As a women, as a daughter of immigrants, as a journalist working on post-conflict, social change and fights for equality, as an author of a book named
... I couldn't agree more.
Last month,
Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden had a public conversation about democracy,
transparency, whistleblowing and more. In the course of it, Snowden – who was
of course Skyping in from Moscow – said that without Ellsberg’s example he
would not have done what he did to expose the extent to which the NSA was
spying on millions of ordinary people. It was an extraordinary declaration. It
meant that the consequences of Ellsberg’s release of the top-secret Pentagon
Papers in 1971 were not limited to the impact on a presidency and a war in the
1970s. The consequences were not limited to people alive at that moment. His
act was to have an impact on people decades later – Snowden was born 12 years
after Ellsberg risked his future for the sake of his principles. Actions often
ripple far beyond their immediate objective, and remembering this is reason to
live by principle and act in hope that what you do matters, even when results
are unlikely to be immediate or obvious.
The most
important effects are often the most indirect. I sometimes wonder when I’m at a
mass march like the Women’s March a month ago whether the reason it matters is
because some unknown young person is going to find her purpose in life that
will only be evident to the rest of us when she changes the world in 20 years,
when she becomes a great liberator.
I began
talking about hope in 2003, in the bleak days after the war in Iraq was
launched. Fourteen years later, I use the term hope because it navigates a way
forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the
complacency or passivity that goes with both. Optimism assumes that all will go
well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us
stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is
unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we
may be able write it ourselves.
Hope is a
belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not
yet written. It’s informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and
what role we may play in it. Hope looks forward, but it draws its energies from
the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their
complexities and imperfections. It means not being the perfect that is the
enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming
you know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what
happens is up to us.
We are
complex creatures. Hope and anguish can coexist within us and in our movements
and analyses. There’s a scene in the new movie about James Baldwin, I Am Not
Your Negro, in which Robert Kennedy predicts, in 1968, that in 40 years there
will be a black president. It’s an astonishing prophecy since four decades
later Barack Obama wins the presidential election, but Baldwin jeers at it
because the way Kennedy has presented it does not acknowledge that even the
most magnificent pie in the sky might comfort white people who don’t like
racism but doesn’t wash away the pain and indignation of black people suffering
that racism in the here and now. Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black
Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s mission as “rooted in grief and
rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”. The vision of a better future
doesn’t have to deny the crimes and sufferings of the present; it matters
because of that horror.
I have been
moved and thrilled and amazed by the strength, breadth, depth and generosity of
the resistance to the Trump
administration and its agenda. I did not anticipate anything so
bold, so pervasive, something that would include state governments, many
government employees from governors and mayors to workers in many federal
departments, small towns in red states, new organizations like the 6,000
chapters of Indivisible reportedly formed since the election, new and fortified
immigrant-rights groups, religious groups, one of the biggest demonstrations in
American history with the Women’s March on 21 January, and so much more.
Optimism
assumes all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all
irredeemable; both let us do nothing
I’ve also
been worried about whether it will endure. Newcomers often think that results
are either immediate or they’re nonexistent. That if you don’t succeed straight
away, you failed. Such a framework makes many give up and go back home when the
momentum is building and victories are within reach. This is a dangerous
mistake I’ve seen over and over. What follows is the defense of a complex
calculus of change, instead of the simple arithmetic of short-term cause and
effect.
There’s a
bookstore I love in Manhattan, the Housing Works bookshop, which I’ve gone to
for years for a bite to eat and a superb selection of used books. Last October
my friend Gavin Browning, who works at Columbia University but volunteers with
Housing Works, reminded me what the name means. Housing Works is a spinoff of
Act Up, the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, founded at the height of the Aids
crisis, to push for access to experimental drugs, bring awareness to the
direness of the epidemic, and not go gentle into that bad night of premature
death.
What did
Act Up do? The group of furious, fierce activists, many of them dangerously ill
and dying, changed how we think about Aids. They pushed to speed up drug
trials, deal with the many symptoms and complications of Aids together, pushed
on policy, education, outreach, funding. They taught people with Aids and their
allies in other countries how to fight the drug companies for affordable access
to what they needed. And win.
Browning
recently wrote: “At the start of the 1990s, New York City had less than 350
units of housing set aside for an estimated 13,000 homeless individuals living
with HIV/Aids. In response, four members of the Act Up housing committee
founded Housing Works in 1990.” They still quietly provide a broad array of
services, including housing, to HIV-positive people 27 years later. All I saw
was a bookstore; I missed a lot. Act Up’s work is not over, in any sense.
For many
groups, movements and uprisings, there are spinoffs, daughters, domino effects,
chain reactions, new models and examples and templates and toolboxes that
emerge from the experiments, and every round of activism is an experiment whose
results can be applied to other situations. To be hopeful, we need not only to
embrace uncertainty but to be willing to know that the consequences may be
immeasurable, may still be unfolding, may be as indirect as poor people on
other continents getting access to medicine because activists in the USA stood
up and refused to accept things as they were. Think of hope as a banner woven
from those gossamer threads, from a sense of the interconnectedness of all
things, of the lasting effect of the best actions, not only the worst. Of an
indivisible world in which everything matters.
An old
woman said at the outset of Occupy Wall Street “we’re fighting for a society in
which everyone is important”, the most beautifully concise summary of what a
compassionately radical, deeply democratic movement might aim to do. Occupy
Wall Street was mocked and described as chaotic and ineffectual in its first
weeks, and then when it spread nationwide and beyond, as failing or failed, by
pundits who had simple metrics of what success should look like. The original
occupation in lower Manhattan was broken up in November 2011, but many of the
encampments inspired by it lasted far longer.
Occupy
launched a movement against student debt and opportunistic for-profit colleges;
it shed light on the pain and brutality of the financial collapse and the
American debt-peonage system. It called out economic inequality in a new way.
California passed a homeowner’s bill of rights to push back at predatory
lenders; a housing defense movement arose in the wake of Occupy that, house by
house, protected many vulnerable homeowners. Each Occupy had its own engagement
with local government and its own projects; a year ago people involved with
local Occupies told me the thriving offshoots still make a difference. Occupy
persists, but you have to learn to recognize the myriad forms in which it does
so, none of which look much like Occupy Wall Street as a crowd in a square in
lower Manhattan.
Similarly,
I think it’s a mistake to regard the gathering of tribes and activists at
Standing Rock, North Dakota, as something we can measure by whether or not it
defeats a pipeline. You could go past that to note that merely delaying
completion beyond 1 January cost the investors a fortune, and that the
tremendous movement that has generated widespread divestment and a lot of
scrutiny of hitherto invisible corporations and environmental destruction makes
building pipelines look like a riskier, potentially less profitable
business.
Standing
Rock was vaster than these practical things. At its height it was almost
certainly the biggest political gathering of Native North Americans ever seen,
said to be the first time all seven bands of the Lakota had come together since
they defeated Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876, one that made an
often-invisible tribe visible around the world. What unfolded there seemed as
though it might not undo one pipeline but write a radical new chapter to a
history of more than 500 years of colonial brutality, centuries of loss,
dehumanization and dispossession. Thousands of veterans came to defend
the encampment and help prevent the pipeline. In one momentous
ceremony, many of the former soldiers knelt down to apologize and ask
forgiveness for the US army’s long role in oppressing Native Americans. Like
the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island at the end of the 1960s,
Standing Rock has been a catalyst for a sense of power, pride, destiny. It is
an affirmation of solidarity and interconnection, an education for people who
didn’t know much about native rights and wrongs, an affirmation for Native
people who often remember history in passionate detail. It is a confirmation of
the deep ties between the climate movement and indigenous rights that has
played a huge role in stopping pipelines in and from Canada. It has inspired
and informed young people who may have half a century or more of good work yet
to do. It has been a beacon whose meaning stretches beyond that time and place.
To know
history is to be able to see beyond the present, to remember the past gives you
capacity to look forward as well, it’s to see that everything changes and the
most dramatic changes are often the most unforeseen. I want to go into one part
of our history at greater length to explore these questions about consequences
that go beyond simple cause and effect.
**
The 1970s
anti-nuclear movement was a potent force in its time, now seldom remembered,
though its influence is still with us. In her important new book Direct
Action: Protest and
the Reinvention of American Radicalism, LA Kauffman reports that the first
significant action against nuclear power, in 1976, was inspired by an
extraordinary protest the previous year in West Germany, which had forced the
government to abandon plans to build a nuclear reactor. A group that called
itself the Clamshell Alliance arose to oppose building a nuclear power plant in
New Hampshire. Despite creative tactics, great movement building, and extensive
media coverage against the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, the
activists did not stop the plant.
They did
inspire a sister organization, the Abalone Alliance in central California,
which used similar strategies to try to stop the Diablo Canyon nuclear power
plant. The groups protested against two particular nuclear power plants; those
two plants opened anyway.
You can
call that a failure, but Kauffman notes that it inspired people around the
country to organize their own anti-nuclear groups, a movement that brought
about the cancellation of more than 100 planned nuclear projects over several
years and raised public awareness and changed public opinion about nuclear
power. Then she gets into the really exciting part, writing that the Clamshell
Alliance’s “most striking legacy was in consolidating and promoting what became
the dominant model for large-scale direct-action organizing for the next 40
years. It was picked up by … the Pledge of Resistance, a nationwide network of
groups organized against US policy in Central America” in the 1980s.
“Hundreds
more employed it that fall in a civil disobedience action to protest the
supreme court’s anti-gay Bowers vs Hardwick sodomy decision,” Kauffman
continues. “The Aids activist group Act Up used a version of this model when it
organized bold takeovers of the headquarters of the Food and Drug
Administration in 1988 and the National Institutes of Health in 1990, to
pressure both institution to take swifter action toward approving experimental
Aids medication.” And on into the current millennium. But what were the
strategies and organizing principles they catalyzed?
The short
answer is non-violent direct action, externally, and consensus decision-making
process, internally. The former has a history that reaches around the world,
the latter that stretches back to the early history of European dissidents in
North America. That is, non-violence is a strategy articulated by Mohandas
Gandhi, first used by residents of Indian descent to protest against
discrimination in South Africa on 11 September 1906. The young lawyer’s sense
of possibility and power was expanded immediately afterward when he traveled to
London to pursue his cause. Three days after he arrived, British women battling
for the right to vote occupied the British parliament, and 11 were arrested, refused
to pay their fines, and were sent to prison. They made a deep impression on
Gandhi.
He wrote
about them in a piece titled “Deeds Better than Words” quoting Jane Cobden, the
sister of one of the arrestees, who said, “I shall never obey any law in the
making of which I have had no hand; I will not accept the authority of the
court executing those laws …” Gandhi declared: “Today the whole country is
laughing at them, and they have only a few people on their side. But undaunted,
these women work on steadfast in their cause. They are bound to succeed and
gain the franchise …” And he saw that if they could win, so could the Indian
citizens in British Africa fighting for their rights. In the same article (in
1906!) he prophesied: “When the time comes, India’s bonds will snap of
themselves.” Ideas are contagious, emotions are contagious, hope is contagious,
courage is contagious. When we embody those qualities, or their opposites, we
convey them to others.
You do what you can. What you’ve done
may do more than you can imagine for generations to come
That is to
say, British suffragists, who won limited access to the vote for women in 1918,
full access in 1928, played a part in inspiring an Indian man who 20 years
later led the liberation of the Asian subcontinent from British rule. He, in
turn, inspired a black man in the American south to study his ideas and their
application. After a 1959 pilgrimage to India to meet with Gandhi’s heirs,
Martin Luther King wrote: “While the Montgomery boycott was going on, India’s
Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of non-violent social change. We
spoke of him often.” Those techniques, further developed by the civil rights
movement, were taken up around the world, including in the struggle against
apartheid at one end of the African continent and to the Arab spring at the
other.
Participation
in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s shaped many lives. One of them
is John Lewis, one of the first Freedom Riders, a young leader of the lunch
counter sit-ins, a victim of a brutal beating that broke his skull on the Selma
march. Lewis was one of the boldest in
questioning Trump’s legitimacy and he led dozens of other
Democratic members of Congress in boycotting the inauguration. When the attack
on Muslim refugees and immigrants began a week after Trump’s inauguration, he
showed up at the Atlanta airport.
That’s a
lot to take in. But let me put it this way. When those women were arrested in
parliament, they were fighting for the right of British women to vote. They
succeeded in liberating themselves. But they also passed along tactics, spirit
and defiance. You can trace a lineage backward to the anti-slavery movement
that inspired the American women’s suffrage movement, forward right
up to John Lewis standing up for refugees and Muslims in the Atlanta airport
this year. We are carried along by the heroines and heroes who came before and
opened the doors of possibility and imagination.
My partner
likes to quote a line of Michel Foucault: “People know what they do; frequently
they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they
do does.” You do what you can. What you’ve done may do more than you can
imagine for generations to come. You plant a seed and a tree grows from it;
will there be fruit, shade, habitat for birds, more seeds, a forest, wood to
build a cradle or a house? You don’t know. A tree can live much longer than
you. So will an idea, and sometimes the changes that result from accepting that
new idea about what is true, right, just remake the world. You do what you can
do; you do your best; what what you do does is not up to you.
**
That’s a
way to remember the legacy of the external practice of non-violent civil
disobedience used by the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s, as with the civil
rights movement of the 1960s, which did so much to expand and refine the
techniques.
As for the
internal process: in Direct Action, Kauffman addresses the Clamshell Alliance’s
influences, quoting a participant named Ynestra King who said: “Certain forms
that had been learned from feminism were just naturally introduced into the
situation and a certain ethos of respect, which was reinforced by the Quaker
tradition.” Suki Rice and Elizabeth Boardman, early participants in the
Clamshell Alliance, as Kauffman relates, were influenced by the Quakers, and
they brought the Quaker practice of consensus decision-making to the new group:
“The idea was to ensure that no one’s voice was silenced, that there was no
division between leaders and followers.” The Quakers have been since the 17th
century radical dissidents who opposed war, hierarchical structures and much
else. An organizer named Joanne Sheehan said, “while non-violence training,
doing actions in small groups, and agreeing to a set of non-violence guidelines
were not new, it was new to blend them in combination with a commitment to
consensus decision-making and a non-hierarchical structure.” They were making a
way of operating and organizing that spread throughout the progressive activist
world.
There are
terrible stories about how diseases like Aids jump species and mutate. There
are also ideas and tactics that jump communities and mutate, to our benefit.
There is an evil term, collateral damage, for the people who die
unintentionally: the civilians, non-participants, etc. Maybe what I am
proposing here is an idea of collateral benefit.
Ideas
are contagious, hope is contagious, courage is contagious. When we embody those
qualities we convey them to others
What we call
democracy is often a majority rule that leaves the minority, even 49.9% of the
people – or more if it’s a three-way vote – out in the cold. Consensus leaves
no one out. After Clamshell, it jumped into radical politics and reshaped them,
making them more generously inclusive and egalitarian. And it’s been honed and
refined and used by nearly every movement I’ve been a part of or witnessed,
from the anti-nuclear actions at the Nevada test site in the 1980s and 1990s to
the organization of the shutdown of the World Trade Organization in late 1999,
a victory against neoliberalism that changed the fate of the world, to Occupy
Wall Street in 2011 and after.
So what did
the Clamshell Alliance achieve? Everything but its putative goal. Tools to
change the world, over and over. There are crimes against humanity, crimes
against nature, and other forms of destruction that we need to stop as rapidly
as possible, and the endeavors to do so are under way. They are informed by
these earlier activists, equipped with the tools they developed. But the
efforts against these things can have a longer legacy, if we learn to recognize
collateral benefits and indirect effects.
If you are
a member of civil society, if you demonstrate and call your representatives and
donate to human rights campaigns, you will see politicians and judges and the
powerful take or be given credit for the changes you effected, sometimes after
resisting and opposing them. You will have to believe in your own power and
impact anyway. You will have to keep in mind that many of our greatest
victories are what doesn’t happen: what isn’t built or destroyed, deregulated
or legitimized, passed into law or tolerated in the culture. Things disappear
because of our efforts and we forget they were there, which is a way to forget
we tried and won.
Even losing
can be part of the process: as the bills to abolish slavery in the British
empire failed over and over again, the ideas behind them spread, until 27 years
after the first bill was introduced, a version finally passed. You will have to
remember that the media usually likes to tell simple, direct stories in which
if a court rules or an elective body passes a law, that action reflects the
actors’ own beneficence or insight or evolution. They will seldom go further to
explore how that perspective was shaped by the nameless and unsung, by the
people whose actions built up a new world or worldview the way that innumerable
corals build a reef.
The only
power adequate to stop the Trump administration is civil society, which is the
great majority of us when we remember our power and come together. And even if
we remember, even if we exert all the pressure we’re capable of, even if the
administration collapses immediately, or the president resigns or is impeached
or melts into a puddle of corruption, our work will only have begun.
**
That job
begins with opposing the Trump administration but will not end until we have
made deep systemic changes and recommitted ourselves, not just as a revolution,
because revolutions don’t last, but as a civil society with values of equality,
democracy, inclusion, full participation, a radical e pluribus unum plus
compassion. As has often been noted, the Republican revolution that allowed
them to take over so many state houses and take power far beyond their numbers
came partly from corporate cash, but partly from the willingness to do the
slow, plodding, patient work of building and maintaining power from the ground
up and being in it for the long run. And partly from telling stories that,
though often deeply distorting the facts and forces at play, were compelling.
This work is always, first and last, storytelling work, or what some of my
friends call “the battle of the story”. Building, remembering, retelling,
celebrating our own stories is part of our work.
I want to
see this glorious resistance have a long game, one that includes
re-enfranchising the many millions, perhaps tens of millions of people of
color, poor people, and students disenfranchised by many means: the Crosscheck
program, voter ID laws that proceed from the falsehood that voter fraud is a
serious problem that affects election outcomes, the laws taking voting rights
in most states from those convicted of felonies. I am encouraged to see many
idealistic activists bent on reforming the Democratic party, and a new level of
participation inside and outside electoral politics. Reports say that the
offices of elected officials are swamped with calls and emails as never
before.
This will
only matter if it’s sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the
myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the
consequences aren’t immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when
you fail at your immediate objective – to block a nominee or a pipeline or to
pass a bill – that even then you may have changed the whole framework in ways
that make broader change inevitable. You may change the story or the rules,
give tools, templates or encouragement to future activists, and make it
possible for those around you to persist in their efforts.
To believe
it matters – well, we can’t see the future. We have the past. Which gives us
patterns, models, parallels, principles and resources, and stories of heroism,
brilliance, persistence, and the deep joy to be found in doing the work that
matters. With those in our pockets, we can seize the possibilities and begin to
make hopes into actualities.
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