After I learned the secret handshake, I saw it everywhere.
  • Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is about the human right to a standard of living sufficient for a secure and decent life. When I think about driving across North America, whether in parts of various cities or in small towns and rural counties, I easily recall visual evidence that in many places the United States fails to live up to the standards agreed upon by the United Nations in 1948.#
    • Article 25#
    • Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. #
    • Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection. #
  • We rarely discuss the fact that the United Nations have together created a multi-part International Bill of Human Rights, of which the 1948 document is one key. Not discussing these things in the United States makes them easy to ignore, even when the evidence of our own experience urges us to speak. Silence is at all times a great friend of the powerful and the selfish.#
  • If all you can hold in your billionaire head is one value at a time, then maybe you clutch onto an idea that you're calling free speech, say. Speech is good, free speech is better. The freer the speech, the more of it, the better. Flood the zone with free speech.#
  • But a lowly millionaire might easily know that (for better or worse) an idea grows more powerful when it is linked to a second and a third idea. Free speech, the first value, is transformed when combined with a second idea: a space where you can flood the zone with an irresistible torrent of relevant, irrelevant, dogmatic, irreverent, fervent, high-pitched, sometimes even barely coherent speech. This serves as a shortcut through the concerns and objections of other human beings. No need to respect their sorry souls, no need to listen. You can't even tell if they're speaking, the din around them, around us all, is so loud. Still, if you want power, something you want to call free speech plus a place for a million voices to all call out at once leaves the side door to the power dashboard less guarded than it should be.#
  • But if there really is a value that deserves the venerated name free speech, and a space to practice this value, and a group of other people not scorned but perhaps accepted and respected for what they've witnessed in life, a place where people can for a time, for a project, affiliate with each other and get some thinking and then some work done, well, then the idea of speech in a social space where decency has a chance to prevail starts to make sense. The linked chain of values, speech-place-civil audience, makes free speech more meaningful. The billionaire might not get that, the one-idea-at-a-time billionaire, or his distracted-by-thoughts-of-power millionaire buddy neither. But we can see it, and maybe even achieve it sometimes, here and there. We can remember times when it happened. We can recall the circumstances, the necessary layers of precondition that made it possible. That still make it possible.#
  • American schools disengage from students three months every year. Young people return in September fuzzy about things they used to know. It takes precious weeks to energize and refocus.#
  • The Democratic Party disengages from voters for many months after each election.#
  • In both cases, Americans build a good amount of destructive back-sliding right into the system.#
  • 1. After the focused activism of the 1968 Poor People's March on Washington, journalist I. F. Stone wrote, "To see the Poor People's March on Washington in perspective, remember that the rich have been marching on Washington ever since the beginning of the Republic."#
  • 2. In recent years, right-wing media operations have fervently and tirelessly used the slogan-fear-repetition methods of classic 20th century propaganda to march into the homes and heads of tens of millions of U. S. citizens, every hour of every day.#
  • 3. In 2008, the Obama campaign for president developed a web presence that informed, motivated, and activated tens of thousands of citizens about the issues and stakes of the day. After the election, the Obama team shut down the site. Whatever skills and tools and insights about activism had been developed were shelved.#
  • 4. In 2024, the Harris campaign developed informative and motivational digital communication tools, and after the election they shut it down, abandoning for the foreseeable future the lessons learned about communication in our troubled society.#
  • Items 1 & 2 imply that for Republicans what matters is knowing how to work the system in their favor, and once they spot the method they would call it insane to stop working the system. Trump, in his auditorium speeches, surely does the same thing with lines that stir the emotions of the crowd. #
  • Items 3 & 4 imply that for Democrats what matters is winning the next election so they can grab control of Statehouses and Congress and proceed from their as ever-wise insiders able to do without our support until the next election. It's so rewarding to be sworn into high office that they seem to forget that the goal is not to be sworn in but to govern, successfully, at length, and in such ways that you won't be kicked out and your policies overturned two or four years from now.#
  • 5. Citizens seem to accept the what surely must be unacceptable approaches taken by both parties. Lacking a clear alternative based on alliances and affiliations with others, based on understanding of civic practices, based on tools and skills of building a movement and applying sustained pressure . . . lacking all those things, citizens are left with, well, left with what?#
  • 6. The history of the web is in some ways the history of a chain of manifestoes that answer the question in Item 5. Starting from outside, with the tools we possess and others we might invent, what are the next steps to create a third way, via activism, without the glaring flaws of the two national parties sketched so quickly above.#
  • 7. Where are those manifestoes, what are those tools? We know people who know parts of the answer to that question, but they are not usually affiliated with each other, working as a team to go forward. Which helps return citizens to their status in Item 5.#
  • In the early 1940s, in Nazi-dominated Berlin, unsigned postcards excoriating Hitler’s dictatorship began appearing around the city.#
  • The brutal Gestapo began to fear that a secret organization of political activists had successfully formed right under their noses.#
  • It was just a married couple, Elise and Otto Hampel, writing cards in their small apartment. Otto placed them when he was out walking.#
  • In repressive times, most people never speak, but those that do can have an amplified importance and can startle the powerful.#
  • Political science research tells us that elected officials often hear keenly the voices of those relatively few who call or write them.#
  • But to matter, those voices must have reach and staying power. They must be heard again and again, widely, or they will be ignored.#
  • The most basic way to have reach is to have partners repeating and amplifying the message, multiplying the audiences.#
  • Voices with reach and staying power. Active citizens with a wide group of partners. Skill with the communication tools.#
  • (Just for the moment ignoring the fact that some people have different access to elected officials than you and I have.)#
  • About halfway through my daily 8000 steps, walking along the St. Joseph River between the Farmers Market and Howard Park, I spotted a man up ahead sitting near the top of the Depression-era WPA stone steps that decorated the riverbank and provided work for some very needy people. As I came near, the gentleman happened to rise up, and he turned my way and we said hello. Bit of a conversation followed.#
  • I would say that he withheld answers to some questions I asked, but I had no rights to demand answers and I hope I didn't seem to be doing so. We touched on the election, on economic pressures, on racism, and more, and ended with a handshake.#
  • He said he was in the business of pouring concrete but that in the winter there is not much work. He was in town from Denver, seeing a family member, and eager to get back. I asked if he was hopeful about the coming week, and he dodged a little and also expressed some preference for what he remembered of economic conditions during Trump's term. I didn't try to argue. Maybe where he was in his life then it seemed to be true.#
  • We talked a little about Colorado. He felt that drugs had damaged the state, and he expressed a general commitment to people taking care of themselves. He said his wife was not taking care of her health. People sit around and watch entertainment and eat, he said. #
  • He asked who I was voting for and I said Harris. This choice did not interest him. Because he looked to be of Hispanic heritage I said, "But Trump is a racist." Racism is everywhere, he said, including in his homeland of Mexico. He claimed heritage not from Spain but from the indigenous peoples of Mexico, who he said are often very low in society.#
  • Racism is everywhere sounded like an observation from experience that implied, Hey, let's not pretend we can draw bold lines between these politicians and those, these business people and those. Racism was less interesting to him than economics of everyday life.#
  • We agreed that most people want the same things, if they can get them. Decent schools for their kids, chances for jobs and health care, a safe place to live. He seemed to be saying that a fair portion of the discourse about politics here is irrelevant to him. #
  • I couldn't tell if he was mainly reserved and discrete, if perhaps he felt a need to be cautious in an unfamiliar place talking to a stranger, if perhaps his English was a little shakey and he backed away from the occasional sentence because he wasn't sure he caught the meaning. I don't know. But for sure he said that racism is everywhere. That was his experience, plainly reported. It seemed naive to base all of one's decisions on that word, he implied, because you couldn't hope to be free of it. And we agreed that people have a lot of common ground concerning what they want and need on a daily basis.#
  • We shook hands. I'm heading off to have breakfast, he said, and I thought about my next meal too.#
  • New Jersey transit from Manhattan to New Brunswick. Somewhere along the route, a man comes up the aisle looking for a seat and spots an old buddy from high school, not seen for years. Joins him in the seats across from me. They fill each other in on the last many years of their lives. One asks, kind of tentatively, if the other is still in touch with the third member of their high school buddy group.#
  • Yes and no, once in a while, it turns out. The tentativeness continues in the conversation, slowly receding as an old openness returns, tempered maybe by the insight of early middle age. It becomes clear that they grew up somewhere in New Jersey or New York where young people are at risk of being swallowed up by the streets, by the choices and risks there, by the narrow paths out and beyond. #
  • One of the buddies seems to have gotten well free, seems to be doing fine. The other one seems to be doing reasonably well, but he alludes to struggles and maybe not a large margin of error. The third buddy, it becomes clear, has not escaped, has not found stability. He comes around from time to time asking for help, for money, maybe for a place to stay. Maybe he is carrying and looking for someone to party with, too. He's reaching up for a hand to pull him a little way out or to pull you a little way back in.#
  • The two buddies in this public place know how to say just enough about their old friend to acknowledge the risks and the costs of that old life, the burdens when one steps closer to the edge of it or hears your name called from the edge of it.#
  • The more successful buddy doesn't seem at any risk, but he well remembers. His friend has had his share of struggles and is on his feet. He remembers, but not from such a distance in time and space. He remembers and feels the urgency more keenly in the here and now. But they both know.#
  • Their missing friend could turn up. They would recognize him and his situation very well, they are themselves not among the naive or indifferent of our fellow citizens. But that doesn't mean they know any special magic to apply to the wounds of their old friend, of whom they have spoken for twenty or more minutes now, at first tentatively and indirectly, then more frankly as the journey through New Jersey continued. Their train arrives at destination after destination, but the instructions over the loudspeaker are full of static and garbled. If you don't know the route, if you aren't paying attention, you could easily miss your stop.#
  • They say the highlighter marker pen was invented by Dr. Frank Honn in 1962. By the time I was a young teacher they were common in schools. Students would read a chapter and run the highlighter across terms or sentences that they thought were important. Sometimes you'd see a school book with great swaths of florescent yellow highlighting on page after page. Usually there would be no written comments in the margin, so a student would have to reread the material to remember why it mattered. It was a profoundly inarticulate form of note-taking. Florescent yellow meant "something matters over here." What matters? Usually there was no clue. You'd have to hope a person might be able to recreate the thought while rereading. Other students, using pencils or pens, might very well jot a few words in the margin at the same place, preserving something of the thought, the judgment, the value perceived in the passage. The student using the highlighter threw all that away -- the fruits of a first reading, abandoned.#
  • Since school has so many layers of alienation going for it, maybe that's not surprising. If I can't see the use of the material any time soon in my life, why bother to pin down its value? Why bother to do the work to integrate the best part of the reading into my own thinking and experience?#
  • When I first taught a course in writing for the web, with an emphasis on marketing and activism, many students would write tweets the same way they used highlighters. Using a link, they'd point to something that seemed valuable, but they wouldn't introduce any of their own thinking into the tweet or the brief blog post. They'd abandon any clues to their own thinking and satisfy themselves with pointing, with saying, essentially, "Hey, over there at that web page, yeah, that one in the link, you might find something you want to read. I'm not going to tell you what I cared about there, you figure it out!"#
  • Linking done that way is an assertion of value, but nobody can tell what value is being asserted. "You figure it out!" is a dismal form of human exchange.#
  • But nobody who came to enjoy blogging stopped there. In many circumstances, a post would offer a link or two, and the writer would talk about the value -- would at least introduce a clue to a line of thought that the reader could follow up on. There was a notable blog-theory post maybe twenty years ago that spoke of a model blog post being a value-added proposition. You offer one or more worthwhile links and you introduce them and your interest in them at least briefly. You put down some markers, saying, "Here's what I was thinking . . ." You preserve the mental activity of reading for yourself and for your future readers to build on.#
  • That's linking practiced as a value-added proposition. By itself, a link builds out the structure of the web just a little more, but a value-added link makes that new part of the web's structure a little richer. It's part of the generosity of the web that early users remember fondly, I think. It's part of the reason the web made people hopeful. #
  • We have to have communities of readers for this value-added linking and blogging practice to pay off. The first level of payoff is when people exchange ideas and grow them through conversation. Many early bloggers remember this experience pretty keenly, I suspect. I didn't start in until about 2003, not terribly early, but I remember it.#
  • But from the start people described and criticized bloggers as isolated figures typing away, often for no payoff and no results. There's some truth to the description. Part of the challenge that has often not been met was to turn the isolation of writing into collaboration and action in the world. I send out my messages but only very slowly do I see anything happen as a result. Fair enough. We may not have the right temperament for collaboration and we may not quite have the tools for teaming up, I'm not sure.#
  • Nevertheless, writers who read and share links, who track their thinking about the reading and add value to the links by preserving what they're thinking, are doing something that has sometimes paid off for individuals and groups. #
  • Bloggers tend to believe in reading, in thinking about reading, in writing about reading. They tend to believe in practicing worthwhile things like reading and writing every day. They tend to understand that reading and thinking begin, at least, as solo operations, even if in a better world the full fruits of reading and writing are more widely social and political.#
  • Ideas need to circulate to have power, even if the circulating takes decades. The web where ideas circulate might begin with typing, with screens and electrons, but unless the ideas make the jump into the parallel social and political web, the ideas are doomed. People with skills and tools carry or transfer ideas sourced from the digital web out into the social and political web, though we don't talk much about how that happens. With persistence and good fortune, those ideas come to reside in people's philosophy, to be embodied in society's institutional practices, in laws, economic structures, and so forth. I'm not sure if there's a basic theory in place for that transfer and embodiment part of the life cycle of ideas or not. Maybe you know one.#
  • I'm pretty sure that reading and writing, tracking and sharing thinking, will be part of that theory, and the use of a highlighter pen will not be. And that's why I have a blog.#
  • I talked for a few minutes with a woman at the company's 800 number, and she resolved my problem with their billing quickly enough. At the end, I asked where she was today, and she said Nashville. I mentioned getting to know Knoxville a bit since our son-in-law was from there. I expressed an interest in the historical district downtown, buildings brought back into use, historical markers in many blocks, a surge of life. I mentioned how forthright the markers were about the messy history. The employee said that this was much more common now, places in the South acknowledging shameful history. In fact, she said, when you don't see the acknowledgements these days it's usually because you've landed somewhere where silence is preferred, where the old ways don't bother the current residents. You might not feel welcome there when you see that, she said.#
  • It's a slow progression, that kind of history. And thanks to Barbara who helped me with my billing question and who shared an insight about it.#
  • Ulster County, New York. Population about 180,000.#
  • Trump plans to deport ten million human beings from the U.S. That's about 3%.#
  • So that could be about 5400 people being rounded up in Ulster County, New York. It's going to take a lot of armed personnel to carry that out.#
  • If one national guard soldier could round up (say) five people, you'd need a military unit of about 1000 armed soldiers to handle the rounding up of 3% of the human beings in Ulster County, New York.#
  • Imagine that.#
  • During the years when the living models were Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, W. H. Auden made this six-line character sketch of tyranny:#
    • Epitaph on a Tyrant

      Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
      And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
      He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
      And was great interested in armies and fleets.
      When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
      And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
      #
  • Think about line 5. So-called respectable senators are already treating Trump that way, laughing when he laughs, lying when he is marketing his latest lie, jumping when he says jump. Elected officials who behave that way will not protect the country, the people of their home districts, the Constitution, or any number of decent values. Risk of tyranny? We're already there.#
  • Think about line 2. The simplifications, the slogans, the lies, the ranting, the emotional outbursts -- yes, these are easy to understand and they work up a crowd, and when one crowd responds to a manipulative line he hits that line harder in the next town, working people up to more and more of a pitch of emotion. That's dangerous, and in an era when elected officials from his party jump when he says jump, and when journalists can't figure out how to call him out for his excesses, or don't care to, it's particularly dangerous. Risk of tyranny? We're already there.#
  • Think about line 3. He knows all about vanity and greed and fear, he knows all the buttons that can be pushed to bring out the worst in people. He has no self-control, and so he uses that knowledge freely and selfishly. We know this very well by now -- risk of tyranny? We're already there.#
  • Think about line 1. He wants a tidy world, cleaned up after a model that appeals to his vanity and fear and greed. He's not interested in politics of the kind that involves listening to others or compromise. He wants victory and power, neat and clean. Will it require the national guard or the army coming out? Maybe so, and he's talking that way now. Risk of tyranny? We're already there.#
  • Think about line 4. He's running for the office of President, where he would direct the world's most potent military. He loves power no matter how corrupt it might be. He's keenly interested. Risk of tyranny? We're already there.#
  • And the consequences? Auden had one line left in his six-line poem. Think of line 6. The consequences include but are not limited to the death of the most vulnerable. Risk of tyranny? For sure? Stakes? Everything. We're already there.#
  • #
  • Auden's poem was published in 1940, in a book called Another Time.#
  • Some sentences -- some explanations -- are reusable because society keeps making the same mistake. Other reusable sentences expose a social structure or a cause-and-effect relationship over here that also exists over there. This next partial sentence is surely one of those reusable ones.#
  • ". . . almost no one knew how these things worked and thus [most people] had no idea what was possible."#
  • For example, in Czechoslovakia, in about three weeks in 1989, through a series of increasingly larger public protests, a decades-old, iron-handed, and seemingly stable dictatorship was overthrown. Hundreds of thousands of people who at the start of those three weeks were not politically active, and who were not politically organized, participated in forcing a change of government. Media censorship was lifted, huge numbers of people who were not in the habit of taking chances and standing up in public began to stand up in public, and police, the secret police, and the military, all long accustomed to enforcing the will of the dictatorship, eventually stood down.#
  • These were not mystical events, though most people have never looked into them. Not many people know how these things work, and so most people probably don't think these sorts of things are possible. #
  • Nevertheless, events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia offer clues to mechanisms that can sometimes create or preserve a democracy.#
  • PS. The slightly reworded quotation above comes from a recent blog post by Dave Winer.#
  • I don't remember learning in school that a person could expect important changes, improvements, and opportunities for excellence and creativity that become possible, that only become possible, by practicing something for years. In a way, it's obvious, but on the other hand, wouldn't it be useful for young people to consider it explicitly from time to time?#
  • I left the room for a while during last night’s VP debate because it felt like a stream of psychological abuse. Much like Trump, Vance implied to me something like this: “I can say anything and nobody can make me regret it. I can lie, I can throw a cloud of distractions over the conversation, and you can’t call me on it, you can’t stop me. This is how the game is played in America and I’m pretty good at playing this game.”#
  • That felt like a stream of abuse to me, and I needed to take a break. Happily, some people are getting better at calling out what needs to be called out. It’s about time. #
  • Some things candidates say actually are damning, as Governor Walz noted. More points like that, please, you journalists and politicians. Otherwise, the manipulation, the psychological abuse, continues.#
  • “In any healthy food culture, there is a strong connection between the people growing the food and the people eating it.”#
  • Activism and information packaged (for example here) so people can think about it and act on it, from @Riverford Organic Farmers and @WickedLeeksmag. #
  • Vance behaved as if this was a gotcha moment. He called out the journalist for fact checking when the rules of the debate said that they wouldn’t be doing that sort of fact checking.#
  • A less corrupt and dishonest politician would have noticed that the gotcha moment was actually when the journalist pointed out his intentional deception about large numbers of legal residents of Springfield, Ohio.#
  • Called out? No problem, he had a cloud of jargony details to cloak the issue in, all ready to go. He may not have Trump’s (for some audiences) magnetism, but he lies much prettier than Trump lies.#
  • Specificity can be made to matter. I read that Harris is using quotations from Tuesday's debate to attack Trump -- using his actual words.#
  • Lots of Americans know Trump actually said particular things that are objectionable because we heard him talking during the debate. Done right, we confirm those quotations ourselves, from personal knowledge. That's a powerful way to make political rhetoric.#
  • It respects the knowledge and experience of the citizen, and the judgment of the people outside the Beltway. That's a great method and a good sign about Harris that she knows what we know and wants to respect our judgment and tap into our knowledge.#
  • About a century ago, an Austrian writer named Karl Kraus said that his job was to condemn the corrupt figures of his day not by saying he disapproved of them or saying that they aren't following a party line. No, he said that his job was to condemn the corrupt figures of his day by putting their words between quotation marks. Also a great method.#
  • Political movements that succeed all share eight traits. Those movements, and even ones that come close to succeeding, always assemble public voices that have 1) reach and 2) staying power. These movements also know how to build and grow partnerships and alliances. Five other things are required, but if the movement's leading voices don't have reach and staying power, their opponents and the wider population know that the movement will fade. Without building a public voice that everyone hears, a voice that everyone knows they will keep hearing, opponents know they will soon be able to ignore the movement. Without continuing to build partnerships for activism, any movement will lose energy and fail.#
  • That's part of Obama's failure -- after shutting down his campaign website and suggesting to the millions who stirred themselves to elect him, his inside-the-Beltway opponents knew that they could continue to play the old games in Washington, ignoring the now hibernating movement that brought Obama into the White House. Obama's team stripped away three of the eight essential movement traits that got them elected: growing partnerships of citizens with voices of real reach and staying power. Republicans in Washington went forward knowing that they could ignore those millions of now-silent, now isolated Obama-supporting Americans between elections, which is their preference anyway. The powerful love the silence and isolation of others.#
  • Usefully, using different key words, Dave Winer covers this same territory in a new podcast linked here.#
  • I get the impression that Australia's political culture has a lot in common with ours here in the United States -- politicians play politics as much as possible, as fully as they can get away with, as a game where insiders, whenever circumstances allow, work to shed the pressure of the wider society.#
  • But Tim Dunlop has been keeping a close eye on groups of citizens in Australia who are finding innovative ways to assert a more democratic political process in that country. He reports on one stage in a brief book called Voices of Us: The independents’ movement transforming Australian democracy and on another in a recent Substack posting about the establishment of perhaps permanent deliberative bodies called citizens assemblies. #
  • His work came to mind as I turned back once again to Havel's "Power of the Powerless" essay, which is sometimes published by itself and sometimes as a section of a longer book of the same name. When I first read this essay more than a decade ago, I saw that it was about political life behind the Iron Curtain, but on later readings some of its explanations seemed to be aimed more widely at other societies, too, such as my own. For example:#
  • There in the first paragraph of Paul Wilson's translation Havel speaks of a political system that has no intention of being responsive to citizens who cannot readily conform to its dominating patterns. He says, "What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures."#
  • It was this sentence that reminded me yesterday of Dunlop's work. The idea that a governing system calcifies until it cannot respond openly to contrasting voices from the citizenry, cannot make room even for these to be heard. Or the idea that a governing system might have been designed in the first place to speak past the concerns of citizens. Or that a governing system, even an honorable one, is always in the process of being captured by those who intend to operate as they wish behind its noble façade. #
  • And therefore the idea that citizens might always need to be about the work of creating civic practices and civic spaces outside of those expected and tolerated by their home government. The idea that if they are not doing so they are accepting silence as their fate. And that they are normalizing their condition of silence, which is fine as far as the insiders and the powerful are concerned.#
  • For the powerful love the silence of others.#
  • Dave Winer writes:#
  • I think it’s possible to put together an online version of the Democratic Party, something that never goes away, is available to rally the electorate at any moment.#
  • That’s the way to neutralize the power of the media moguls who have us wrapped around their fingers.#
  • Does the Democratic Party think clearly enough about how politics and democracy work do build and operate this kind of ongoing participatory operation? Or would voters have to model the thing for them? I don’t know.#
  • And does the Democratic Party endlessly repeat the 2008/9 mistake of turning off the innovative Obama campaign participation website and essentially telling their voters, “Hey, relax, now that we’re back in Washington we’ve got this. You can tune out now. This is an insider’s game.”#
  • That is a character flaw of the Democratic Party, for sure. The Party needs counseling.#
  • PS. Who built that Obama website, by the way? Somebody should interview the creators about what it offered and how it worked.#
  • It's an information problem. There's plenty of evidence of the threats, but it's not in one place. How to gather it up and present it for ready access.#
  • It's a persuasion problem. How to present the evidence so that it speaks to the hearts and minds of more people. Powerful clear rhetoric is not the same as reciting facts.#
  • It's a conceptual problem. How to encourage people to to think of themselves as meaningful actors, not victims of forces beyond their influence. #
  • It's a methods problem. How to show citizens the pathways to activism that has a chance for success.#
  • It's a definition problem. How to help citizens think of democracy as more than (absolutely essential) voting, as a set of fragile institutions and practices that need to be defended and revitalized in every single generation.#
  • It's a morale problem. How to help people see realistic reasons for both urgency and hope. How to build the stamina and staying power required both in a crisis and in the long run, because a society is not like a light switch: Up means working well, Down means not. It's more like a studio mixing board, with many inputs and outputs, many sliders influencing the outcome.#
  • It's a leadership problem. Not just that leaders are needed, but that they need to be provoked by a sturdy and brave population. LBJ told MLK that even as president he needed organized activism to make him do the next good thing.#
  • It's a history problem. History is full of examples but they don't speak to us unless we go looking and start thinking and talking them over together.#
  • Here's one: On July 4, 1861, Lincoln called a special session of Congress and gave a serious speech about what was at stake in the now-unfolding rebellion. Imagine if instead of acting as if business-as-usual in Washington was enough, imagine if Biden and Harris called a special session of Congress for next week with a similarly urgent message, addressing our problems in enough detail, beyond sound bites, layer upon layer, something we could unpack together as a nation for weeks to come . . .#
  • About thirty years ago, someone moved through our neighborhood, presumable after dark, and selected a concrete pillar on the railroad bridge, the pillar nearest the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church, about 175 steps away from its front door, and likely in the dimness of the closest streetlight painted in just a few thick black strokes a cartoonish image taken from the most well-known and most violent repertoire of American racist history, and in case anyone missed the point, which the church-goers in the AME congregation were not likely to do, the graffiti artist stayed on a moment longer to scrawl in bold black letters "GOOD OLD DAYS" just to the side of the brutal cartoon. If you've taken a guess at what the image portrayed and you know some southern and Indiana history, you've probably guessed correctly. For many years the image has slumbered beneath one coat and then another and another of the city's gray paint.#
  • John le Carré recalled secret and not-so-secret government pressures on writers and film-makers early in his career:#
  • “One shouldn’t underrate these networks of influence that flow out of enormous intelligence agencies like the CIA. There are guys sitting on certain floors of certain buildings whose sole job is to massage opinion. And in those days, the CIA was financing magazines, it was financing movies of its own . . . “#
  • At the end of a long article about his family having hidden away, living in a chicken coop during World War II, in an effort to escape the Nazi persecution that killed millions, Max Heppner reflects on trying to escape the naming others place on victims:#
  • “It’s been a lifelong challenge not to see myself as a victim. The Dutch word for victim is ‘slachtoffer’ — which is the word for the animals taken to the temple to be slaughtered as an offering to God. I don’t want to see myself as that, as a victim. I’d prefer to see myself as a storyteller.”#
  • The word feels static, imposed, thoughtless, fatalistic, implying powerlessness. Heppner is right to push back. If he experiences storytelling as one countermeasure to the naming society places on him or on his people, that makes sense. A good story can make something visible, bring something up for reflection, that might otherwise go unnoticed amidst the din of rote language and thoughtless "common sense" of tradition. Even individual words do some of that damaging work.#
  • Stories, too, can do little more than to reinforce those thoughtless meanings being passed down in a society, like the word victim in Dutch, as he describes it here, implying appeasement to God, a grim vision. But stories can disrupt the senseless common sense of a society too. How do they do that? -- a great question. #
  • You hear about native American groups in the West who associate places in their home landscape with events that took place there--historical events and even events before the firm remembering of historical time, perhaps mythological events, perhaps versions of old events that have been smoothed into poetry and vision through retelling. You could see these old stories tied to place as lessons to be memorized, as ways to pin oneself to unchanging knowledge and tradition, I suppose, but maybe they have equal power as points of example and deliberation. Reflect on these touchstones of story, a lively humane cultural tradition might say to its young people. These stories offer you something, if you open yourself to their richness. Not meant for memorizing, I'd guess, but meditating. #
  • I was once upon a time a writing teacher, and sometimes I went to conferences and listened to talks by other writing teachers about the work we did. Possibly the worst talk I ever heard was about the diagrams writing textbooks use to illustrate the process of writing.#
  • Some diagrams present the process as a line, starting here and heading over there, the speaker said, pulling several of these diagrams up on the screen beside him at the front of the room. These diagrams tended to begin with doing research on a topic, and they’d head on over to forming a main idea and choosing an organization. They’d end with revising and proofreading, he said. #
  • But some diagrams acknowledged that a writer keeps thinking and sometimes has to go back and do more research, sometimes has to come up with a new organization, sometimes has to toss away a portion of a draft or a whole draft and begin a good bit of the work again. These diagrams tended to be circular, like a snake trying to eat its own tail. No telling how many times a writer would need to circle through the elements of the process before becoming satisfied with the draft. These diagrams make clear that writing isn’t a fully linear process, the speaker said.#
  • And then there were some outliers among the diagrams. There were Venn diagrams and clouds of inputs linked by arrows to a central processing unit. There were diagrams where different colors of ink played a role.#
  • The speaker’s thesis seemed to be, “There sure are a lot of diagrams in writing textbooks.” At the time, and in my hazy memory of that day in the 1980s, neither the thesis nor the diagrams help me think clearly about how writing works. Nevertheless, I’m sure a couple of lines were added to the speaker’s resumé going forward, holding their own on an interior page for years to come.#
  • Maybe the resumé was the only thing at stake that day, which is a shame. People need strong public voices, for one thing, and if for no other reason than that, writing matters. Talking about writing as if writing matters — a worthy goal. It needs to be accomplished not like the motto at the base of the statue on the college campus at the start of the movie Animal House, which as the camera pans in on the noble figure atop the pedestal we eventually see below him the words “Knowledge Is Good” . . .#
  • If writing matters, it matters in a given context. It’s good or less good in a given context. That talk about diagrams was a lot of language with next to no significant context to give it weight. With no context, writing can’t matter.#
  • I had a thought about blogrolls the other day, which is that they are a way of saying to readers, “This is what I see as the context for my work. For what I hope can be our shared work.” We plainly need a tool like that.#
  • The people too are the context for “my work, and I hope for our shared work.” We need a tool that’s good for bringing people together to affiliate on a shared project. We need tools for sharing the process work and the results of a project. And a tool for allowing people to find a way to participate. To some degree we have these tools, and to some degree not. Context for the project, people involved, process markers, ongoing results, ways to participate, ways to illustrate and test the results out in the world, ways to insist upon and honor the real stakes in people’s lives.#
  • We were in Scotland for several days. Many things to mention, but here’s one for starters. On the spectrum with “A) Enjoying hearing music as part of who we are” at one end and “B) Enjoying making music as part of who we are” at the other end, the people we met were oriented toward B much more than folks I know back home. The US leans toward A, I think.#
  • And on the spectrum between “C) Enjoying hearing recorded music” and ��D) Enjoying hearing live music” here too I thought I saw a difference. People we met in Scotland leaned toward D more and back home we lean toward C, I think.#
  • And on the spectrum between “E) Enjoying big famous professional traveling shows” and “F) Enjoying local musicians” I also thought there was a difference. US: tilts toward A, C, and E, and Scotland: tilts toward B, D, and F. That’s how it felt during our brief stay.#
  • One part of the evidence: On a rural walk, we met a man at the end of his driveway and talked with him for maybe ten minutes. As part of a story he was telling, he sang a song in Gaelic to us, a song he said was deeply, historically meaningful to people from a region of the UK.#
  • Background: Part of the positive energy of the first Obama presidential campaign had to do with a new use of online knowledge-sharing, community-building, and event-promoting that gave people a new feeling that they could be a meaningful part of a national campaign on their local level. It felt like a new method of politics that made people hopeful about democracy in a fresh, concrete way.#
  • The minute the Obama team got to Washington, they shut down the website. “Thanks for your help during the election,” they seemed to say to us, “but we’ll take things from here. We’ve got this. Go back to your personal lives. No longer think of yourselves as active citizens on any sort of regular basis. We can run the democracy without you.”#
  • It felt bad to see this happen, and it seemed like a grievous misjudgment and a profound misunderstanding of people, of politics, of hope, of — well, you name it. Damn, damn, damn, some of us thought at the time. #
  • The point: Fast forward to today, with the democracy far more imperiled than in 2008. The old tool in moth balls somewhere, hard to remember it in any detail. A new tool is on the table, AI. So, we know for sure that the old tool made people feel good, made people feel like active citizenship was for them. Now, with a powerful new tool available, what could it add to the positive things the old tool could already do? Just wondering. Wondering very seriously.#
  • For starters, maybe it could do something like this tilted in the direction of much-needed active citizenship. And more . . .#
  • Looks like we’ve set things up so it’s easier and more profitable to destroy a company like Red Lobster than it is to build one. #
  • Seth Abramson suggests that a high-profile career criminal avoiding deep legal trouble until late in his 70s is not a good sign about the United States of America. Tristan Snell has some clues about how that happens.#
  • A good blogroll sketches the context of your project.#
  • You’re saying, “These are the writers who help me think or find sources or build work teams or get the word out.”#
  • Most of the time, sharing the context links for your project is probably a wise and generous thing to do.#
  • This will seems too simple, and speaking of another person or another people too simply is a cruelty, I know. But I have to start thinking somewhere.#
  • The suffering of two people or two peoples cannot possibly be the same, cannot possibly be equal. To speak of suffering with the tools of mathematics is, I think, a fresh brutality.#
  • The suffering of two peoples is not equal, but I start thinking, because I have to start somewhere, with what two peoples have in common.#
  • Within reach here at my table I have two texts. #
  • The first is an illustrated directory of historical synagogues of Europe, written by C. H. Krinsky. It was published a couple of decades after World War II. Open to almost any page and you will find evidence of the creativity with which human atrocities are invented by the worst among us. Something different on every page. I haven't tried to read the book yet, I just open it at random from time to time. There is a page where I learn of paving stones being removed from streets that were paved during German occupation; the stones, which had first been grave stones, were being preserved now in the vestibule of a synagogue that had been restored to serve as a museum of witness. Even a cemetery could be an affront to the Nazis; even the grave markers had to be laid low one way or another, had to be flattened, de-spiritualized, de-historicized, de-personalized. Made lowly and mundane, made coarse by walking over and driving on.#
  • The second text near me at the desk is not equal to the first, because saying one life is equal to another is vulgar and grotesque:#
  • In the 1950s, a reporter for The New Yorker, A. J. Liebling, interviewed a retired Turkish military officer who when he was a younger man marched his troops through Gaza toward Egypt. His approach to Gaza, he said, was to leave no house standing. Liebling reports that the fellow, who things have been named after since those days . . . the fellow accompanied his comment about leaving no house standing with a gesture of his hand, moving horizontally across the space in front of him, implying a land where things have all been flattened.#
  • In a time of war that follows decades of animosity and war, it's difficult to imagine the emissaries of two peoples meeting at a grand table to talk meaningfully about peace. What could they have in common, except the one thing: Putting the < and > and = signs away for now, both peoples have been the victims of atrocity. I reach this question:#
  • Has that common ground ever been enough to start a conversation about making a shared future? How would a conversation starting there possibly go? I don't know.#
  • Some coincidences:#
  • Two friends were born in the same week, in the spring of the year I was born, many years ago. If memory serves me, each year during his birthday week one of the friends sends out a note reminding anyone who cares to ponder it, saying something like this: If there's something you were put on this earth to accomplish, better get to it.#
  • Since my birthday is only a handful of weeks earlier, that annual spring message speaks to me a little louder , a little more symbolically, than it might without these personal connections and coincidences in place. #
  • And that other friend, born that same spring week those many years ago? He was in my circle of close friends from school more than fifty years ago. No other non-family member saw so many decades of my life. And a few weeks ago he passed away, short of his spring birthday.#
  • He held his cards close to his chest through much of his life. I suspect he thought he had not accomplished as much as he could have. I had trouble persuading him that he would never know the ripples of influence that moved outward from him, from his careful reflection, from his moral character, from his inventive decisions. I suspect that he thought that what you accomplish in life is something you see and know clearly, can have confidence in and can name.#
  • I'm not sure that we all can have that sense of clarity. I suspect that he doubted himself and his accomplishments in the weeks of his final illness. Introvert though he was, those ripples were always emanating from him over the years, influencing others at near and far distances. There were people in need he served, for one thing -- who can measure that accomplishment? #
  • So expecting the surviving friend's annual note to come this year during their spring birthday week, I find myself thinking of tangible and intangible ways a person can satisfy its tolling of the calendar bell. Both kinds of accomplishment are very real, but the intangible, the ideas spun out into the community, say, the motions of spirit and example, the naming of standards for our actions, the creativity, the calling for creativity, all these and other un-measurables, well, yes, we'd better get to those with some urgency too.#
  • We would come to understand the many tasks, focused around one question that demanded an answer. This we would call the work of a generation. This work would define us. We would be known for this work as long as our society endured in its current form.#
  • But how to discover the question that would guide the work? Where would we meet in order to talk it over? Who would speak at the meetings, bringing the evidence of what lived experiences and what expertise?#
  • Who would call the first of these meetings? How would people be persuaded to attend? How would they be tempted to believe in the possibilities? How would the word get out and be noticed in a society already flooded with words? What would tempt people to attend to the word of the first meeting if they once noticed it? #
  • What information and conversations would prepare the ground, as it were, for the seed of the early meetings? What weathers water what was planted there? Who would provide and provoke the inquiries that had a hope of discovering the question that could, in time, form up the idea of the work of a generation? #
  • How could an agreement be reached to undertake the worthy work of a generation? What about the naysayers who remained?#
  • Who would set out the work? Who would clarify the work as it was being set out? Who would refine the plans along the way, based on what conversations and what inquiries? Who would extend the schedule for some years if work remained?#
  • What kinds of celebrations would be held as the work of that generation concluded? Who would tell young people about the work of the elder generation? Who would persuade them of the honor of good work? Who would urge and tempt them to look for the next quiding question? Where could they begin to meet? Who would call the first meeting?#

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