Published on Wednesday, January 25, 2017, by Common Dreams
The 70-foot, hand-painted banner appeared to hang above the White House for several hours. (Photo: TheAnonnMessage/Twitter)
Greenpeace activists have unfurled a 70-foot, hand-painted banner declaring “RESIST” from atop a 270-foot construction crane facing the White House, demonstrating to President Donald Trump that his anti-environment, anti-women, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-immigrant policies are going to be met with a sustained popular resistance.
The action involved seven people—including the chair of Greenpeace’s board of directors—and was also meant as a call to arms, explained San Francisco community organizer Nancy Pili Hernandez, who helped unfurl the banner.
In a livestream from atop the crane, Hernandez said, “We’re asking everybody to pledge to join the resistance.”
“I hope that everyone can find ways to resist in our own lives. To stop the pipelines from being built, to protect the water, to protect the land, to protect a woman’s right to choose, to protect gay marriage, to protect our brothers and sisters who are being threatened by deportations,” Hernandez went on.
“The sun has risen this morning on a new America, but it isn’t Donald Trump’s,” said Pearl Robinson, another activist involved in the banner drop, in a statement. “I fear not only the policies of the incoming administration, but also the people emboldened by this election to commit acts of violence and hate.”
“Now is the time to resist. We won’t stand rollbacks on all the progress the people have made on women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQIA rights, the heightened awareness of state-sanctioned violence on black and brown folks, and the progress we have made on access to clean and renewable energy, an issue I have personally worked on my entire adult life,” Robinson said.
“There’s a lot that we’re up against,” Hernandez admitted during her livestream. “But I feel like I just learned how to fly. It’s using carabiners and ropes, but it’s a super power. Whatever super power you have I hope that you can harness it, and use it to be part of the resistance and use it to fight back and use it to demand better than what we’re being offered right now.”
The activists are urging spectators to join Greenpeace as it pushes against Trump’s repressive agenda.
“People in this country are ready to resist and rise up in ways they have never done before,” commented Karen Topakian, chair of Greenpeace’s board, who also climbed the crane to help unfurl the banner. “While Trump’s disdain and disrespect for our democratic institutions scare me, I am so inspired by the multigenerational movement of progress that is growing in every state.”
The banner went up around noon local time and hung for several hours, before the activists began the process of taking it down and descending the crane at around 2:15pm. Watch the moment of its unfurling—put to the accompaniment of choral music—here, courtesy of National Nurses United’s RoseAnn DeMoro.
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People protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline march past San Francisco City Hall. 15 November 2016. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
by Kathleen Malley-Morrison
Now is the winter of our discontent, this woeful election year. Unhappiness with the government, frustrations over corruption of democratic processes, fears regarding increasing economic inequality, anger at the multiplying restrictions on prospects and possibilities, and rage at the unfairness of it all have been rife. But today, on this Thanksgiving Day, Americans (most of whom are descendants of immigrants from other lands) have a chance to get things right.
And many people are doing just that. I give particular thanks to all the Americans, of all hues, who are standing by the Native protestors and their supporters at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota.
The nonviolent resistance of the Standing Rock protestors to the planned Dakota Access pipeline, slated to pass through sources of drinking water and sacred sites of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, is a noteworthy and admirable example of nonviolently standing up against greed, unbridled capitalism, the militarization of civil society agencies, the unwarranted exercise of power by fossil fuel goliaths within the military industrial complex, the rape of the land, racist disregard for human lives, disrespect for laws (including in this case, yet another violation of a treaty), and violation of human rights including the rights of indigenous peoples . Moreover, the protestors are praiseworthy not only for standing up for clean drinking water and human rights but also for promoting the viability of this continent and the planet on which the survival of all peoples is dependent.
Among the groups to which we should be thankful for getting things right and taking risks to do so are:
A model of moral engagement: Gandhi statue, Indian Embassy, Washington D.C., USA. Author: Carol H. Highsmith. In the public domain. Model of moral engagement.
Engaging Peace began its blogging career by introducing the ideas of psychologist Albert Bandura about moral disengagement and moral engagement . Moral disengagement involves unconscious mental processes that enable otherwise good, caring people to act in inhumane ways—often as a result of deliberate manipulations undertaken by leaders pursuing their own self-serving agendas. Moral engagement processes, by contrast, enable other good, caring people to summon the strength, courage, and moral fortitude to resist the abundant pressures in our societies to behave cruelly and inhumanely.
In the wake of the misery, the anger, the blaming, the fear, and the despair that characterized this election year—along with the elation of some people at the outcome–I am embarking on a quest to review, in a series of brief posts, the mechanisms of moral engagement that might help this country heal its wounds and move in the direction of peace and social justice.
As explained in an earlier post , “Moral engagement requires moral agency–active engagement in resisting pressures and justifications for behaving inhumanely, and proactive efforts to engage in and promote humane behavior. Key contributors to moral agency include humanizing the other, and empathizing with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the other.”
Principled moral arguments are dramatically different from the pseudo-moral, spuriously “moral” justifications that some people advocate to convince others that, for example, deadly warfare is the best way to make the world safe for democracy or that assassinating a few potential terrorists is ethically superior to maybe, possibly, perchance risking the lives of thousands of innocent victims (and laws, human rights, and Constitutions be damned!).
Principled moral arguments rest on principles like the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), Kant’s categorical imperative (“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”), the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the messages in favor of love and brotherhood in various Holy Books.
My advice to everyone distressed by the nature and results of this election is to continue to work for a truer and more complete democracy, characterized by the pursuit of peace and social justice, in a morally engaged way. This means understanding, among other things, the difference between principled moral reasoning and the pseudo-moral arguments that attempt to justify harm-doing.
Author: James Montgomery Flagg. 1917. In the public domain.
By Anthony Marsella, Ph.D.
What does it take?
What does it take to awaken the American (USA) people to the egregious political, economic, and moral abuses and violations of their Constitutional rights and privileges? What does it take for the American people to demand changes in existing government and corporate political, economic, and social policies and actions limiting accountability, transparency, and participation?
What does it take for the American people to successfully reduce the concentration of power, wealth, and position favoring a few and denying equality and opportunity for the masses? Why are American people failing to respond to the numerous crises in American society that reveal widespread corruption, cronyism, and incompetence in public and private institutions and organizations?
Why are Americans savoring the fruits of consumerism, materialism, commodification, competition when the consequences of these institutionalized values are destructive for individuals and the social fabric? These questions are but a few of the many questions being asked daily across America and the world. At issue is the disproportionate presence of silence and passivity, and the absence of activism.
I am not discussing, nor am I advocating, widespread rebellion or revolt, even as some voices have called for these as solutions in the face of a creeping oppression. Rather, I am seeking an understanding of why so few protests have emerged and been sustained across time and place?
No one can deny the existence of protests from both “liberal/progressive” circles, (e.g., Occupy Wall Street, Wisconsin Teacher Unions, LBGT organizations) and conservative/tea party circles (e.g., regarding border immigration, abortion rights, gun ownership rights). Yet, in my opinion, these protests have been focused on specific causes, often informed by narrow ideological reasons. I am seeking an understanding of sources that could undertake a broader and unified protest, seeking to re-claim and to improve upon America’s inspired heritage of human rights — a protest to reclaim “moral authority,” “national identity,” and “social and civic responsibility,” not through guns, violence, and anger, but through virtue.
It must be asked whether current divisions across gender, racial, ethnicity, social class, political, wealth, regional, and religious boundaries have limited any collective citizen response challenging the concentration of power, wealth, and position that seeks national and global domination. In my opinion, the concentration denies citizen participation by controlling means, motives, and consequences of national activism, especially by creating divisions across diverse population sectors. Although developing diverse identities is to be encouraged because diversity is the essence of life itself, a sense of unity is lost as too many are denied equality.
And how does the fractioning of a society lend itself to external control and domination by those with wealth, power, and position? For me, the answer is simple: “A society can assume unlimited diversity, as long as it provides equal access to opportunity.”
It is the disproportion in opportunity, rights, and freedoms that lead to resentment, struggle, and violence. The USA needs a national vision identity that recognizes and accepts the conditions required for civility and citizen accommodation in our global era, including (1) an appreciation of the value of diversity, (2) a willingness to accept an interdependence ethic, (3) the commitment to nonviolence/nonkilling, and (4) a belief in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Unfortunately, what has emerged in the USA is a “limited good” mentality1 in which gains by one group or sector are considered losses by another, because there is only so much “good” to go around. But while this may be, in part, an accurate appraisal of our global situation, there are forces at work that seek control stemming from the age-old divisions rooted in concentrations of power, wealth, and position. Choose your century, country, or cause, and “concentration” will always be the root of problems.
In today’s global era, filled with challenges that defy solution (e.g., population increases, poverty, violence, wars, environmental pollution, crime), “control” by a few (e.g., 1%, bankers, dictators, corporate royalty, Davos faction, monopolies) has become the means and the end. In the USA, which leads the world in military force, financial wealth, corporate cartels, and exportation of popular culture, “control” is essential to preserve an existing state of affairs that denies equality, and promotes homogeneity.
The USA has the world’s largest military budget, highest medical costs, greatest number of prisons and prison inmates, and greatest divisions of wealth (e.g., 1% versus 99%). What this enables — indeed ensures — is the opportunity to implement a “Just Enough” approach to keeping collective control.
NOTE:
George Foster (1965). Peasant society and the image of limited good. American Anthropologist. Limited good refers to the concept that in peasant societies the world is seen as a “competitive” place in which “goods” are limited, and so distrust, envy, jealousy, and resentment are fostered. Hmmm?
Anthony Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.
