Blog 5
December 13, 2016
Daily Practice
My yoga teacher says that now more than ever we need a daily yoga practice for strength and calm. Good advice, which led me to another daily practice.
The good news is that in my world everyone is activated. Whether I am at my book group, at the dinner table with my adult children or with ,friends we are talking about what is happening to the U.S and what we can do about it. The struggle seems to be where to pay attention, when so much information is flooding in. and which action to take when so much needs to be done. From my perspective, the more we speak with each other, the more likely we are to select a focus for our work in this careening world.
My daily practice:
To do before the day fills with so many other things to do:
Search for wise words written by people who understand what is happening and who direct me towards what I can do about it.
Chronicle actions people I know are taking or actions I read about.
Chose one action to take each day.
Write my blog.
Wise words
Suggested by Peter Yedidia
On Optimism and Despair
A talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize.
Excerpt:
Things have changed, but history is not erased by change, and the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefited. Neither my readers nor I am in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive. I don’t claim that it’s easy. I do not have the answers. I am by nature not a political person and these are the darkest political times I have ever known. My business, such as it is, concerns the intimate lives of people. The people who ask me about the “failure of multiculturalism” mean to suggest that not only has a political ideology failed but that human beings themselves have changed and are now fundamentally incapable of living peacefully together despite their many differences.
In this argument it is the writer who is meant to be the naive child, but I maintain that people who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.
Suggested by Marilyn Robertson:
Posted on December 2, 2016
Art activism doesn’t just critique what is wrong, inadequate or incomplete. By enabling us to imagine alternatives, it breaks the spell of inevitability which the dominant hegemony has cast over us. A recent book, Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics, provides many provocative examples. Here are some of my favorites:
▪ When mathematician-philosopher Antanas Mockus became mayor of Bogotá in 1995, he borrowed strategies from activist art to help citizens re-imagine their city. He mocked the mythology of leadership by wearing a “super-citizen” costume, and cut a heart shape out of his bulletproof vest to demonstrate his shared vulnerability. He created an exchange of guns for toys in which the city’s children pressured parents to turn in their weapons. And he replaced the notoriously corrupt traffic police with 400 mimes, who used humor instead of fines to manage the flow of vehicles. In one of the world’s most dangerous cities, traffic fatalities were cut in half, and the homicide rate declined 70%.
▪ During the oppressive regime of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian “laughtivists” painted the dictator’s face on an oil drum and left it on a crowded shopping street along with a bat. Passersby took the opportunity to bash the drum image until police finally “arrested” the drum and put it in their van, a comic scene widely covered by the media. “Laughtivism derives its power from the ability to melt fear, the lifeblood of dictators . . . and help to cut away at the leaders’ authority, which often stems from intense narcissism.”[vii]
▪ In 2013, Enmedio, a “media prankster collective” in Barcelona, made striking posters of individuals whose homes were being foreclosed by a Spanish bank, and pasted them onto the façade of the bank’s central downtown branch. The invisible victims, and their stories, were thus made dramatically visible at the scene of the crime………
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Suggested by Kaethe Weingarten:
NOTES FROM THE RESISTANCE: A COLUMN ON LANGUAGE AND POWER
SUMMER BRENNAN
December 9, 2016
Excerpt:
Words have power.
We fight back by correctly labeling; by calling a white supremacist a white supremacist, a fascist a fascist, a sexual assault a sexual assault. We name what is happening or about to happen around us: kleptocracy, kakistocracy, authoritarianism, fraud, corruption, embezzlement. We can creatively add to the taxonomy of tyranny even as we feel ourselves buried alive by it: idiocracy, dystocracy, misogynocracy.
We in America are already being told that two plus two equals five. In time, just like Winston in 1984, we may even come to believe it. Or we may cease to care whether we believe it or not. Under the cover of that uncaring darkness, any number of atrocities may occur.
No one person can defend everything in America that will need defending in the age of Trump. What we must do, instead, is to find our particular hills to defend, and then to defend them as if our freedom depended on it. Even if these battles are lost, the very act of writing down the progression of that loss, as Winston did, is an act of resistance. The hijacking of public language, as is happening now, is a way to shift perception—to bend and control thought—and must be resisted.
I would like to invite readers to join me in doing this. Get a diary or journal and write down as many words as you can that relate to the things that you value. Fascism favors sameness; it represents a desertification of language and thinking. You can fight sameness with diversity. Inside this thought-desert, we must learn to be jungle oases. If you plan to defend nature, write down the names of birds and landscape as a start. Write phoebe, warbler, wren, heron, starling, swift, swallow. Write dale, dell, coppice, coomb, swale, swarth. Let your language soar and spread. Get closer and write root, leaf, stem, stamen, stigma, filament, sepal, pistil, petal. Write down how the world and words around you change.
We all need our hills to defend. As I intend to chronicle in this twice-monthly column, language will be mine. I’ll be here, wielding pen or laptop under the eye of Big Brother, repeating that two plus two equals four.
Actions:
From Franny Yep:
All over the Bay area groups of people are getting together on Sundays to take action and to plan actions. Here are links for some of the groups in our area.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1402221439795697/ Oakland Solidarity Sundays
https://www.facebook.com/events/930212277110333/ North Berkeley Solidarity Sundays
One example of a Sunday Solidarity Groups’s action:
SOLIDARITY SUNDAYS: ALAMEDA
SENDING SOLIDARITY
DEC 11, 2016
Love Trumps Hate
BACKGROUND
In response to the horrific rise in post-election hate crimes, hate speech, assaults, and bullying , our main
Action today is to send love and solidarity into the world in the form of holiday cards and handwritten letters.
Each SS group has created a list of local organizations and their mailing addresses that serve the
populations most in danger/subjected to threat and hate right now—immigrants, LGBTQ, homeless, Muslim,
disabled, POC, women, etc. Our goal is to let these organizations and the people they serve feel loved and
supported during a challenging and dark time.
The list of suggested organizations is below. We’re not creating a specific script for this action, as we want
people to write from the heart. We do suggest going beyond a simple “Happy Holidays” greeting, and
offering at least a few sentences about why you’re sending this card to this particular organization. Please
keep holiday references general and non-religious, as the people and orgs we’re writing to represent a wide
range of faiths.
Suggested Sending Solidarity card recipients:
Oakland Fire Station 13
La Clinica de la Raza
Midway Shelter
Mujeres Unidas y Activas
Causa Justa/Just Cause
Ella Baker Center
Islamic Center of Alameda
DreamCatcher Youth Services
Rep. Barbara Lee
AG (and soon-to-be Sen.) Kamala Harris
Address: Office of the Attorney General. 1300 "I" Street. Sacramento, CA 95814-2919
SOLIDARITY SUNDAYS ELECTORAL COLLEGE/RUSSIAN HACKING ACTIONS:
SAMPLE LETTER:
Sincerely,
ACTION #3 Email/call the members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:
Follow up to actions taken by Blowing on Embers Redux blog readers:
From Cynthia Flannery: This follows the first meeting of a small group of concerned citizens:
Our group here in West Linn was invited to submit a letter to our City Council identifying the issues we would like to see the council address as they consider the city's position on hate and bigotry. We co-wrote the letter, contributing our thoughts online to one another. The letter is the first step. We will invite council members to our meetings to continue a conversation about establishing West Linn as a sanctuary community (like Portland is) and other ways to implement community values of inclusion over hate and bigotry.
For our next meeting, students who have participated in the demonstrations calling for a safe, inclusive environment at the high school will meet with us. We want to hear from students what their experiences have been, and to let them know that our group can provide resources and support. The students have asked for more communication with the community and we want them to know we hear them.
From Kaethe Weingarten:
Greacian Goeke and I organized this group that met for the first time in Albany, December 7th. About 30 of us from all over the Bay Area gathered in five topical working groups and brainstormed short- and long-term action steps. (And another 10 were online). Of note, we affirmed the importance of forming affinity groups to support us doing the work and coalitions to accomplish the work. Coalitions are not meant to be comfortable or like home, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock fame pointed out in the 1980’s, but they are where the work gets done. Anyone who wants to join this group, contact Kaethe at kaethew@gmail.com.”
Let us all know what you are thinking and what you are doing.
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