When the first people to resist use tactics and rhetoric that make sense to those in the center who have been hoping to stay “above the fray,” the center is likely to throw its weight more strongly against the coup. Then, together, it can be defeated.
While I am no longer the news junkie I once was—I want to preserve my sanity when the news is often so distressing–I am definitely paying attention to DT’s constant attacks on our democracy.
It is obvious to me that even though he doesn’t study anything he should be studying, he does study how fascists come to power and does his best to emulate them. I think there is a high probability that if his plans to steal the election are unsuccessful, he will resist the transfer of power as the first US president ever to do so. I’m very aware of the chatter about what to do if that happens and I think it is likely that a general strike can be organized quickly and he will have to capitulate. We have a big advantage in that the military is not in love with him, to put it mildly. So he will have to rely on the armed goons within his base, who are not going to be disciplined enough, not going to agree on targets and tactics, and hopefully not too many of them actually willing to shoot random strangers just because they disagree with them.
I have been a student of non-violent resistance for almost 50 years. Non-violence has brought down viciously authoritarian governments and was often more effective than violent resistance. While it certainly didn’t bring down the government, nonviolent resistance was even surprisingly effective against the Nazis . There are hundreds of documented examples of this. All those people who smuggled hidden children or hid people in an attic or helped virtually all of the Danish Jews escape over the sea to Sweden in a single night. We saw decades-long non-violent resistance to the incredibly cruel and violent British occupation of India, and in our own American South, and in South Africa, and the Arab spring.
It is worth pointing out that these were not benign governments. They were nasty, vicious, violent. And they fell in the face of this kind of power.
On a discussion forum for nonviolent (NV) activists, my friend David has been a consistent advocate for filling the jails, and has expressed frustration that so few people are willing. The discussion recently turned to encompass the question of property destruction (I’m an opponent). I shared my thoughts about both tactics, and added the concept of meeting people where they are and building a ladder for them to go deeper. I thought it might be useful to share it here, even though I recognize that it won’t be relevant to many of my business readers. You can see the entire conversation at https://thepowerdynamicofnonviolence.blogspot.com/2018/12/if-you-can-persist-in-face-of.html
Activists project pro-immigration signs onto the US border station, Brownsville, Texas, February 15, 2020. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
@David Slesinger, it’s beginning to sound as if you feel that ONLY NV actions that result in arrests and jail are meaningful. I strongly disagree with that premise–and so would Gandhi (the local textiles movement), MLK (Montgomery bus boycott), and the Hebrew midwives Shifra and Pu’ah, who may have invented nonviolent resistance 3000+ years ago. (I’m at least not aware of any earlier documentation of a nonviolent action against state power than the scene in the Old Testament where Pharaoh confronts them.) The majority of Gene Sharp’s 198 NV tactics do not involve arrest.
I have been involved with hundreds of actions that provided meaningful protest and in some cases helped to change government policy that did not risk arrest.
Also, it’s important to give people a ladder. You have to meet people where they are ready. Most new activists take tentative steps at the beginning. Over time, some of them move up that ladder. Serving any jail time of more than a weekend or so is pretty high up the ladder. Serving a sentence of months or years is almost all the way at the top (a little below martyrdom) and many of us never reach it. You have told me many times about your frustration that so few people are willing to do as you’ve done.
Unknown raises excellent points about property destruction. Destruction of private property is a mistake both morally and strategically, for the reasons Unknown cites and also for its effect of making enemies of those whom other NV tactics would turn into allies.
I am a rape survivor. I have also experienced the break-in and looting/ransacking of apartments I was living in. They feel remarkably similar; the difference is in degree. Both are a violation. So was the time I was visiting my college after finishing, staying at the Gay Center–and a rock wrapped in a Nazi hate message came through the window. It wasn’t my property, but I felt just as violated.
I do make a distinction between property belonging to a single person (and that would include the merchandise inside a small store) and the use of property destruction aimed at the state or at e.g. military contractors–such as the actions of the Berrigans and their compadres in damaging draft records and nuclear missiles. WE should note that unlike looters, they got no personal gain, were really careful to avoid collateral damage to living creatures, and waited around to be arrested. They maintained the moral high ground even while destroying things. But this is extremely rare. Most instances of property violence are perceived as criminal or even terrorist by the public at large AND the power structure.
Noah Webster dictionary frontispiece and title page, 1828
Now that more than half a year since Merriam-Webster (as in Webster’s dictionary) released this list of its most searched words for 2019, I thought it might be fun to revisit it. I wrote most of this in response to a reporter query last December on what this list says about our society. The parts in italics are written in July, 2020, with the benefit of hindsight.
THEY: The Word of the Year is enormous recognition for the rapidly growing nonbinary community. I too have a child who now uses they/them/their, and so do many of their friends. This is a choice I might have made for myself in my 20s (and might still make in the future). A friend remarked to me recently that our generation (I’m turning 63 next week)(that was in December; next December will be my “Paul McCartney birthday”) worked to eliminate gender roles, while Millennials work to eliminate the concept of gender itself.
QUID PRO QUO: Asking for a favor in return for another favor. The search popularity of this phrase indicates that people want to understand what’s really true. For a public figure to be caught flat-out asking the president of another country, using the language, “a favor,” and then claiming there is no quid pro quo makes people wonder what this public figure has to gain from such an obvious lie–and what does it mean for a president to call on a foreign power to investigate his likely opponent. It also brings up questions about why foreign policy is being weaponized for personal political gain, threatening to deny already-approved aid an ally that is under attack by a neighboring superpower. We have an administration that tries to weaponize just about anything, refuses to work with Democrats in any meaningful way, and has spent the entire first half of 2020 sewing division and stupidity in everything from how to contain a virus pandemic to how to treat immigrants and refugees.
IMPEACH: Since this [impeachment of a president] was only used three times previously since the founding of the Republic, voters–especially those age 35 and under who probably don’t remember the last time–want to know exactly what it means, when it may be invoked, what the consequences are, and perhaps what the Founders had in mind when they wrote it into the Constitution. The high level of interest shows that we are not nearly as apathetic and apolitical as the media would portray us. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached, as was the current president; Richard Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment. What we’ve proven in 2020 is that there is, unfortunately, no requirement that the Senate discharge its duties properly. With minds already made up for acquittal, Senate Republicans other than Mitt Romney refused to hear evidence or call willing witnesses and ignored the copious violations of law, ethics, and the Constitution by the most corrupt and least qualified person ever to hold the office. I hope many of these Senators are defeated in November.
CRAWDAD is a bit of an outlier in that it has nothing to do with politics. It does show that even in our device-oriented world, a book can still make an impact on the way we talk, and that English is such a rich language in part because it borrows so liberally from other tongues.
EGREGIOUS: Although the Merriam-Webster (M-W) example cited is about the Boeing 737 Max scandal, a lot of this word’s popularity also has to do with the political situation. Searching “egregious trump” brings up 2,470,000 hits on Google, while “egregious boeing max” returns only 178,000.
CLEMENCY: Essentially a form of pardon. This year’s use of the word is particularly interesting because the Tennessee case cited on M-W’s page of a woman who murdered her abuser being granted clemency contrasts so sharply with the recent Kentucky governor’s grant of clemency for more than 400 felons on his last day in office, including one convicted of child rape and another whose murder victim was beheaded and stuffed into an oil drum–and another whose family held a campaign fundraiser for that governor.
THE is an example that craziness can gain entry to the list. Adding the word “the” to an official university name is just a marketing stunt that should have been ignored. But it does revisit many interesting issues about rebranding, going back at least as far as 1972, when Standard Oil’s US division gave up the warm and cuddly Esso for the cold, corporate Exxon, but the Canadian branch kept Esso.
SNITTY is an apt description for much of what passes for public discourse these days, including on social media. While I’m not personally a fan of Barr, I enjoyed his use of this term as cited on M-W’s page.
TERGIVERSATION is new to me. George Will actually apologized for using such an obscure word in describing the hypocrisy of Senator Lindsey Graham, once a strong critic of Trump and now one of his staunchest defenders. It has been fascinating to see George Will, an apologist for Republican presidents back to the Nixon-Ford era, become ever-more-clear that this one is not fit for office. Even Fox News gave huge play to Will’s late-May call to remove not just Trump but his “congressional enablers.”
CAMP: Ahh, a relief from politics that might hearken back to they/them/their as nonbinary pronouns. This has been around in the gay subculture for decades; I encountered it in the early 1970s. As conservatives try to double down on “traditional” family structures, expressions of camp creep ever-more-frequently into the wider culture, and society as a whole is a lot more accepting of male fashionistas (as an example). If you want a wonderful example of how gay male camp can take a court-jester role and use humor to attack the current administration, watch a few Randy Rainbow videos. They’re great fun. A recent one, “Bunker Boy”, is one of my favorites, and also one of the recent ones. You can find many of them at this search results page.
EXCULPATE: Now we’re back to the heart of the matter: the question several of these words and phrase raise about corruption in the conduct of senior government officials. Mueller said the report did not exculpate, and the quid pro quo demand makes it clear that the behavior hasn’t changed, either. Of course people will want to know whether their president was exculpated, and what that means.
Taken as a totality, these words show a keen interest in the legal challenges to the Trump administration. When we note that justice and feminism were the top words of the administration’s first two years, and we look at the enormous growth in protest movements immediately following the 2016 election (engaging millions of people who had not been active before, or had not been active in decades) 2018 and 2019 elections as well as the surge in popularity of presidential candidates who would have been considered fringe-left not that long ago, we see that these lookup spikes tell an important story about a growing and powerful movement for deep social change. We see that despite a rightward, authoritarian trend in governments around the world, there’s a strong undercurrent for social justice, and that includes bringing a cruel and corrupt president to justice. And while the centrist Biden came away the winner in the Dems’ nomination process, he has shown himself far more willing than I would have expected to embrace many elements of the progressive agenda, and to build real coalitions with progressive leaders including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Americans think of ourselves as a “can-do” people. Over the course of its history, the US has often been in the vanguard, with the rest of the world playing catch-up later. The US was especially good at technology, pioneering innovations ranging from the interchangeable parts that made mass production possible to the amazing moon missions that took less than seven years from JFK’s speech at Rice University to Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” as he became the first person ever to set foot on the lunar surface, to enormous leadership in green energy from the 1970s into the 1990s.
And Americans often see ourselves as the greatest country in the world. In many ways, that image is correct. We have amazing natural and scenic resources, a wide diversity of people, cultures, ecosystems, and more. We are very resilient, even scrappy at times. We have a democracy that has not only lasted but expanded. We’ve birthed may popular movements for justice and liberation, and experiments in new ways to form community, that went around the world.
And despite the perception of American exceptionalism–that we’re a beacon to the rest of the world–there are many areas where the US is far, far below “the best in the world.” This could be a much longer list, but here are a few examples:
Although US police forces are far more heavily armed than those in many other countries, our crime levels are worse than most countries; we are the 50th most dangerous out of 132 countries ranked.
59.5 percent stemmed from a race/ethnicity/ancestry bias.
18.6 percent were motivated by religious bias.
16.9 percent resulted from sexual-orientation bias.
2.2 percent stemmed from gender-identity bias.
2.1 percent resulted from bias against disabilities.
0.7 percent (58 offenses) were prompted by gender bias.
My guess is that these terrible statistics don’t even count police murders of people of color.
What is the Real America?
Technically, America is much more than the US. It’s everything from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina–and Americans live anywhere within. But right now, I’m just talking about the US.
And the answer is…all of the above, and more. Our diversity is part of our resilience and our strength. But our education (in school and out, and that includes social media) tends to sharpen our existing divisions and make it hard to find people who disagree with us–let alone have those meaningful, structured conversations that explore how we can work together with people who are not like us.
And it hasn’t helped that the current president has repeatedly and publicly embraced racism, misogyny, ableism, and difference, while promoting suppression of real news and science, monolithic social mores that ignore or (sometimes even physically) attack different perspectives, and dictatorships in other countries. A president who has put children in cages, essentially closed the borders to legitimate asylum seekers (long before COVID), slashed the safety net, appointed a likely child abuser to the Supreme Court, and made a mockery of our cherished democracy.
This Moment: A Time for Action
Many things are changing in our society this year:
The pandemic has changed the way we interact–and created a ridiculous ideologically based divide between those who take precautions and those who don’t
Anger around police mistreatment has created a mass movement
COVID has shown that our entire society can pivot, that all those “impossible”changes around issues from climate change to racism are actually less drastic than what we’ve already changed
In short, the cauldron is bubbling. What emerges depends on what we put in–but this could be a time to Make America Great, finally.
An article called “Build Back Better,” offered eight ways we can mitigate the climate crisis as we reopen. It’s on the Singapore-based Eco-Business site (often a wealth of fresh thinking to my American eyes)
I’d only read a couple of paragraphs when I got the idea to start a community on the theme of building back better—but not just for climate change. I envision a portal with resources and ideas to create better futures in criminal justice/policing, nonviolent defense, immigration, equitable housing, transportation, community food self-sufficiency, education, the work world, democracy… There’s a ton of great stuff out there, but I’m not aware of a one-stop resource that crosses silos, and disciplines, reaches people with a wide range of passions, interests, skills, and demographics, and has the power to create change.
While it certainly builds on the work I’ve been doing for several years at Going Beyond Sustainability, I see it as a community project that would seek ideas both from thought leaders/subject experts and from “ordinary” people (none of us is actually ordinary; all of us are unique).
And use social media, press outreach, and other tools to get it in front of leaders in government, business, academia, nonprofit, etc. After all, every major site started small, even Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. Using the power of the Internet, this could evolve rapidly to a place that journalists and politicians turn to for sources and advice.
I got so juiced that I stopped reading, ran off to GoDaddy, and scooped up build-back-better dot net (not using the domain syntax because there’s no site up yet so I don’t want it clickable). Most of the more obvious variations were already taken, which tells me there could be some traction in the concept. Only after I secured the domain did I go back and finish reading the article. UPDATE, JULY 9: I’m now thinking it might be better to come up with a cool, brandable single-word name (and I have a few possibilities in mind)–rather than a three-word name whose meaning isn’t all that obvious.
So…who wants to play? If it’s going to fly, it’s going to need volunteers:
Thinkers and doers: researchers, authors, activists, business and community leaders, students, etc., who could post ideas-in-progress and let the community help those ideas evolve into workable solutions
Web designers who can handle complex threading and submission forms that allow people to submit and subscribe by specific idea, by topic heading, and overall—and who have a deep understanding of Internet security and SEO
Topic leaders who are experts in their subject and can moderate submissions so the spammers, trolls, and nut-jobs have to play someplace else—but who will put up actual ideas that are submitted in their area, even if they personally don’t see them as workable. (That would be an ideal opportunity to help them think their idea through. Post the submission and immediately post a comment that doesn’t put down the idea but grounds them in reality, with questions like “have you thought about what could happen if…?” “Do you think this could also be useful in (a different discipline)?” “What resources would this
Residents of Wadajir, Somalia attend a meeting on community policing. Photo by David Mutui, courtesy Wikipedia Commons
require and how would you go after them?”
Influencers (including journalists, bloggers, marketers, people operating successful online communities, people with a big fan base or lots of social media connections) who can bring the site to the attention of their networks
Revenue generators who would work on commission to raise money for hack-proof site operation, and eventually raise enough to start paying volunteers
Obviously, this is only a preliminary sketch. If you’d like to be part of this, use my contact form (on my sister site, Going Beyond Sustainability) to get in touch.
A recent Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, OR, June 4, 2020
Happy Juneteenth. As you probably know by now, June 19th is a Black American holiday celebrating the day the last slaves in a Confederate state finally got the news that slavery had been overturned 2-1/2 years earlier (four Union states still permitted slavery for a few more months, until the 13th Amendment became law).
A recent Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, OR, June 4, 2020
You also probably know that the guy in the White House planned to have his first live indoor rally in months today–and rubbing salt in the wounds, it was going to be in Tulsa, site of the worst violence against a black community in the history of the US (in 1921). And of course, you know that the US has been rocked by racial justice protests for weeks, following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Not coincidentally, black organizers of Tulsa’s annual Juneteenth celebration, who had canceled the event over the virus, uncanceled it and are now expecting 30,000 people (11,000 more than will be at the re-election rally).
(Aside: the cowards who ran the factory let him come in anyway. They should have said, “No mask? Then no tour.” Perhaps they were afraid of being ridiculed in a nasty tweet. Or of losing a federal contract. The former, which was quite likely, would put them in a prestigious club of people and organizations important enough to be publicly scorned by the country’s most incompetent president. The latter would have been a juicy lawsuit, and meanwhile, New England’s governors would have been falling all over themselves to grab those suddenly available supplies.)
The man who also refused to take the necessary actions months ago that would have contained the virus impact, as countries from Vietnam to New Zealand did, along with countries more comparable to the US, like Germany and South Korea.
If it were either Juneteenth or Tulsa, it could conceivably have been a coincidence. But to have the kick-off event for the revived in-person re-election campaign held on that day, in that city, could not be a coincidence. It’s a dog-whistle to the racists, no doubt schemed up by one of DT’s senior advisors (I don’t think the man himself is educated enough to know about Tulsa, and it wouldn’t shock me if he hadn’t known what Juneteenth is.)
Like many on the Left, I was disappointed that a whole slew of brilliant progressives with the skills to be president failed to get traction. And I was dismayed by the Biden campaign’s sneak-attack success at undermining Elizabeth Warren’s chances just before Super-Tuesday, with the very public withdrawals and endorsements by Klobuchar and Buttigeig. If we had Ranked-Choice Voting and other long-overdue electoral reforms in place, this would not have been a problem. (Note: that second post is something I wrote back in 2007, outlining seven important reforms. At that time, Ranked-Choice was usually referred to as Instant Runoff.) But it left a lot of us feeling angry and left out.
With the withdrawal of Bernie and Elizabeth and their eventual endorsement of Biden in the weeks following, things shifted from who do we want as our ally to who do we want as our adversary? This is a very important distinction, brought to my attention by Erica Chenowith, who is known for her work showing that nonviolent struggle by just 3.5% of the population is enough to bring down a government. We will make more progress in a Biden administration than the current administration. We have already pushed Biden’s rhetoric well to the left and have given him the space to make the recent statements condemning DT’s racism.
Effigy of “the Donald,” photographed by Shel Horowitz at the Climate March, April 2017, Washington, DC
I already voted, on super Tuesday. But if I lived in a state that was yet to have its primary, I would absolutely vote for Sanders in order to increase that leverage from the left. But that’s all it will do. Sanders will not be the nominee. That dream is over! While giving more strength to the Sanders coalition, we have to recognize that in November, barring some kind of miracle or catastrophe, Biden’s name will be on the ballot. And the more out of control DT gets, the more he tilts actively toward fascism as he has been doing with increasing strength ever since the impeachment failed, the more urgent it is to make the margin of victory so big that DT cannot steal it this time (the 2016 results will be under a cloud forever).
We need to fight for every vote in swing states even if that means having recounts. To delegitimize the current administration in every way possible.
The absence of DT’s actual name in this post is deliberate. It is one small way we reduce his legitimacy, and his bragging rights.
I was on an Indivisible NoHo call with our progressive Central/Western Massachusetts congressman, Jim McGovern, this week. He noted that Biden was not his first choice, or even his fourth choice. That’s true for me as well. I think of the 22 original candidates, I had him at about 17. But we lost that one. Again!
Yes, Sanders would have made a fine and successful nominee that I could have supported with a lot more enthusiasm. He was my second choice, after Warren. Yes, absolutely vote Sanders in the primary but recognize that Sanders will not be the nominee and this is about giving strength to the left to negotiate with Biden.
Have you been dithering about starting a blog? Blogging provides several advantages in your marketing, but a lot of people are scared off by the idea.
It’s not that hard. A no-cost tool called WordPress makes it easy.
WordPress dashboard showing the ribbon, file naming, and text-editing window
WordPress is a terrific platform. I have never heard of it not working on a site, though if your host company doesn’t support it, you’d need to do a manual installation (any web designer could help you with that). Most webhosts have one-click WordPress installation in their CPanels.
You do need to know some things about WP before you set up.
There is WordPress.com, which is hosted on THEIR servers, and WordPress.org, where your content is hosted on YOUR server (you don’t have to own your server–let your hosting company do that). You want .ORG, so you have full control over the content and cant be held hostage over it. Neither one charges money.
WordPress is a very simple shell that uses “themes” to determine the look and feel. There are thousands of themes out there, some at no cost and others for a fee. Find one you like that can incorporate your company branding, but play with it to see how easy it is to work. There are some that nest text inside Java routines as one example) and I have found it’s really tough to find the place I need to be to make minor edits.
Editing in WordPress is really easy, assuming you picked a theme that didn’t have the issue I just described. If you turn off the blocks feature, the interface is similar to Microsoft Word or GMail . So you don’t have to learn any HTML. Instead of using angle brackets to e.g. turn your text bold and then back to regular, you just highlight the text and click the B button in the formatting ribbon. You can see that ribbon at the top of the screenshot.
Find and install a few key plugins: a backup program so if WP utterly collapses, you still have your content; a file-namer that gives your posts a meaningful name taken from your headline (see where it says “Permalink” on the screenshot?), probably some others.
WordPress updates frequently, both to add function and to beef up security. Set yours up to automatically run the updater, but remember to check every now and then to see if you need to update your plugins. Updating is just a few clicks and very intuitive.
You have a choice every time you post new content: a post, which goes at the top of your blog (which posts in reverse chronological order so the newest is on top) or a page, which is part of your permanent website structure and can be organized with menus, etc. Posts can also be sorted by category, so your reader can see everything you’ve put in any particular category just by clicking on the category name. I find it very worth the extra few minutes to add categories, keyword tags (which help people find your post), a picture, and an excerpt.
Consider having a designer set up the site to begin with, making sure they know you want a theme that’s easy to edit posts, and then posting your own content from there.
