Tag Archives: Rev. William Barber

Look Back in Anger

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Laurie and Debbie say:

It’s been 48 hours or so since the Capitol Building was cleared of domestic terrorists. Thanks to curfews and other factors, we have been spared much of the immediate violent fallout that could have occurred: Black churches and synagogues in DC and other cities suffered no serious harm, and no violent street protests appear to have made much headway.

The voices of our political “leaders” and our self-appointed pundits are loud and constant. All of them are prepared to tell us what the right punishment is for Donald Trump, what the DC police did or didn’t do that they should or shouldn’t have done, who should suffer consequences (and what consequences), etc. Most important, they all want to tell us what’s going to happen next–something no one knows.

We’d rather look at what did happen and offer some thoughts about why.

Even though many women participated in the rampage, and even though the Proud Boys are uncommonly diverse (and uncommonly proud of it) for an all-male far-right neofascist organization, this was basically an explosion of enraged white men. The Proud Boys were by no means the only instigators of Wednesday’s violence.

What are they angry about?

At base, they are angry because they are losing the privilege they believe is their birthright. In the last forty years, they and their fathers have lost a lot of power over women. In the last sixty years, they and their fathers and grandfathers had the opportunity to see what might happen if Black people actually made gains in education, employment, and affluence. They have always been told that they are the only people who deserve status, of wealth, and of power.

Watching what you have been told is your unquestioned birthright slip away from you will make you angry. This anger, by definition, has to be unexamined, because examining it can make it disappear: examined loss of privilege can result in a greater understanding of what you have that other people don’t, and what might be productively shared.

Add the election of Donald Trump to that pile of kindling, and you get a rage bonfire. Trump is a perfect example of the man born with everything and is constantly enraged because he doesn’t believe he has ever had enough, and — say what you like about his intelligence in other contexts — he is uncannily good at speaking to the unexamined rage, inflaming it, and directing it. This explains much about the last four years in the United States.

So he becomes not just a leader and an instigator, but a father and almost a deity to people who feel that he understands them when no one else does. He takes an entrenched American habit of expressing our anger outside our borders and brings it home to lay at the feet of his admirers. Then he loses an election. And, true to form for people whose ascendancy is unchallengeable, he refuses to admit that he lost. He marshals all his incendiary skills to inflame the only people who could conceivably save him …

… and they storm the U.S. Capitol. This is historically unprecedented, and happens in our very visual, news-in-your-eyeballs world. The people who hate, despise, and fear Trump react as if this mob of terrorists, armed with AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, and pipe bombs, has stormed our own houses. And we respond with two emotions: fear and our own rage.

Fear makes it harder to examine rage. Rage, by its nature, resists examination. If it cannot be expressed, it strives to be denied. Nonetheless, quieting our fear and examining our rage is what we must do. Anger denied is powerless; anger expressed without examination is purely destructive. We need only to look to real leaders like Stacey Abrams and Rev. William Barber to see what happens when anger is acknowledged, contained, and directed. Examined anger is effective. And effectiveness, above all else, is what we need right now.

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Thanksgiving 2017: Keeping Hope Alive

Rev. William Barber II leading a song at the end of a news conference

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Laurie and Debbie say:

For the first ten years of this blog, we wrote a Thanksgiving post, listing good things that had happened in the year since the previous Thanksgiving. (We know  the shameful history of Thanksgiving very well; we also like taking stock of good things.)

Last year, less than three weeks out from Trump’s election, we couldn’t bring ourselves to write that post. Instead, we wrote about how we were feeling, and how we were redirecting the blog in resistance.

This year has been one of the roughest years in American political history, and next year is probably not going to be much better. The catalogue of atrocities, cruelties, threats, and stupidities of the current White House and Congress is amazingly long.

Debbie listens regularly to Deray McKesson‘s podcast, Pod Save the People. Deray interviews an extraordinary variety of people on that show: politicians, activists, cooks, fashion photographers, you name it. The interviews are all done through a political lens, and he always asks the same question:

“What do you say to people who have given up hope, people who’ve been fighting forever and feel like nothing changes, people who think the fight is useless?”

That question has as many answers as Deray has interviewees. We each have our own answers, but that’s not where we’re going today. Instead, we want to mention just a few of the literally thousands of initiatives around the country and elsewhere, all fighting against the forces of hate  and contempt–the forces which right now are undeniably running a large portion of the world.

#Take a Knee: Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who led the the San Francisco 49ers to the championship playoffs in 2012 and 2013, decided not to participate in standing for the U.S. national anthem, as a direct response to police murder of black people. He carefully and respectfully chose to go down on one knee rather than any other form of protest. His motives have been viciously misrepresented, and his career is on hold. At the same time, he spawned a nationwide movement: from sport to sport, from pro sports to colleges to high schools, from men’s sports to women’s sports, and (although not enough) from people of color to white people. When Trump got on the anti-takeaknee bandwagon, even some rich white football team owners fought back. And that fight shows no signs of stopping.

After the nakedly inhumane conditions in the Grenfell Tower in London resulted in a fire that caused the deaths of at least 80 people, Jeremy Corbyn and the British Labour Party are calling for an expenditure of at least one billion pounds for sprinklers in comparable buildings. It’s too soon to say if this practical proposal by Corbyn will succeed, but Labour’s star has been rising, and we predict that Corbyn’s call will see some response.

One of the factors fueling the Republican power imbalance is flagrant gerrymandering in many states, including Michigan. The Supreme Court has the opportunity to change this, but so do the citizens of the gerrymandered states. And in case you thought they didn’t care, a group in Michigan trying to put a limit-to-gerrymandering state constitutional amendment on the ballot has collected well over the 315,000 signatures they need, much faster than they expected, and without paying for signatures.  Almost all state ballot measures have to pay for signatures, so this reflects how many people in Michigan are aware of gerrymandering, and want to do something about it–even though it’s an issue that in 2016 was thought to be technical and boring.

#MeToo: The last month and a half has seen an unprecedented series of downfalls and firings — for sexual harassment. We are still in the early days of this process, and no one knows how it will shake out. However, it is a tectonic victory when famous and powerful men are losing their jobs for treating women (and sometimes men) like sexual party favors. Alyssa Milano was the immediate instigator of the #metoo hashtag which took over Twitter and Facebook for days and days, and we also pay homage to Tarana Burke, who started the phrase more than ten years ago.

Disabled people are a particular target of every authoritarian, purist movement in history, and the Trump White House and Republican congress are marching in lockstep with that history. Disabled people are also at the heart of all kinds of resistance, and in 2017 many disabled folks have covered themselves with glory, taking risks that few of the rest of us are prepared to take. Here’s just one example.

Ten protesters, most of whom have disabilities, were arrested …  in the Denver office of Republican Sen. Cory Gardner after staging a sit-in that lasted nearly 60 hours. They are part of a larger network of activists who believe they are literally fighting for their lives in their efforts to stop the Republicans’ health care bill.

The activists are members of ADAPT, a national disability-rights organization, which staged a similar protest in the Washington office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on June 22.

The protesters, which included four people who use wheelchairs and two with cerebral palsy, arrived Tuesday and sat in a 15-by-12-foot room for more than two days.

The Republicans have long claimed some kind of incomprehensible moral high ground, where they will go to any length to protect an unborn baby, but will drag a 10-year-old out of the hospital to be deported, where they will extol the value of military service and starve veterans, and so on and so on. Fortunately, there are real moral movements developing in the U.S., and Reverend William Barber is leading one of them.

 Barber has set for himself the daunting goal of spreading the Moral Mondays model nationally to resist what he views as the dangerous economic and social policies of the Trump administration.

He’s heading efforts that will train an army of activists in the nation’s most conservative states and put the issue of poverty front and center in American politics. Barber said he sees his efforts as the unfinished work of King, who was assassinated in 1968 shortly after announcing a campaign to improve the lives of poor people.

When we think about all of these people putting their feet, their passion, and their money where their mouths are, supporting all of these grassroots movements and hundreds more, hope is a little easier to come by.