Protect Your Peace - So You Can Engage

Dear friends and loved ones,

How are you holding up? It's a lot, right? A highlight of yesterday for me was the somewhat surprising and thoroughly satisfying defeat of H.R. 9495 in the US House of Representatives. This was a bill which could have allowed Trump's Treasury Dept to unilaterally revoke tax-exempt status from non-profits it deems as "supporting terrorism." The bill needed a two-thirds affirmative vote to pass, and it didn't get it, perhaps in part because a slew of folks (myself included) called their elected representatives to weigh in. Trump can and does ignore public opinion, but at some level he'll be a lame duck for his entire second term, whereas our elected representatives still need to be thinking about how they'll stay in power, so...

Another highlight for me yesterday was this excerpt from an interview with award-winning Chicago-based investigative journalist Jamie Kalven:

"With this election, we’ve joined the rest of the world. Think of all the other nations that live under moronic, venal leadership. There are models for honorable political lives in those circumstances, but those models are quite different from our dominant notions of citizenship in which we follow politics as a spectator sport and occasionally vote. All over the world there are people in repressive settings who find ways to live as free human beings, act in solidarity with their neighbors, and fashion strategies to resist state power. We’re going to need to get good at practicing that kind of politics.

One of the dangers is that people will instead become demoralized and retreat into denial, that they will seek refuge amid the pleasures and fulfillments of private life. That would give carte blanche to power. There was a term used in central Europe to describe those who opted to retreat into private life under totalitarianism. They were called “internal emigres.” That is certainly tempting at a time like this: to live one’s life in the wholly private realm, enjoying the company of friends, good food and drink, the pleasures of literature and music, and so on. Privileged sectors of our society are already heavily skewed that way. It’s a real danger at a time like this. If we withdraw from public engagement now, we aid and abet that which we deplore."

I hope you will stay engaged, or prepare to be engaged.

Thanks for listening.

in peace,

Shelley