Demonstrators continue to protest the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police officer on June 03, 2020 in New York City. The white police officer, Derek Chauvin, has been charged with second-degree murder and further charges are pending for the three other officers who participated in the arrest. Floyd’s death, the most recent in a series of deaths of black Americans at the hands of the police, has set off days and nights of protests across the country. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Amid a wave of
sustained protest in cities across the U.S. and the globe against police
brutality and racial injustice, author and activist Naomi Klein on Thursday
reminded those experiencing President Donald Trump’s America that it is
precisely during times when the government is pushing hardest to discourage
dissent that massive displays of public opposition are needed most.
While Trump this week
has dispatched with calls for calm and unity in favor of “law and order” machismo and threats of
deploying U.S. soldiers, more police, and federal agents to put down
demonstrations spurred by last week’s killing of George Floyd by police in
Minneapolis, Klein in a Twitter post reprised a warning she first issued at the
outset of the president’s term: “When they say we don’t have the right to
protest, that is the moment to flood the streets.”
“One moment when
it is incredibly important to resist, is in that moment when they are trying to
scare you,” Klein said during the 2017 event in Chicago. “In that
moment, when they are telling you to stay home, that is when you go out. When
they are saying stay home—go out.”
Individuals and
communities nationwide have demonstrated their inherent understanding of
Klein’s guidance. Even after Trump had Lafayette Square outside the White House
violently cleared of nonviolent protesters on Monday and threatened to send
U.S. soldiers to patrol other U.S. city streets this week, the daily and
nightly demonstrations, as Common Dreams previously reported, have only grown in strength and size
as the week progressed.
Klein told the
audience in 2017 that “we won’t know when it will happen,” but that
when it does people should “flood the streets” en masse. “That
matters more than anything,” she said to applause. “When they try to
take away the right to protest, flood the streets, ok? Get ready.”
The event was related
to Klein’s new book that year, titled “No Is Not Enough,” which offered an initial framework for understanding
Trump’s rise to power as well as a blueprint for how best to resist his obvious
racist and fascist tendencies.
Published on Thursday, June 04, 2020 by Common Dreams. Their work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
“The symbolism of the seesaw is just magical.” (Photo: Twitter/Channel 2 KWGN)
Two California professors built three pink seesaws on the U.S.-Mexico border to allow families to play together and to bring “joy, excitement, and togetherness” to both sides of the divide.
Installed along the steel border fence on the outskirts of El Paso in Texas and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, the seesaws are the invention of Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an associate professor of design at San José State University, who first came up with the concept 10 years ago.
The wall installation quickly garnered praise on Twitter.
San Francisco protesters of the U.S. immigration ban hold signs reading “Imagine All The People” and “People For Peace”. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen
Part Two: BREAKING THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION
by Stefan Schindler
Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
How do wars start? Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.
Karl Kraus
The battles of the Sixties may someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose dimensions we have yet to grasp.
Mike Marqusee
President Donald Trump makes a
telling point when he refers to the mainstream news media as “fake news.” There’s a lot of truth in his accusation, the
dimensions of which ought to be honestly explored. Behold: those dimensions have indeed been
explored, with awesome authenticity and shocking revelations, by Michael
Parenti, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, and Noam Chomsky, all of whom
ought to have won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. They have long been denied such
recognition. Had their insights been
widely discussed in the U.S. “marketplace of ideas,” Nixon, Reagan, Cheney-Bush
and Trump would never have risen to the heights of power.
The elephantiastical lies of the
Republican Party – for example: American-trained death squads in Central
America are “freedom fighters;” Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons; global
warming is a “liberal hoax;” mega-tax-breaks for the mega-rich will make
everybody happy and secure – such lies too often succeed thanks to a criminally
complicit Democratic Party, a mainstream news media owned by a handful of
Republican oligarchs, an historically illiterate citizen population who (in
Noam Chomsky’s astute observation) “don’t know they don’t know,” and an
educational system designed primarily to ignorate, manipulate, stupefy and
confuse.
When President Trump slings his
accusation of “fake news” at American journalists – usually exempting the Fox
News Network owned by right-wing Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and
championed by Newt Gingrich – he only does so in order to lie about his lies.
And why not? It worked for Ronald Reagan, who turned
“liberal” into a dirty word, perpetuating the myth of America’s “liberal
media.”
That Gingrich and Murdoch succeeded
in turning American political discourse into a poisonous swamp is largely the
fault of the traditional American mainstream news media, which perpetuates the
ignoration that is the primary function of American education.
Thomas Jefferson recognized the
problem, noting: “A country cannot long remain ignorant and free.” American citizens have lost more freedoms
than they know, thanks to the most unpatriotic act in American history: the
post-9/11 Congressional passing of the unread 340 pages of the Cheney-Bush “USA
Patriot Act.”
Democracy cannot survive the
shredding of civil rights, nor can it long endure sophistry and deception. It might be worthwhile, then, to pause a
moment to reflect upon the words truth
and trust. In his book On the Meaning of Human Being, Richard Oxenberg notes:
The English word ‘truth’ is related
to the Middle English ‘troth,’ whose principal meaning is ‘trust’ (to be-troth someone … is to enter into a
relation of trust ….) A truthful
account, then, is one that is maximally trustworthy. … That Plato had [such an] understanding of
truth is evident from his association of the true and the good. [The true is good – has maximal value – because it is worth our trust.]
To restore truth and trust in
American social discourse and electoral politics, it is necessary to oppose the
Weapons of Mass Dysfunction – deception, distortion, distraction – employed by
the National Security State to bind its citizens with chains of illusion.
Let us give profound thanks that progress toward honesty and enlightenment is now being made. Although fraught with danger, and subject to abuse, the internet has nevertheless become a major instrument for awakening, as evidenced by websites like Common Dreams, Political Animal Magazine, and Engaging Peace.
This is a timely breakthrough in
communication, enhancing solidarity among peacemakers and justice-seekers in
the present conflict-ridden crucible of history.
John Le Carre provides context:
In
our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great
god of indifference. We protected the
strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and
friends of the most disgusting potentates.
And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend
our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.
Having been betrayed by a corrupt
political system, we are now in the early stages of America’s third Civil
War. The second Civil War was embodied
in The Spirit of The Sixties, when the civil rights and anti-war movements –
quietly but greatly aided by Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando – coalesced into
an anti-establishment revolution, emphasizing peace, justice, gender rights,
Earth Day, holistic health, nuclear disarmament, egalitarian economics, and
authentically edifying education.
The Reagan counter-revolution
succeeded in crushing that national outburst of activism, hope, and pragmatic
idealism. It was aided in doing so by
the pseudo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, embodied in the Trilateral
Commission, which in 1975 published The
Crisis of Democracy. The
crisis? Citizen activism in the body
politic, hoping to influence a government supposedly “of, by, and for the
people.” Citizen participation in the
functioning of democracy was, and still is, considered outrageous by what C.
Wright Mills called “the power elite.”
Yet citizen activism was the origin
and impetus for the American Revolution; for the anti-slavery “abolitionist”
movement; for the women’s-right-to-vote “suffragette” movement; and for the
1960s and 1970s anti-war and civil rights movements. Today, with an echo of Thomas Paine’s “these
are the times that try men’s souls,” citizen insistence on a just society
remains our only hope for democracy, peace, and ecological sanity.
To engage or not to engage in self-education, global citizenship, and active resistance to the forces of mega-wealth and tyranny – that is the question which every citizen now faces, and upon which the future of our children and grandchildren depends.
Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry
for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and
Peace Abbey; and author of America’s
Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War. His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.
Protestors rally against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh as they march on Capitol Hill, September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. On Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault, is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
As the rolling saga of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination progresses ― with more allegations emerging and staunch defenders of the nominee making proclamations on the Senate floor and cable news ― I, like many sexual assault survivors, have begun living in a kind of bifurcated time. I am in the present, in which the news continues to relentlessly unfurl. And I am in the past, where the pain lives, and it keeps pulling me back to the worst moments of my life.
On the one hand, I am living my life, here in September of 2018. I am doing my work; I am drinking my coffee. I am typing with hands still brown from the summer sun; the cold rain of autumn cools my cheeks.
“In the real con game, we are asked not to take it personally when people in the highest levels of our government attack survivors of sexual assault.”
And on the other hand, I am suspended in a series of awful moments, recalling themselves to me from puberty onward. I am recalling each grope, each unwanted incursion into my body, each mortification of my female flesh, and I am trapped in visceral sense-memories of rank sweat and alcohol and a flood of stress-borne cortisol.
I am living in two spaces at once: in the world of accumulated trauma, and the contemporary news cycle that evokes it. And I’m not alone. Over the past week, sexual assault survivors of every gender have poured out their experiences on hashtags like #WhyIDidntReport and #BelieveSurvivors. On Monday, social media was flooded by photos from a national walkout by black-clad, solemn-faced survivors and allies, a rebuttal to the casual dismissal offered in the Senate and on Fox News and ― perhaps worst of all ― from the president, who has casually and cruelly rebutted many credible assault allegations against himself.
Liiving in bifurcated time means reeling from Trump’s casual dismissal of Deborah Ramirez’s claim, reported in The New Yorker, that a college-aged Kavanaugh took out his penis and put it in her face against her will. “She admits that she was drunk,” the president of the United States said. And inside me, an inner Rolodex of humiliations unfurls, and I feel cramped with shame and rage, feel marked, inside, with red blazons of indignity.
For all of last week and this one, I have lived between these two worlds: the perpetually moving present moment and the one that doesn’t move, the harsh-toned film clips of past assaults, that click into place and play under my drooping eyelids. Sleep has come reluctantly; it has memories to fight.
All the while, the vote to confirm Kavanaugh is proceeding apace, though it has descended into a kind of brittle, hideous black comedy, like a John Hughes movie with its ugly underbelly exposed.
At issue is not only the judge’s errant penis, or his alleged attempted rape of Christine Blasey Ford, but also his virginity: He told Fox News host Martha MacCallum that he remained a virgin throughout high school and “for many years after.” An immaculately conceived defense: the Virgin Brett. A man who was a fellow student at Yale alleges that Kavanaugh had contradicted this statement back in their freshman year.
Renate Schroeder Dolphin, a woman who had signed a letter of support for Kavanaugh, discovered, to her chagrin, that she had been the subject of a seemingly sexualized proto-meme in the Georgetown Prep yearbook. Kavanaugh and others, including eight other members of the football team, listed themselves as “Renate Alumni,” which some former classmates said meant the boys had in some sense “graduated” her.
“I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things,” she told The New York Times, “but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way.”
Kavanaugh was asked on Fox News about allegedly participating in a gang rape, pursuant to questions raised by the publicity-inclined lawyer Michael Avenatti. Needless to say, most of us have not faced a gang-rape questionnaire in any job interview. Most of us have not had to.
And yet even this has not sufficed to derail his nomination ― or slow the stream of defenders rushing to declare any woman coming forward about Kavanaugh’s past as participants in a “smear job.” Christine Blasey Ford will testify on Thursday with no corroborating witness; the one man she named as a direct witness to the events she described, Mark Judge, has not been subpoenaed by the Senate. Nothing has deterred the assemblage of distinguished lawmakers prepared to elevate this man to the nation’s highest court, with its absolute control over the legislative fate of women’s bodies. In the president’s words, the women coming forward are part of “a con game.”
But it has begun to feel as if the real con game is the broad expectation that women will go along peaceably.
The real con game, the big lie, was women ever hoping to be considered equal.
In this con game, survivors work to square our poisoned memories, the frozen time of trauma, with the present, in which powerful men defend other powerful men against anything and through anything, heedless of their own descent into indignity.
In the real con game, we are asked not to take it personally when people in the highest levels of our government attack survivors of sexual assault.
Over the past two weeks, a mewling chorus of fear has swelled on the right. The idea, as put by Trumpist social media provocateurs Diamond and Silk, that “today it’s Kavanaugh, tomorrow it could be your brother, your father your husband or your son.”
The assumption, of course, is that having committed or committing sexual assault is not what men should fear; rather, they ought to fear the retribution of victims. Another implication is that allegations of sexual abuse are random-function, un-anchored in truth. That they are a catching plague dispersed on an ill wind, which, if uncontained, will infect the innocent.
As Slate columnist Lili Loofbourow put it: “Is it any surprise that men would panic at the realization that the system that they could depend on to look the other way is fast eroding?”
I Googled my rapist this week. I looked through his Instagram photos. There he is, sharing a margarita with a woman I don’t know. There he is, sharing photos of a cat, making jokes about bagels. I never reported him, and he’s served no time. By all appearances, he’s doing fine.
I do not want him to be doing fine. I would like him to be afraid.
If I must live with my pain, I would like him to live with the fear, just under the surface, that what my body remembers so vividly can come disrupt his life, as it disrupts mine daily. I would like him to live with a little of the fear I’ve lived with my entire life, the same fear every woman I know lives with: the quiet safety protocols that I put in place for each date and each walk alone and each time I get drunk in public. Perhaps if he fears me, he cannot ignore me; perhaps if he fears me, I will be his equal at last.
I would like to think ― I do think ― that the pain we are pouring out to each other and to the world cannot be put back. That the women who walked out will become the women who take to the streets for Saturday’s March For Survivors. That the women arrayed in anti-Kavanaugh protests at the Capitol represent a small proportion of those of us who are willing to be galvanized by our pain. That, tired of being led by rape apologists and alleged rapists, we will become an army, with one hand covering our wounds and one hand pulling the lever for change. That our pain means something, and our pain means we are awake to what cannot be borne.
We, who are tired of living in the nightmares of the past and the Kabuki theater of the present, are ready to demand our answers, now. We have heard your fear, and we like it.
Note from Kathie MM: Thanks to Common Dreams for their essential journalistic work on behalf of peace and social justice and for making their articles publicly available.
