a path of “easeful activism” (as my yoga teacher might call it). I’ve found plenty of ways to be an effective agent of social change without getting beaten, killed, or thrown in jail. I haven’t found it necessary to be a martyr, but I deeply respect those who do. And I am prepared if the day comes where I am called to do as much or more. I will not allow fear of my own death to keep me from doing the right thing. I will continue to follow the path of nonviolent action for deep social change.
impact in the world? Please post your comments below.
Someone asked on Quora whether 40 was too old to start a business. Once I was done laughing, this is how I answered:
Fireboard decorated by Grandma Moses, 1918. Courtesy Wikipedia.
One of the US’s most famous painters, Grandma Moses, started painting at 77 and made it her career at 78. I’ve known dozens of people who started a business after working in the corporate world for decade. And when I was a paid organizer for the Gray Panthers in my early 20s, my chapter leader was a 75-year-old fireball who had taken up yoga and become a vegetarian at age 70. It is only your own thinking that is holding you back.
But start small, keep another income stream, and test the waters. Make your business viable—and make sure you like it—before you saw off the bridge. Expect to flounder for a year or two as you figure out the intersections of your skills and interests with what the market wants.
I stated my business at 24 after several failures over the previous several years, expecting it to be a part-time thing until I could find a job. Instead, my business kept morphing and getting both more interesting and more successful. I’m now 60 and in the midst of yet another business reinvention. What I do today looks almost nothing like what I did 20 years ago, but the seeds were always there. My latest incarnation is helping businesses turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—not through guilt and shame but by creating and marketing profitable products and services that address these enormous challenges.
