Author: Ruby Sinreich

RESIST

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Bayard Rustin’s call for civil disobedience and direct action tells us that “the only weapon we have is our bodies and we have to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.” Even if it that’s not your jam, everyone has a role in creating a society where we divest from things that punish and invest in real community-based measures that keep us safe. It will take community organizers, cultural workers, farmers, caretakers and builders. Now is the time to go big; we have everything to gain.

– Charlene Carruthers, 31, the national director of Black Youth Project in The New York Times: ‘Resist’ Is a Battle Cry, but What Does It Mean?, 2/14/17.

 

Bayard Rustin on resistance

 

Image: New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer – Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c18982, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1305647

 

Why I’m joining the Moral March on Raleigh

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I have lived in North Carolina since I was two years old, and now I’m raising my son here. I have personally been from Murphy to Manteo (not all in one day!) and I truly love this state.

I attended the very first HKonJ (Historic Thousands on Jones Street) 11 years ago, and almost all of them since then! Thanks to the visionary leadership of the Reverend William Barber of the NC NAACP organizing HKonJ and then Moral Mondays we have been able to bring together a huge community of advocates around civil rights, the environment, workers, women’s rights, stopping unjust wars, and much more. It’s important for me to raise my voice along side theirs because I know we are all in this together.

We have to take our state back from those who only want power and money. We have to stand together at HKonJ, now known as the Moral March on Raleigh, to show our strength and build this community for the future.

Helping my son see at the 2014 Moral March:Photo of Ruby with her son on her shoulders at a previous march

More-Popular-Than-Democracy-An-American-Coup-Detat

Wake up! Democracy is on life support.

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We’re not just facing a constitutional crisis. Diabolical mastermind Steve Bannon is laying the foundation for a total government takeover by Trump, Inc. Please read “Trial Balloon for a Coup?” by Yonatan Zunger for just the latest developments of this.

If you still think we can fight back in midterm elections or 2020 you are intentionally avoiding the facts. It’s awful, but please expose yourself to the truth. We have to move past our shock and start putting ourselves directly in the way of this fascist kleptocracy. (I’m still figuring out how.)

That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.

[Saturday] was the trial balloon for a coup d’état against the United States. It gave them useful information.

– Trial Balloon for a Coup? by Yonatan Zunger on Medium, 1/29/17.

Image source: More Popular Than Democracy: An American Coup D’état, 9/15/15. (Warning: kind of crazy.)

Trump’s Lies Pave the Way for an Assault on Voting Rights

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If the legitimacy of the government derives from the consent of the majority, then at some point, we will have to address this disjuncture between the popular will and our elected bodies. We should start with nonpartisan redistricting reforms, and a fresh look at the Electoral College. But Mr. Trump’s comments make the adoption of democratic reforms that much harder.

Second, there’s a more insidious longer-term purpose here as well. Propaganda about illegal voting has been used — throughout history and in modern times — to justify unnecessary restrictions on voting. Unpopular incumbents like Mr. Trump can help their odds of re-election with measures that make it harder for people to vote.

Source: Trump’s Lies Pave the Way for an Assault on Voting Rights – The New York Times

Don’t negotiate with terrorists

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What is up with these Democrats playing kickball at a gun fight? They are negotiating with themselves. Republicans are not playing, they’re burning our government down as fast as possible. They’re not compromising, not looking for common ground, not thinking about how they’d want the system to work if they were not in power. (This is why they are a death cult. There is no end game.)

There is no long game. There probably won’t even be a functioning democracy left to govern in 5 years.

Everyone knows you don’t negotiate with terrorists. WHAT. ARE. THEY. THINKING?

Welcome to 1984. Trump is more dystopian than Orwell.

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Three different Orwell experts find massive and unmistakable parallels between the Trump administration and the dystopian nightmare of 1984.

This part quoted below struck me the most because so many of us cried out about lies, fake morality, and deception during the Bush administration, but there were never any social or political consequences. So of course the post-truth war on the reality-based community has continued and intensified.

But this new world has been a while coming. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” were foreshadowed by the George W Bush adviser who said in 2002 that the new American empire was “creating [its] own reality”. As in the 1930s, war has been at the heart of the corrosion of trust in politicians. The lies over Iraq and the quagmire of Afghanistan were followed by the financial crash of 2008, and bankers’ bonuses – making people far more willing to disbelieve the remote metropolitan media and be drawn to the false dawn promised by Trump.

Read more in The Guardian today:  Welcome to dystopia – George Orwell experts on Donald Trump.

Image source

“Mother of Exiles”

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The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus

Photo: First Lady Nancy Reagan waves from the Statue of Liberty after she re opened the structure on its 100th birthday, 1986.

Same as it ever was

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16 years ago today I was wearing warm sturdy shoes I had bought the night before with a friend just for the occasion, and was being harassed in the streets of DC confused, scared, and angry with my fellow young-ish people in hoodies. Today I appreciated being able to watch these live videos from Black Lives Matter of the movement continuing. (Embedded below.)

Although I think everything about Trumpism is more dangerous to humanity and to the planet than the craven, corrupt, cynically ideological, and illegal Bush administration was, this is definitely a continuation of the many strategies popularized then, especially by Karl Rove who knew he didn’t even have to bother trying to listen to or govern the “reality-based community.”

I am truly happy to see how many millions of people are now mobilized against Republicans’ agenda of ignorance and fear. But I am also feeling really melancholy about how much it takes to get people to WAKE UP. If this many people had been marching with us 16 years ago, we might have limited their disastrous policies and maybe never even been attacked on 9/11. We would not have been sending troops to protect US oil interests, destabilize governments, destroy infrastructure, and give people reasons to hate us. We might not be dealing with ISIS today.

Once again those of us that are dismissed as “hippies” when we try to prevent violence and militarism were right. Will anyone ever listen to reason? Will our country ever get it right? Is it even possible?

Earlier: