Start counting the victories

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, with his two-year-old granddaughter Isabelle Dobbs-Higginson on his lap and United Nations Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon looking on, signs the COP21 Climate Change Agreement on behalf of the United States during a ceremony on Earth Day, April 22, 2016, at the U.N. General Assembly Hall in New York, N.Y. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]*
by Kathie MM

Activism is probably the lifeblood of a democracy.  Despite the gloominess and scariness of recent governmental and corporate anti-democracy policies and behaviors, activism persists and can count its victories.

Many people are aware of the massive protests led by the Water Defenders against the Dakota Access Pipeline project last fall. Although Donald Trump is attempting to undo the success of that protest, the fight is not over yet, nor should it be.

Many people are also aware of and relieved concerning the huge and successful activist effort to resist Trump’s destruction of Obamacare,  and encouraged by actions from the judicial system to restrain his racist immigration orders regarding Muslim countries.

And lots of people have read of the hundreds of “town halls” going on across the country right now, where local citizens have challenged their political representatives regarding distressing issues.

However, it is likely that fewer people  know about other successful activist efforts that may be more local or fail to get the attention of the corporate media.

Here are  just a few examples:

Opportunities for more activism abound. Voices for peace and social justice, and respect for Mother Earth, unite.

Continuing through April 23, Resistance Recess: Town halls, and other outreach activities to politicians

April 22 Earth Day Protest March for Science .  Learn more about the achievements of activism on this day historically by clicking here

April 29, 2017  People’s Climate Mobilization

Lots more opportunities can be found at the World Without War  events list  aimed at achieving a world without war .

*Let’s not allow this victory to be shattered by the current GPS (greedy power structure) in DC.

 

The Sustaining Fires of Standing Rock: A Movement Grows

Beyond NoDAPL March on Washington, DC. Woman in red jacket speaking about her experiences as a water protector at Standing Rock. 8 December 2016. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Rob87438.

by Roy J. Eidelson

 Over the past year, a remote area of North Dakota has been the improbable and prophetic site of a struggle with profound ramifications for us all. The confrontation has pitted the Water Protectors — the Standing Rock Sioux, other Native American tribes, and their allies — against the oil profiteers of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. The source of conflict is completion of the $3.8 billion, thousand-mile Dakota Access Pipeline — the Black Snake — that Energy Transfer Partners has built to carry fracked oil from North Dakota to Illinois.

The current planned route for the pipeline takes it beneath the Missouri River treacherously close to the Standing Rock and other Sioux reservations. A serious leak will threaten the water supply of these tribes and millions of people who live further downstream. Meanwhile, pipeline construction has already caused irreparable harm to Native American ancestral burial grounds and sacred sites.

The Water Protectors

 Beginning last April, Water Protectors from across the country — indigenous and non-indigenous alike — began to gather in the thousands at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, established just north of the Standing Rock reservation. Around the camp’s sacred fires, they shared and honored the rituals, stories, and principles of community fundamental to the traditional values of the Lakota tribes: prayer, respect, compassion, honesty, generosity, humility, and wisdom.

At the same time, the Water Protectors sought to block construction of the final section of pipeline. Their non-violent acts of civil resistance were met with attack dogs, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, water cannons, aerial surveillance, and hundreds of arrests by militarized law-enforcement personnel. The standoff ended a few weeks ago when the Governor of North Dakota, citing safety concerns, issued an emergency evacuation order. Shortly thereafter, authorities forcibly shut down and razed the camp.

Assaults like those that took place at Standing Rock are really nothing new for our nation’s Native peoples. Their history of removal, dispossession, degradation, attempted forced assimilation, and betrayal at the hands of White America runs as long and as deep as the Missouri River itself. Spanning centuries, these experiences form a chronicle of unresolved grief and historical trauma, which Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart has described as “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over one’s lifetime and from generation to generation following loss of lives, land, and vital aspects of culture.”

The consequences of these brutal colonization practices are visible too in a range of cold, hard statistics. Today Native Americans have a median household income barely two-thirds that of the general population, and their poverty rate is nearly twice as large. They’re half as likely to have a college degree, and their life expectancy is six years shorter. They also suffer from higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, incarceration, depression, and PTSD, as well as suicide among their youth.

The survival of Native Americans, their diverse communities, and their rich cultures — despite hardship and oppression, and against such long odds — is a powerful testament to their extraordinary resilience. This abiding strength deserves greater recognition than it receives; like historical trauma, it too is transmitted across lives and generations. Shared narratives, traditional practices, spiritual teachings, the prayerful appreciation of time and place, and respect for the interconnectness of all things serve as crucial protective factors for indigenous tribes and their members.

The Oil Profiteers

 Compared to the Water Protectors who converged at Standing Rock, corporate oil profiteers are a very different breed. But they too have their sacred places: anywhere fossil fuels can be extracted from the ground at a handsome profit. They have rituals too: board meetings where successful ventures are celebrated and forays for new plunder are devised. And, of course, they have their own cherished stories: about the day they first struck it rich; or the time they duped a community into believing that fracking is risk-free; or the shrewd business deal that bankrupted their competition.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this contrast in cultural values. After all, consider the company profile for Energy Transfer Partners. Among its top institutional owners is Goldman Sachs, once famously described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Donald Trump — “I don’t believe in climate change” — was himself a high-profile investor until conflict-of-interest controversies during his presidential campaign reportedly forced him to sell his holdings. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was on the company’s board of directors until earlier this year. Perry’s response to the catastrophic BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico — ruled “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” by a federal judge — is memorable in its own right: “There are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.”

And above all there’s Kelcy Warren, the multi-billionaire CEO of Energy Transfer Partners. His business philosophy is dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest, as he once explained this way: “Like Mother Nature, the energy industry purges itself now and then. …I don’t wish any negatives on my friends, but the most wealth I’ve ever made is during the dark times.” So where was Warren while the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies were braving “dark times” during a bitter North Dakota winter in makeshift huts and tipis? He was probably more than comfortable in his 23,000 square-foot home on ten acres in Texas, with six bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and “a chip-and-putt green, a pole-vault pit, a four-lane bowling alley, and a 200-seat theater.”

A Movement Grows

 Energy Transfer Partners boasts that the nearly completed pipeline utilizes state-of-the-art safety measures. But comparable pledges have preceded other environmental disasters in the past. The Water Protectors also recognize that these assurances are essentially meaningless for another reason: any construction that encourages continued reliance on fossil fuels is inherently dangerous and potentially calamitous for the Earth and future generations. The world’s leading scientists long ago reached an overwhelming consensus that climate change and global warming are the result of human activity — especially the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas — and that among the adverse consequences are more destructive floods, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires.

The oil profiteers know this too, but they have hundreds of billions of dollars in annual profits at stake, and large shareholders who vigilantly watch the bottom-line. So greed overwhelms conscience and they resort to false-alarm mind games as part of a massive misinformation campaign, insisting that warnings of planetary peril are vastly overblown. Favorite appeals in their propaganda arsenal include disingenuous denials that climate change exists; bogus claims that scientists disagree about the facts; unfounded assertions that there’s no crisis because we’re capable of adapting to change; and deceitful efforts to portray environmentalists as radical extremists.

Three days after last November’s election, CEO Kelcy Warren was confident about the prospects for the Dakota Access Pipeline: “They will not stop our project. That’s naïve. They’re not stopping our project.” Such arrogance seems to come naturally to someone who’s grown accustomed to relying on friends in high places and his personal wealth — he gave over $100,000 to Trump’s campaign — to achieve self-aggrandizing goals. The words of Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, communicate humility instead: “We have no power…the only thing that we have is support from around the world.”

But this support and solidarity shouldn’t be underestimated. Regardless of the pipeline’s final disposition in the federal courts, Energy Transfer Partners and its cronies have unleashed a counterforce that may well exceed their comprehension and control. While digging for dollars they’ve awakened a movement that combines a long-overdue commitment to addressing the trampled rights of Native Americans with a reinvigorated call for climate justice and environmental action. Today the ranks of the Water Protectors present at Standing Rock have been thinned. But as spring soon arrives on the North Dakota plains, countless more of us are embracing their powerful message of reverence and resistance.

********

Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached by email at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com and on Twitter @royeidelson.

Trails of Tears

Trail of Tears sign from the Cherokee Heritage Museum.This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Wesley Fryer from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA

by Kathie Malley-Morrison

The current standoff between Native American Water Protectors and the Army Corps of Engineers is only the most recent event in a long history of inhumanity carried out unflinchingly by invasive power structures motivated by greed.

Last fall, during the closing months of the Obama administration, thousands of people—even some banks—rallied around the Water Protectors as they tried to protest yet another treaty violation and protect their water supply and land from the encroachment of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Victory was joyfully embraced when the pipeline was stopped.

Yet, less than one month into the Trump administration, the pipeline is once again underway, protestors are being forced out of the area, and the battle cry of the public is sadly diminished.

What has happened?

Are the people who are disturbed by the Trump agenda just overwhelmed with Executive Orders, resignations, firings, noisy town meetings, references to Fascism?

Are some people so focused on stopping Trump that they do not have the energy to focus on and resist his carrying out of some of his threatened actions?

If you are concerned with the changes (or extensions of former changes) that seem to be bombarding our experiment in democracy from all sides, my suggestion is to continue as best you can to roll up your sleeves and attend to the three Rs:

  1. Resist oppression.
  2. Reject exploitative capitalism, with its disregard for the human costs of greed.
  3. Repair the system.
Reverse side Trail of Tears sign. Cherokee Heritage Museum. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Wesley Fryer from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA.

 

 

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart, Part 3

A person protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, 15 November 2016. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

by Charles Eisenstein

The dehumanization of the Other that happens in war, racism, and genocide is no different from any reduction of the sacred to the profane. It is the same mentality that informs the reduction of nature from a sacred, living intelligence into a collection of insensate things: mere resources to be exploited or an enemy to be conquered. The reduction of humans to enemies or to subhuman caricatures like greedy executives and donut-eating police pigs is the same mentality that makes it OK to threaten a river with catastrophic oil spills. Invoking the principle of morphic resonance, by entering into war mentality we strengthen the field of war, including the reduction and domination of nature. That is why victories in war so often lead to just more war. The war is won, but the ideals for which it was fought remain as distant as ever. So it has been for five thousand years.

In other words, if we seek to win a fight using the tactics of dehumanization, we are contributing to the sacrilege that is at the root of the problem. No pipelines would be built if we loved the river like a grandmother.

When the elders ask us to proceed prayerfully, what do they mean? To be prayerful is to be in awareness of the sacred. We too easily forget the sacred, whether in relationship to human beings or to other-than-human beings like trees, soil, and rivers. If prayer is sacred speech, then to act prayerfully is to be reverent in action as well as speech. The dehumanization that leads us onto the warpath is the opposite of reverence.

It is not easy to stay off the warpath. Each new atrocity and outrage renews the invitation into hatred. Lord knows we’ve received many such invitations onto the warpath. The attack dogs, the pepper spraying, the water cannons, the woman whose face was shattered by a rubber bullet, the news that the police will start carrying live ammunition, the state government’s fines for those bringing supplies to Standing Rock, the fact that ETP’s drilling is currently illegal, the historical robbery of native lands and the breaking of every treaty… there are any number of reasons to adopt a good-versus-evil view. As tempting as it is for me, all the more for people at Standing Rock who have been subjected to violence personally or witnessed it first hand. To counsel forgiveness or nonviolence from afar seems almost arrogant, were it not echoing the elders and so many others on site.

Each of these invitations onto the warpath also presents an opportunity to defy the enabling narratives of violence and to take a step toward victory without fighting. It is an opportunity to employ what Gandhi called “soul force.” Meeting violence with nonviolence invites the other into nonviolence as well. Refusing the invitation onto the warpath automatically extends a counter-invitation to the enemy to cease being an enemy. That is why it is so important to remember that the purpose of nonviolent action is not to make the other side look bad. That would be a kind of attack, a kind of violence, and a tactic of war. No, the purpose is to invite the other side and onlookers alike to join you in courage. Of course, they may decline the invitation, but it grows more powerful with each escalation of violence.

Each time you refuse the invitation onto the warpath, you become more powerful. Those who can stay peaceful in the face of any terror or threat become virtual miracle-workers. I am reminded of an Afghan woman I know named Sakena. She does peace and education work in Kabul, including the education of girls. This is a dangerous line of work in a place where religious fundamentalists believe that educating girls should be punishable by death, and indeed Sakena receives her share of death threats – something to be taken seriously in that place.

One day Sakena was in a car with her driver, two staff people, and her unarmed bodyguard. Suddenly the driver stopped. A makeshift roadblock was ahead of them, manned by twenty or so young men dressed in fundamentalist garb and armed with rifles, which were pointed at the car. “Tell Sakena to get out,” they shouted.

Bravely, the driver said, “You’ve got the wrong car. There’s no one by that name here.”

“Oh yes there is,” they replied. “We know she’s in there. We’ve been watching her.”

Sakena got out of the car and strode up to the young men. “I’m Sakena,” she declared. “What do you want?”

For the next half hour, the four people in the car watched as Sakena talked to the young men. Finally she returned to the car and said, “OK, we can go now.” Astonished, her staffers asked what happened. She told them that the young men had decided that they wanted to be educated too, just like the girls, and had arranged to meet her again the next week outside a certain mosque.

Such is the potential power of staying off the warpath. Even with guns pointed at her, Sakena refused to see the young men as anything less than divine human beings. She refused to reduce them in her vision to crazed terrorists or subhuman “fundamentalists.” She saw them as promising young men who of course wanted an education. Her fearlessness and goodwill exerted an invitation so compelling that the men were nearly helpless to refuse it.