How we’re going to make it through this.
Autocracy: Rules for Survival by Masha Gessen is an absolute must-read. I’ve been coming back to it every few weeks to regain my bearing.
In the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.
Friends, please don’t make the mistake of thinking that Trump’s seemingly random and ill-informed actions are not part of President Bannon’s strategy.
They’ll bleed the public of money, culture, education, health, and community. They’ll sow chaos and violence. And they’ll beef up institutions that can enforce their coup: police & military.
This is truly disturbing to contemplate but do not look away! Turn toward the fear (as Pema Chodron would say), open your eyes and your heart. Batten down your hatches however you can and prepare for the worst. Then mobilize, speak out, tuck your body into places so the wheels of fascism don’t turn.
Stop being surprised that Trump is doing everything he said he would. He may well be the greediest man alive. History will remember how we responded.
Thanks to the American Friends Service Committee for publishing these two wonderful posters for resisting racism and bigotry. AFSC is a great organization. I collaborated with them when I worked at the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Driven by a desire to provide tools for schools and the larger community to create space for discussion and declare solidarity, artists Micah Bazant and Kate DeCiccio partnered with AFSC, Forward Together, Jewish Voice for Peace, Center for New Community, and Showing Up for Racial Justice to produce these beautiful images.
– https://www.afsc.org/resource/posters-resisting-racism-and-bigotry
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.
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
Rise up with me and sign a declaration of revolutionary love!
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:
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.)
I love Ursula Rucker’s update on the classic dancehall tune. She brings the analysis and the dub!
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?
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.