Tag Archives: #takeaknee

Thanksgiving 2018: Hope Is Staying Alive

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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.)

In 2016, 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. In 2017, we wrote about some of the myriad of places where we saw hopeful possibility. We also said about 2017, “the catalogue of atrocities, cruelties, threats, and stupidities of the current White House and Congress is amazingly long.” Needless to say, that is still true.

But …

One of our examples was Colin Kaepernick and #takeaknee . That movement has, in some ways, gone quiet, suppressed by team owners, but it is not dead. Since our last Thanksgiving blog, Kaepernick has been named an Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience, and has won the Muhammad Ali Legacy Award given by Sports Illustrated. (Oh, and something from Harvard University, too). Far more important, Kaepernick has changed the national conversation in a way that will continue to reverberate for some time; almost no one looks at a line of ball players singing the National Anthem the same way they used to. Sure, some of the conversation is negative, even very negative, but a lot of it is positive, and passionate. And it’s spreading, including to South Africa,

We also talked about Reverend William Barber II and his moral movement. In 2018, Barber won a Macarthur “Genius Grant” — and got arrested the same day it was announced, supporting workers demanding union rights in Chicago. His movement also put a great deal of effort into Get Out the Vote work in North Carolina earlier this month.

Then there’s #metoo, the earthquake that just keeps going. A year ago we said “No one knows how it will shake out” and that is still true. However, we do know that it hasn’t stopped shaking the world, and shows no sign of stopping. Yes, it’s had failures, including the very high-profile and disheartening failure of the U.S Senate to believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. It has also had hundreds, if not thousands, of successes and — like #takeaknee — it has changed the conversation, everywhere. We find it especially encouraging that, while women of color and women in minimum wage jobs are still at greater risk, that conversation is also happening everywhere, sometimes with excellent results.

No one wanted this year to bring us the Parkland students’ movement for school safety and gun-ownership restrictions, including #boycottnra, but that intrepid, tactically brilliant group has made extraordinary progress, and gained the visibility they deserve.

The midterm elections are getting some mainstream press as “mixed results,” or “tepid Democratic victory,” but the truth is that they were not only a blue wave, they were a black and brown and female wave, and they represent an entirely new force in mainstream American politics.  Here’s one overview article, and a few high points:

  • The first two Native Americans ever elected to national office (both women);
  • The first two Muslim-American women ever elected to the House of Representatives;
  • Three new black lawmakers, including a mother who became politically active when her son was murdered in a hate crime*;
  • Seven additional Hispanic members of the House of Representatives; and
  • A record number of women in the Senate, including the first Latinx woman senator.

State legislatures and governors show similar gains. The U.S. has its first openly gay male governor. We have literally never seen a Congress or statehouses like this before. Likely results include: 1) stemming the Trump administration tide at least somewhat, including the fact that the House of Representatives can cut off the money; 2) encouraging many more women, people of color, and LGBTQ people to run next time, and to pay attention to state and local government; 3) changing the paradigm, as Barber, Kaepernick, and the Parkland students (among many others) are doing.

It’s important to mention here that some high-profile losses, like Stacey Abrams’ bid for governor of Georgia and Andrew Gillum’s for governor of Florida, are causing progressives in those states to turn up the gain. Abrams has announced Free Fight Georgia, and she’s a force to be reckoned with. Florida is newly able to change itself, because even in a year when the Republicans took the state offices, 60% of Floridians voted to restore voting rights to 1.4 million Florida citizens who have served their terms as felons in prison, and are now back on the street. Many other important progressive state ballot initiatives passed, including one that will require a unanimous jury of folks in Louisiana to convict on a felony. (Oregon is now the only state where 10 jurors can do that.) Enough power to fix gerrymandering has changed in at least four states–Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado.  Just as with the Florida voting rights victory, this opens the way to change the game for the next election.

Look for a 2019 full of Republican atrocities, yes. But also look at the growing ways we have at our fingertips — not only to fight back, but to make end runs around the haters, and create real change.

Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate!

Follow Debbie on Twitter. 

*We originally had this incorrect as a death by police violence. Thanks to Lisa for the correction.

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.