August 6 Blog: Time to Step It Up, It’s not Hard

Dear Friends:

I suspect many of my readers have been as appalled and shocked as I have been at how quickly many large institutions and businesses have yielded to Trump and cooperated with him.

I recommend this podcast of Jon Stewart with Mehdi Hasan, former MSNBC host. I think the Stewart-Hasan discussion is quite insightful on why that is and how much the traditional Democratic Party is part of the systemic problem that we need to fix if we are to build the country we want.

In the immediate future, we need to save our democracy. I know some of us have been attending the One Million Rising training sessions and/or the weekly Indivisible calls. Both the Mobilize and Indivisible organizations are working hard to build enough of a base of non-cooperation and resistance that we can effectively push back on the destruction of our democracy.

The premise espoused by the One Million Rising movement is that to topple a dictatorship, you don’t start by going after the dictator directly, but go after the pillars holding him up. Those authoritarian pillars are made up of people who can be influenced by experiencing unpleasant pushback for their own cooperation and seeing those like us not cooperating. The Tesla Takedowns are a good example of regular people exerting influence on a business pillar. University alumni and former law firm employees have used petitions and letters to push for non-cooperation in institutional pillars. History shows when 3.5% of the population engages, tyranny can be defeated. 

Non-cooperation starts small moving from individual to collective to mass non-cooperation. Building that base of non-cooperation is up to all of us, and the next step – or “How to Make It Happen” – is very local and pretty simple in their model: invite some friends and neighbors over to talk about what is happening and brainstorm on what you might do. There is a toolkit on how to hold these brainstorming sessions, but, while it’s helpful, you don’t need the toolkit to just gather a few folks together over food or drink and talk. If you want to register your event and/or use the Toolkit, all the better.

The third and final training is “Campaign Design: What Now, Organizing Action” on Wednesday, August 13^th at 8:00 pm. The link for registration is: https://www.mobilize.us/nokings/event/803953/

If you wish to catch up on the previous trainings: Session 1 (The Moment & Your Mission) and Session 2 (How to Make it Happen) have been posted on YouTube.

While we have had national and global mass demonstrations already and they have been big and influential, we need to build much more sustained non-cooperation to get to a persistent 3.5%. I hope all my readers will invite some friends and neighbors over to brainstorm how to help do that.

Finally, Visibility Brigades.org has called for morning and afternoon banner drops on Friday August 15 that say “Be Brave: Join Us.”  Our Fairlington Rush Hour Resistance team will be out at 7:30 am and 5:00 pm that day and we invite you to join us. 

As always, I welcome comments and suggestions.

Yours in peaceful resistance, 

Libby