By Jade Begay, YES! magazine
In my humble opinion, if these are our goals, we must get used to and comfortable with people being in dedicated, committed, and prolonged uprising. In fact, I believe that’s what this “new normal” is, and I hope that these protests go well into November and beyond until we see accountability and real, tangible actions taken by cities, states, and the country to abolish racism and white supremacy.
By George Lakey, Waging Nonviolence
The initiative of the Movement for Black Lives needs to be picked up by others. The vision can be enlarged to advance key goals of each of the progressive movements operating today.
By Nadine Bloch, Folabi Olagbaju, Waging Nonviolence
“Defund the Police!” has moved from fringe idea to nearly law of the land so fast, pundits have motion sickness. It shows what can happen when progressive ideas are backed by true people power in a kind of “People’s Shock Doctrine.”
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
It has been an awful and amazing two weeks – a time of reckoning that is long overdue, a time of coming together that, despite the tragic circumstances, has been enlivening. What is so remarkable is that the Black Lives Matter protests have been nested within a larger, unprecedented trauma, the pandemic.
By John Foran, Resilience.org
Each day now feels like a decisive day in the decade of decision that we have the fate to be alive in. Speeding up the pace at which we slow down. Slowing down the pace of destruction. Speeding up the pace of creation. Slowing down the machines. Speeding up our imaginations, going deeper in our dreams, and walking further, together, asking questions about the future we want. Right now.
By Paul Engler, Waging Nonviolence
Whether the Sanders campaign seizes this opportunity, or an alternate framework for collective action arises, a mass movement response to the coronavirus pandemic cannot come too soon. For our own sake, and that of our society as a whole, let us help the drive toward solidarity emerge.
By Adoración Guamán, Transnational Institute
The future is uncertain. Attempts to impose Lex Mercatoria will continue but there will also be social victories along the way, along with the increasingly widespread conviction that we are facing a profound and epoch-making alternative: ‘democracy or markets’.
By Dougald Hine, Bella Caledonia
Like the White Queen in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, I have been practising, doing my best to believe impossible things before breakfast. Could these experiments with slower, deliberative modes of democracy carry the currents of indignation, transform them into a turning aside from business as usual? Could there be political leaders who come around to the need for such a turning, in the face of the enormity of the climate crisis?
By Marc Hudson, The Conversation
Extinction Rebellion was once criticised by other activists for “love bombing the cops”, but now it has found itself labelled a terror threat. In a guide sent to teachers by counter-terrorism police, the non-violent group’s logo and activities were described to help them spot students who may be involved.
By Amanda Follett Osgood, The Tyee
Tensions have been high in the area since a Dec. 31 B.C. Supreme Court decision that granted Coastal GasLink an injunction barring land defenders from blocking access to the pipeline work sites.
By David Fopp, Medium
The world is on fire. We need a global political movement in the broadest, not party-political sense. We cannot go on watching the rainforest burn, the German coal power plants produce CO2 and people as well as millions of animals die in Australia´s bushfires. We need a common and global reaction.
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian blog
The nonviolent strategist George Lakey argues that polarisation brings clarity and a volatility that makes positive change more possible. We have the polarisation and the disillusionment, and with perspective about how we got here and when we won, we can claim the possibilities in the decade to come.