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Eight Million Protestors and No Kings: The Case for Showing Up (Rebecca Solnit)
The evidence suggests that a lot of mild-mannered people have been radicalized. One BlueSky guy reported 'Walking thru the “Ultra Normie” No Kings rally in my extremely rural, white town and there are Patagonia wearing moms carrying signs that say “DEAD PEDOPHILES DONT REOFFEND” and “ICE GETS THE WALL” and I hi fived an old guy with a sign that said MY DADDY FOUGHT NAZIS AND SO WILL I” this is wild. I cannot stress enough how these are PTA moms and soccer coach dads and I can best describe the vibe as “festively bloodthirsty.”' But the whole idea that there's a small cadre of revolutionaries who do all the political heavy lifting in this country isn't really accurate; a lot of it – I hope to do an essay on this soon – has been not just for decades but centuries by those who might be dismissed as nice ladies....
"Protests rarely achieve their maximalist demands on their own. But they do things nothing else can: they shift public discourse (Occupy didn’t break up the banks, but the language of the “99%” permanently changed how Americans talk about inequality), they energize waves of downstream organizing (the Women’s March fed directly into the candidate recruitment and voter mobilization that flipped the House in 2018), they build relationships between people and groups who might never have connected otherwise, and they make visible the scale of opposition in a way that no online petition or social media post ever will."
But also what's wrong with feeling good? "Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection," I wrote a while back. Timothy Snyder posted, "I was at a #NoKings rally yesterday and rather than writing another essay about why this matters I will just say that it is pure joy to meet the people who want to stand out and the people who are doing the work. Thank you."
There's fierce joy in feeling far from alone, and something magical can happen and has, again and again, when thousands of individuals feel part of a greater whole, feel the power of solidarity and the possibility that arises from it when they become civil society incarnate. I'm a believer in the almost sacred space of the street and th power of what happens there. I was really struck by LOLGOP's citation above of "the three domains in which democracy is defended or lost: the ballot box, the courts, and the streets. His point was that no single one is sufficient — and that the streets, far from being the weakest, are the foundation the other two rest on."
"Protests rarely achieve their maximalist demands on their own. But they do things nothing else can: they shift public discourse (Occupy didn’t break up the banks, but the language of the “99%” permanently changed how Americans talk about inequality), they energize waves of downstream organizing (the Women’s March fed directly into the candidate recruitment and voter mobilization that flipped the House in 2018), they build relationships between people and groups who might never have connected otherwise, and they make visible the scale of opposition in a way that no online petition or social media post ever will."
But also what's wrong with feeling good? "Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection," I wrote a while back. Timothy Snyder posted, "I was at a #NoKings rally yesterday and rather than writing another essay about why this matters I will just say that it is pure joy to meet the people who want to stand out and the people who are doing the work. Thank you."
There's fierce joy in feeling far from alone, and something magical can happen and has, again and again, when thousands of individuals feel part of a greater whole, feel the power of solidarity and the possibility that arises from it when they become civil society incarnate. I'm a believer in the almost sacred space of the street and th power of what happens there. I was really struck by LOLGOP's citation above of "the three domains in which democracy is defended or lost: the ballot box, the courts, and the streets. His point was that no single one is sufficient — and that the streets, far from being the weakest, are the foundation the other two rest on."
https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/eight-million-protestors-and-no-kings-the-case-for-showing-up-2/?ref=meditations-in-an-emergency-newsletter
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