Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If these were ordinary times, progressives might get away with casual images of our political opponents. Those who disagree “lack information,” or “remain prejudiced,” or are “gripped by an emotion like hate.” Reassured, we can return to informational outreach or protests or confrontations and hope that makes a difference.
It is right to hold sorrow in check, so that we can fulfil our roles, unburdened. To consider a task properly we need unbroken intelligence of receptive senses and an unfettered imagination.
The wall signifies a desire to reduce the number of newcomers and to preserve a way of life that is threatened economically and culturally by the globalism embraced by the country’s bi-coastal elites. Stop the invasion of newcomers and you will stop the forces bearing down on a threatened way of life in flyover country; so goes the visceral logic.
Think of the Trump team, then, as a presidency in search of an emergency. Without a suitable crisis, prospects are fairly bleak. But given a financial meltdown, an epic natural disaster, a war, or a spectacular terrorist attack, opportunities open up.
For the last year, some residents of Boulder, Colorado, have been locked in a heated debate about whether the city should allow housing cooperatives. Advocates argue that cooperative housing counters gentrification, adding that electric, gas, and water consumption of co-op house residents is significantly less than the average resident.
Global society has come unhinged from its political, socioeconomic, and ecological reality-moorings as we’ve known them. We’re in the whitewater rapids of what could be a downward spiral toward system collapse, and/or the brink of an unprecedented opportunity for the evolution of human consciousness. In both cases we’re headed into uncharted waters.
President Dwight Eisenhower wrote his name in concrete by building the interstate highway system. President Donald Trump has made infrastructure one of his signature issues, perhaps because he too likes to write his name on big projects.
I want to share a story with you today that I’ve not shared before on this blog. I was moved by something I saw on Twitter to the effect that the future will not remember Trump, but the future will remember the remarkable things done by those mobilising to oppose him.
It is not unusual for an in-coming administration to postpone the release of lingering rules promulgated by a predecessor. Trump’s campaign promises and a recent statement by House majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) give a more ominous cast to an otherwise common practice, however.
I was twenty-five years old when I started working for Transition US almost four years ago, and since then one of my strong desires has been to engage more young people in our movement. I’ve seen the energy and passion young people bring to social change work.
The regular mechanisms of political narration are breaking down. The pollsters lose confidence in their methods, the pundits struggle to offer authoritative explanations for events that they laughed off as wild improbabilities only months before.
It’s important to say that there are certain things that individuals, families and communities can do that are irreplaceable, that there is no government proxy for. The difficulty with Noam Chomsky’s approach is that actually one of the things that people do really well, is to help each other in times of crisis.
