And yet in crises, as I found out when I studied disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, people often revert spontaneously to a more communitarian sense of self, and in that deeper connection find meaning, purpose, power—and sometimes even joy amid the ruins. I have often thought, over the past fifteen months or so, that part of how we know this is a crisis, a disaster, an emergency is in the way people have shaken themselves awake to respond. People find that they are members of civil society, that they care about strangers and about society, that they will sometimes change or risk their lives for these things, and that their sense of self expands as they move into a more public and collective arena.
I feared after the election that people would be intimidated into public deference and private indifference. After 9/11 the Bush administration skillfully manipulated the event and the response to make patriotism a sort of blind obedience from which few dared dissent in the years after. One of the joys of this ugly era is that hardly anyone seems to fear the Trump administration; his every tweet is greeted with a host of responses by ordinary people that range from mockery to scorn to denunciation as a criminal. In fact, if anything protects this country from going full-scale authoritarian, it is the insubordinate nature of so many of the people here, as well as their commitment to the principles that this country has often declared but just as often has failed to adhere to.
It is not enough to oppose tyranny and corruption in your heart, to feel distress, to care. You have to act. But those feelings are a foundation, and real, practical opposition is all around us. Hundreds of women are running for elected office for the first time and winning, and Democrats are winning in traditionally Republican districts, because of massive engagement on the part of voters who do not agree with Trump and the Republican Party. (The Democratic Party is, obviously, far from perfect, but it is the main alternative to the deranged far-right Republican Party, and many of the individual candidates are more progressive and more courageous than the party leadership.)
In the spring of 2018 the Washington Post reported:
One in five Americans have protested in the streets or participated in political rallies since the beginning of 2016. Of those, 19 percent said they had never before joined a march or a political gathering. Overwhelmingly, recently motivated activists are critical of Trump. Thirty percent approve of the president, and 70 percent disapprove, according to the poll. And many said they plan to be more involved politically this year, with about one-third saying they intend to volunteer or work for a 2018 congressional campaign.
There is no precedent for this level of engagement.
The high school students of Parkland, Florida, who survived the Valentine’s Day 2018 massacre at their school, brought new energy and constituencies into the gun-control movement. A million students are said to have walked out of their classes on March 14, the one-month anniversary of the massacre in that high school. Well over a million took part in more than 450 demonstrations across the country ten days later, on March 24, in the event dubbed March for Our Lives. The Crowd Counting Consortium reports that there were more than 2,500 political demonstrations in the US in one month this spring. The feminist response to the October 2018 revelations about movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment and assault has led to the outing and firing of many men like him, and some of the fury may be a side-effect of having a serial sexual assailant in the White House. Both the feminist and anti-gun activists seem to recognize that the particulars are connected to broader questions about power, authority, gender, race, and equality or its opposite.
Labor and education are under attack, but underpaid teachers organized a successful strike in the impoverished state of West Virginia; Oklahoma teachers are now also on strike, as of this writing; and educators in Arizona and North Carolina have struck as well. There are individual campaigns—a fight to protect an immigrant man in Kansas, for example—that people have passionately joined. A strong fight for voting rights has been launched (part of why Trump won his minority victory was the suppression of millions of votes, thanks to an ongoing Republican strategy to win by warring on democracy).
I am not convinced we are winning, but I am glad we are at last fighting. Some of us. It’s a chaotic time, as some old-fashioned conservatives take aim at the Trump administration and sometimes even at a Republican Party they feel no longer represents them, and some hardliner leftists are sidelined by their disdain for electoral politics and their lack of faith that better arrangements are possible. Liberals and moderates subscribe passionately to those values, and this may be their finest hour. They are the backbone of what gets called the Resistance.
Sometimes the state of our union seems like an absurdist thriller film that we would not have believed was possible, let alone likely, let alone real, had we been told about it a couple of years ago. That a dignified federal civil servant from a privileged New England background and an adult entertainment actress and director from the Deep South—Robert Mueller III and Stormy Daniels—are together laying siege to the citadel of the Trump administration is both hilarious and terrifying and unbelievably weird.
One complicating factor is that this administration has been in effect a slow-motion coup, in how it gained power and how it exercises power, violating the rule of law and the standards of the office a little and then a little more and a little more, profiting and wrecking as they go. The White House and cabinet conduct themselves as a hostile outside force bent on breaking the public educational system and crushing support for the vulnerable (including the poor, the disabled, children, students, immigrants and refugees, trans people), the diplomatic corps and the bureaucracies that keep this country running, the protections for the American people and the environment, the separation of powers, and the accountability and transparency of government.
They came to destroy, and they are well along with the project, with the help of the Republicans of the legislative branch who apparently no longer care about the law, the truth, or the well-being of the country. Some fear that the administration will suddenly seize power and declare an unchecked authoritarian regime; others note that this has been happening gradually. Two factors countering the attempt are the chaotic incompetence of the Trump administration and the watchful outrage of the general public. A third might be the revulsion of longtime government employees in many sectors, from the military to the intelligence community to the scientists and administrators across the nation. An immigration official resigned in 2018, saying, “I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts.”
The sorrow and fury, the sleeplessness and indignation, are not in themselves powers, but they testify to a public-spirited population that may be able to take back a country stolen by a corrupted election and unpunished violations of law. And the moment may soon come when we must try.
In Praise of Indirect Consequences
(2017)
In February 2017, 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 National Security Agency (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 twelve years after Ellsberg risked his future for the sake of his principles. Actions often ripple far beyond their immediate objective, and remembering this is a reason to live by principle and act in the 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 January 2017 Women’s March, whether the reason it matt
ers 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 twenty 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. Fifteen years later, I still use the term 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 to write it ourselves.
Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s an informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we might play in it. Hope looks forward but draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections. It means not fetishizing 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 2017 documentary about James Baldwin I Am Not Your Negro in which Robert Kennedy predicts, in 1968, that in forty years there will be a Black president. It’s an astonishing prophecy, as Barack Obama won the presidential election exactly four decades later, but Baldwin jeers at the comment 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 them.
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 six thousand chapters of the grassroots organizing group Indivisible reportedly formed since the election, new and fortified immigrant rights groups, religious groups, one of the biggest demonstrations in US history with the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, and so much more.
I’ve also been worried 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 just when the momentum is building and victories are within reach. This is a dangerous mistake I’ve seen over and over. To see where we are, you need a complex calculus of change instead of the simple arithmetic of short-term cause and effect.
There’s a bookshop I love in Manhattan, the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, which I’ve gone to for years for a bite to eat and a superb selection of used books. In fall 2016, my friend Gavin Browning, who works at Columbia University and 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, prevention, 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 all these 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 also 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 United States 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, from the lasting effect of the best actions, not only the worst. Of an indivisible world in which everything matters.
Occupy Wall Street was mocked and described as chaotic and ineffectual in its first weeks; then, when it had 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. The thriving offshoots of local Occupies 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 defeated a pipeline. You could go past that to note that merely delaying completion beyond January 1, 2017, 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 nation 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 five hundred 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 from 1969 to 1971, 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 t
he 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, to see that everything changes and the most dramatic changes are often the most unforeseen.
The 1970s antinuclear movement was a potent force in its time, now seldom remembered, though its influence is still with us. In her important book Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism, L. A. 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 England. Despite creative tactics, great movement building, and extensive media coverage against the Seabrook nuclear power station in New Hampshire, the activists did not stop the plant. But 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.
Call Them by Their True Names Page 15