Tag: vietnam war protests

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Lifelong activist Emily Levy made a short video outlining 10 reasons why protests matter. In less than 15 minutes, she explores these benefits of participating in protests. Protests:

  1. Raise the cost to politicians of doing the wrong thing
  2. Heighten awareness both of the issue and that the issue has a constituency of people who care about it enough to take time out of their day
  3. Build momentum toward change, even systemic change (she notes Erica Chenoweth’s research that shows that a government will crumble if just 3-1/2 percent of the population engages in nonviolent resistance)
  4. Help participants feel less isolated
  5. Inspire others to show up, especially if you carry signs about why you’re marching
  6. Provide cathartic release: what she calls “a national scream”
  7. Create opportunities to get involved with organizations working on causes that matter to you
  8. Offers a voice to oppressed and powerless groups that would risk to much if they were actively protesting
  9. Allow even very small numbers to bear witness (I personally have conducted some one-person protests, so this resonates deeply with me)
  10. Facilitate ways to harness your skills, beliefs, and connections to make bigger and more lasting change

It’s a great list, but it’s only the beginning. Here are ten more that I came up with very quickly. I’d love you to add to the list as well:

1) Sometimes, demonstrations and protests actually change things. A few among many examples:
• The 1963 civil rights March on Washington (the “I Have a Dream” march, which my late mother attended)
• 1977’s occupation of the Seabrook nuclear plant construction site, which birthed the modern US safe energy movement. I participated, and I wrote extensively about HOW this action changed the world (that link takes you to part 1 of a 5-part series I wrote about it, and each one links to the next installment at the end)
• Arab Spring brought down multiple repressive governments within just a few months
• The Save the Mountain movement I co-founded resulted in thirteen months of continuous public opposition to a development project–and succeeded! I expected to win, but even I thought it would take five years.
2) Not only do protests show the demonstrators we are not alone, but it emboldens sympathizers who have not taken action before to do so.
3) We don’t always know the effects of our actions in influencing others until afterwards–but later we may have found that we created a shift in public opinion and in willingness to take action.
4) Demonstrations offer chances to learn about not-very-visible parts of your own community–some disenfranchised and needing to tell their stories, others doing great work but out of the limelight.
5) Protests reinforce the idea that powerful, well-thought-out nonviolent action can create sustained change.
6) Sometimes, amazing performers and speakers participate. I have heard John Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon (several times), Paul Winter, Stevie Wonder, Holly Near, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary, Orleans, Jackson Browne, and many others. I learned news and ideas from speakers that changed my way of thinking. In fact, at my very first peace demonstration on October 15, 1969, 12-year-old me heard a speaker say that the Vietnam war was undeclared. When I discovered he was correct, it changed my whole way of looking at the world and turned me into an activist–because everything I’d been led to believe about the US system of checks and balances came crashing down around me.
7) Participation is empowering! You know you’re working for peace, justice, a green planet, etc.–and you feel ready to take on the world.
8 ) You get to enjoy the creativity of signs, puppet shows, songs and chants, etc. that spotlight the issue of the day.
9) It’s a way to build your personal community. If you’ve been doing this a while, you get to catch up with your friends. If you’re new to protesting, you can make new friends.
10) More often than not, participating in a protest is actually fun.

While Emily wrote her list back in 2019, it’s all still not only true but relevant. A few things have changed, though–some good, some bad:

  • Dozens of new ways of protesting were invented or popularized during the pandemic, adding to more than 200 we already had
  • Repressive right-wing governments have been forced from power in countries such as the US and Brazil–but took or consolidated power in Israel, Hungary, Turkey, and India
  • Putin has started a criminal and brutal war against Ukraine
  • In the US, the ultra-right has taken over the Supreme Court and several state legislatures, catalyzing a whole new generation of activists–and in election after election, progressives are winning big in places they weren’t expected to
  • Black Lives Matter and reproductive rights protests reached critical mass
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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 Democracy, Events, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

This morning, a reporter posted a query on HARO (a free service that matches reporters with story sources) asking,

Were you a protester/activist back in the 1960s? If so, what's
your reaction to the current Wall Street protest and the
off-shoots around the country?

I thought my response was worth sharing with a wider audience:



Hi, Sondra, I went to my first demonstration about the Vietnam war in 1969 and was very active in protests all through the 1970s and beyond. I was arrested at Seabrook in 1977, committed civil disobedience but was not arrested at the Wall Street Acton in 1979, was a peacekeeper for the million-person march for peace in 1982. I probably still attend three to five demonstrations in a typical year, mostly local (Western Massachusetts) –but I did go to massive demos in Washington and NYC to try to keep us out of Iraq in 2002-03. Also, using other methods than street demonstrations, I have been an active organizer for decades. My biggest success was forming a group called Save the Mountain, which generated widespread community support and blocked a particularly horrible housing proposal next to a state park–after all the “experts” said there was nothing we could do.


As it happens, today I’m getting on a bus for an evening conference on sustainability in NYC, and staying over for the night. Tomorrow morning my plan is to go to Wall Street and see how things are going.


As a teenager, I had a poster in my room with a picture of a peace demonstration and the caption, “It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest –Abraham Lincoln”–and I guess that pretty much sums up my feeling.


Obama has been a very weak president, falling short on issue after issue about bringing the “change” he was elected to create. He has given us a slower–and in some cases faster (like drone killings)–version of the “new normal” that developed under the illegal government of George W. Bush. No one has even been indicted for the crimes against the people by the Bush government or by the looters in suits in the financial industry. I believe strongly in the power of nonviolent protest, and am thrilled to see a new generation stepping forward, willing as we were to disrupt their lives in order to make a difference. Street protest is certainly not the only approach, and I believe we need multiple simultaneous nonviolent approaches. The country has gotten so topsy turvy and out of balance that I don’t think Richard Nixon would be tolerated by the Republican Party anymore (he’s probably to the left of Obama, if you watch both men’s actions rather than their words), and even their ‘sainted’ Reagan would be too far left to be nominated today. We desperately need an effective Left in this country, and the Occupy movement is stepping up, even if it has not figured out yet how to articulate its mission and goals.

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