Tag: Gray Panthers

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Arts & Entertainment, Diversity, language, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

When gallery owner Richard Michelson asked Jules Feiffer if he wanted a retrospective for his 89th birthday, the brilliant artist replied, “I am doing the best work I’ve ever done and want this exhibit to be new and explosive, with figures sprawling and flying everywhere, and focused on dance…It only took 89 years to figure out how to do this stuff!”

Jules Feiffer, 89, at Michelson Gallery, April 13, 2018
Jules Feiffer, 89, at Michelson Gallery, April 13, 2018

That wonderful and extensive show is now on display at R. Michelson Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts. We went in to peruse it, and Rich’s wife Jennifer told us that Feiffer was about to do a Q&A. Of course we went upstairs, chatted a bit with Jules and his Phantom Tollbooth collaborator Norton Juster (who lives locally), and settled in to listen.

Jules has a quick and acerbic wit and a strong sense of social justice. Someone asked him what the best response was to the current situation in national politics and he instantly responded with a primal scream. I asked him how he was able to capture the 3-dimensional, flowing art of dance so well in static two-dimensional pictures and he talked about capturing the illusion, that everything was an illusion.

His new work is indeed brilliant. While it descends directly from his famous Village Voice cartoons of he 1960s and 70s, it really is what he told Rich. It has so much vibrancy, often very sophisticated and detailed captioning, and the figures really come alive—especially those using colored inks, which he’s begun to use here and there (though most of the show was black-and-white).

Jules is the latest in a long line of inspirational role models for growing older. I’ve profiled some of them here: Arky Markham, centenarian and activist; Bob Luitweiler, founder of the international homestay organization Servas, for instance I’ve been fortunate to know many others, including Pete Seeger and Chicago Seven/Eight defendant Dave Dellinger—with whom I became friends as a teenaged college student when he was 60, and whom I consider one of my personal mentors—as well as Gray Panther founder Maggie Kuhn; I met her when I was working for the Gray Panthers as a VISTA Volunteer, at the group’s national conference.

These are the kinds of people I want to emulate as I (hopefully) reach well past my current age of 61. When I was a teen activist, I often heard that I was too young to change the world. Now, I’m beginning to hear people tell me I’m too old to do the work I do. But I remind them that Grandma Moses started painting in her 70s and enjoyed a 20-plus-year run as a painter. Today, for example, I’m going networking at a sustainability fair, then attending a peace and tax fairness rally, then hiking a mountain, and probably going out to hear some live music or theater in the evening. You’re only as old as you feel.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Copywriting, Democracy, Diversity, Environment, Events, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

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.

  1. 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
    Walking my mother, Gloria Yoshida, into her 65th-birthday surprise party, 1998
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.)
  7. Dr. Jeffrey Lant, who was the first person to help me discover you-centered, benefit-focused marketing.
  8. 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).
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Environment Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Recently, a reporter asked questions about diversity and the environmental movement. I spent a long time responding because I wanted to share it (with slight adaptations) with you, too. Here we go:

1. If possible, could you explain why diversity is so important
for the environmental movement?

  • Everyone loses when people of color or of lower income see the environmental movement as something for white people or rich people. To win the battle, all sectors of society need large majorities who will support the behavior changes and own the issue.
  • Many poor communities/communities of color are hit much harder by industrial pollution (e.g., coal plants and refineries in poor neighborhoods) or—both globally and in the US—are at higher risk for climate-change-related flooding, drought, etc.
  • In the time of a government that is openly hostile to poor people, people of color, and the planet, the rise of intersectionality—seeing multiple issues as linked—has been a major factor in the resistance. We are all stronger when we are all looking past our own immediate self-interest into building a movement.
  • A key piece in fighting climate catastrophe is increasing neighborhood food self-sufficiency. Many poor communities are food deserts, with wildly inadequate service from supermarkets, low quality overpriced food in convenience stores, and often, a junk food culture. Turning urban rooftops and empty lots into high-quality organic food production can create not only better health outcomes but also address climate change (removing the long distances food is transported, oxygenating polluted air, keeping water from contact with roofing materials, etc.) AND economic disenfranchisement (creating jobs, lowering food costs). I have even visited a successful urban farm on the roof of an eight-storey building in the heart of the South Bronx.

    Multicultural contingent at a climate march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
    Multicultural contingent at a climate march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

2. Climate change hurts all living things, but there are issues
that specifically hurt people who aren’t white, straight,
privileged. What are these issues, and what organizations
actually work to make these issues well-known, and matter?

From New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward (flooded by Katrina) to the Maldives Islands, people of color bear more of the risk. In many cases, they have the least to do with causing climate change, so there’s a huge justice issue.
It’s harder to make the connections between climate change and LGBT organizing, but here’s one: pressure to be in procreating hetero relationships may cause some people to have children (or have more children). This pressure to “be fruitful and multiply” was probably a huge factor in religious messages against nontraditional lifestyles (such as the wretched passages in Leviticus that have caused so much misery and suffering for thousands of years)—but at the time the Old Testament was written, small bands of humans needed aggressive population growth. Not anymore. Reducing population growth is an obvious way to lower the temperature. Thus, freedom to choose whether to have children becomes a climate issue.
A stronger connection comes back to intersectionality. No one is free when any group is oppressed. Lesbians and trans people especially have been heavily involved in justice issues generally (the push to find a cure for AIDS was largely lesbian-driven, even though they themselves had lower risk than either gay male or hetero folks), including the climate change movement. By working toward healing the planet, they help liberate themselves too.
[I also connected this journalist with Majora Carter in the Bronx and Van Jones in Oakland—two of the most effective activists doing environmental/climate change organizing within communities of color.]

3. In general, could you explain why an inclusive environmental
org staff is one of the most important assets an environmental
organization, and the movement, can have?

  • People respond best to those they see as like them. If an organization only has white, economically comfortable, straight staffers, it be a lot tougher to organize in the communities that need it most.
  • As a movement, we are much stronger in diversity. Working with people of different backgrounds and cultures lets issues surface and be addressed. A white person from the suburbs may not analyze a situation the same way as a person of color from an inner city neighborhood. By recognizing the value of many different perspectives, solutions arise that are more holistic and more likely to be implemented. As a child growing up in NYC, I never thought about community food self-sufficiency until my teens. People who grew up in the farm community where I live now have been living and breathing it their whole lives. But I knew a lot about mass transit, housing density, and other things that are out of the context of my rural neighbors where I live now.
  • We need to walk our talk around inclusiveness and intersectionality—and show up for other communities when they need us. Not just so they show up for us, but because it’s the way the world should work.
It’s from intersectionality that I really developed the work I do, moving business forward on climate change and on hunger, poverty, and peace by showing them how it is in their economic self-interest. As a profitability consultant for green and social entrepreneurship businesses–and author of 10 books, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Seth Godin, Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, and many others), I show businesses how they can go beyond mere “sustainability” (keeping things the same) to “regenerativity” (making things better). I work with them to develop and market profitable products and services that turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
And as an activist, my proudest campaigns include my (only) arrest at Seabrook in 1977 (the action that pretty much ended the drive toward nuclear power) and founding the movement that saved a local mountain here in Western Massachusetts. I was an early adopter of intersectionality and have been making connections between movements for more than 40 years, starting with connecting student liberation and the Vietnam peace movement as a high school student in NYC. I was raised in a low-income household and have worked for both social justice and environmental causes since 1969 (at age 12). Several years of my life were focused on LGB activism (T wasn’t really on the radar yet). I was on the organizing committee for our local Pride March for three years until they threw the bisexuals out, and my wife and I still march in this parade almost every year. In my 20s, I even had a VISTA job as an organizer for the Gray Panthers and immediately brought them into a Brooklyn-wide anti-racist, mixed-class coalition against nuclear power that I co-founded.
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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Demographics/Psychographics, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

At 72, Lily Tomlin is biologically old enough to be my mother.

I had the good luck to see Tomlin perform Friday night at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, MA (a venue where I’ve seen many great shows). She is not slowing down. She’s still hugely funny, passionate about her work and her beliefs, and very athletic on stage. She’s able to create fleshed-out characters just by changing her body posture, voice/accent, and stage lighting—needing neither costumes nor props to “channel” acerbic Ernestine, the schizophrenic savant bag lady Trudy, a Texas-accented suburban housewife doing vibrator infomercials, or a mother calling her son to put down those assault weapons and landmines and go wash up for supper. And she had obviously spent some time researching the town where she would perform one night and be gone; she incorporated a surprising number of on-point local references that went beyond the obvious.

It was one of the best comedy shows I’ve ever seen. 36 hours later, I’m still rolling some of her routines through my head and laughing.

Pete Seeger, who turned 93 last week, is old enough to be Lily’s dad. His voice doesn’t have the power it had when he was Tomlin’s age, and he’s backed off from the multi-octave, almost operatic singing of his peak years (go listen to his soaring “Wimoweh” from his 1963 Carnegie Hall concert). These days, he doesn’t perform as often, and when he does, he spends a lot of time teaching songs, talking/chanting them, and letting the audience do much of the actual singing.

But at 93, he’s still living at home in his little cabin in Beacon, New York with his wife Toshi. Last I heard, he’s still chopping firewood for his woodstove. Certainly he still devotes prodigious energies to his many environmental and social justice campaigns. In fact, he performed at an Occupy rally in New York just this fall. There’s even a grassroots movement to nominate Seeger for the Nobel Peace Prize (note: as of this writing, the site is experiencing technical problems but claims more than 32,000 signatures).

I’ve been lucky to have great models for growing older all the way back to my childhood. I even worked as a paid organizer for the Gray Panthers for a year and a half in my 20s. And these two are only two of hundreds of people about whom I could say, “I want to be like that when I’m old.” But they’re both very public, and I happen to be thinking about them today. Here are a few lessons I take from Tomlin and Seeger:

  1. Doing what you love and are good at keeps you young
  2. Staying true to your values keeps you young
  3. Being appreciated by others  keeps you young (but note that Seeger was blacklisted and obscure for more than a decade during the McCarthy era)
  4. Finding the fun in life and enjoying the ride keeps you young
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