Patriotic Political Opposition: Positive Outcomes from the People in 2017

It is exactly one year since the 45th presidential election; one year! In that year, this country has changed dramatically.

I’m not talking about the retrograde policy changes or the trammeling of our political heritage and constitutional law. I am talking about the many, many people who have been quietly doing what needs to be done right now to move our democracy forward.

This past year, for example, people have been persuading female civic leaders in communities small and large to run for office. She Should Run is one of several grassroots organizations working to expand the number of women holding office at every political level, all across the country. The goal is to encourage women of all colors and economic backgrounds to run for school boards, town councils and everything on up to senate and congressional seats.

If females in all their diversity become not only visible but just as commonplace as white males in the governance of our affairs, we will have made the kind of seismic leap towards gender equality that hasn’t been seen since Ms. Magazine first hit the stands in 1972.

Members of The Indigenous Youth Council, along with LaDonna Allard, a Lakota historian and activist, organized Sacred Stone Camp in North Dakota, in the summer before the election, to resist the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Since the election, with Trump’s announced plans to allow environmental deregulation and pipeline development everywhere, the inspiring activism of Native Americans has spread to many other states where massive pipelines are being planned and built to carry oil or fracked gas through sacred ground, populated areas, national parks and waterways (The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the Keystone Pipeline and the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, to name a few of the prominent ones).

Sacred Stone Camp renewed the presence of Native Americans in this country. We need them. They are our wisdom bearers, our siblings and ancestors. They not only awoke us to pipeline development happening from one border to another, they have been teaching us how to persuade banks to divest from fossil fuels, and why we need to examine the excessively “armed and dangerous” policing forces mounted against peaceful protesters and what the fundamentals of a reverence for nature ought to be.

When Trump ordered a crackdown on immigrants, sanctuary cities sprang up all across the country. Drawing on existing laws while building consensus among town administrators, police departments, corrections officers, state legislators and the general public, these sanctuary cities go well beyond the buttons and banners declaring support for the marginalized immigrant community. They have action plans and a network of organizations for protecting the persecuted: accompanying them to hearings, providing legal representation and physically housing some of those threatened with deportation (How ‘Sanctuary Cities’ Are Helping Immigrants Outwit ICE, by John Carlos, Frey; The Marshall Project, 6/20/2017).

It feels as if we are taking our cues in this matter from history, in particular, from the Underground Railroad. During six decades in the early 1800’s, perhaps 100,000 slaves used the Underground Railroad to escape their captivity and live as free citizens. At this time, ICE has been deporting over 200,000 immigrants per year. The numbers alone make this an issue that galvanizes citizens to work towards justice and equality for everyone.

During this past year, it was announced that the U.S. would not participate in the Paris agreement on climate change. In fact, agencies of the federal government have been populated this past year with non-scientists who deny that climate change is an issue, people who think scientific inquiry leads to bogus conclusions, federal administrators who are systematically ridding their departments of scientists.  But again, cities and towns, even some whole states, sprang into a kind of coordinated action on behalf of our environment.

With climate change already affecting their own people and infrastructure (the fishing industry, for example, or crop production, or storm recovery), governors, mayors, universities, businesses and private citizens have been meeting independently with leaders of other countries to express local and regional commitments to working with the global community to achieve the goals of the Paris accord. That is, people are working to remove that issue from the political arena (Forget Paris: US mayors sign their own pact after Trump ditches climate accord, by Aamer Madhani; USA Today, 12/4/17).

This is an enormous phenomenon, I think. The inspired few moved immediately to keep the issue of climate change in the hands of all of us, the whole country. It was clear, in this case, that political foolishness would only harm us all. Meanwhile, government scientists who have worked on environmental issues for years, immediately set about securing all of their data on safe files, on behalf of the country, so that the facts remain free from political follies like erasing data or removing informational web sites.

Taking big old bulls like this by the horns seems to have become an American pastime this year. Individuals and small towns all across the country are rolling up their sleeves to do some nitty-gritty wrangling with the direction of our democracy.

A liberal friend of mine has, throughout this past year, commented carefully and thoughtfully on every single conservative or alt-right Facebook post she receives from people she has known forever and cares for deeply. She responds with facts, reasons and a light tone of having a lunch table conversation with the sender. I admire her greatly. And since she’s a professor, wife, mother and very busy lady, we’ve all been wondering if she’s gotten her hands on a 3-D printer that somehow creates more hours in a day!

Classroom teachers and parents have been incorporating comments and policies from the Trump administration into discussions, lessons and learning opportunities. They have no choice. Children know children who are being deported, children who are killed in mass killings, children without food and clothing. The numbers of children who are leading protests and doing charitable work has grown this past year. Some are even suing the government for failing to protect their right to life, liberty and resources (Children’s Climate Law Suit Heads to Trial: Court Rejects Trump Attempt to Bock It, by Nicholas Kusnetz; Inside Climate News, 3/7/2018).

Looking around my own region, one nearby liberal town set out to find a conservative town and begin a dialogue. That tiny little town (over 80% against Trump) set up an exchange with people from a tiny little town in Tennessee (over 80% for Trump), for the sole purpose of listening to one another’s experiences and point of view.

A group of representatives from the Tennessee coal mining town travelled to our academic/farming New England area and spoke to a group of about 200 people about their struggles for day-to-day existence. Local representatives of this person-to-person dialogue housed the visitors, scheduled pot lucks and dances, got the teens involved with one another and set up a reciprocal visit to Tennessee (Conservative Kentuckians, Leverett counterparts reach across the political gap, by Richie Davis; Daily Hampshire Gazette, 10/30/2017).

Many people were environmental activists before Trump was elected. Many people worked for immigration justice and women’s rights. Now, however, we are starting to OWN our fate as a nation, not letting the future happen to us by electing a politician and going on our merry way, or by watching news media and forgetting about the stories told, or by giving a donation to feel better about an issue. We are OWNing what happens.

Many of us thought we would be spending four years protesting and resisting, and we have done a fair amount of that: holding up signs, marching, declaring ourselves committed to the welfare of all others; wearing buttons that say, “You are safe with me,” to signal solidarity with the many different constituent groups who had hoped for a kinder presidency.

This past year, though, folks everywhere have also spent a lot of time learning: learning how to turn the edifice of a church into a bona fide sanctuary, learning how to talk to people whose values and beliefs are vastly different, learning how to speak another language in order to serve as an interpreter and mentor, learning how to defuse bullies wherever they are encountered, learning about the cultural diversity in our neighborhoods, learning about white privilege, learning how to respond when white supremacists come to local campuses, or interrupt church services, or leave hate mail.

I learned how to create and manage this web site so that I could give voice to the importance of equality. Amid the destruction of so many treasured American ideals since last November, I feel this most essential one must survive. Equality was the foundation for what is now a centuries-old Constitution. We flounder badly when we let go of the principle of equality, even when we have to work out some mighty tough kinks in the system.

I also have gone back to church, after decades of being a spiritual loner. One Sunday morning, a month before the night of the 45^th presidential election, I practically flew out the door. Like a toy with a wind-up key in its back, I felt as if all the tightly wound anxieties suddenly let go and propelled me down the road to the right church door. The process of living as equals had become too big to handle alone. I needed a community of caring, kind souls to keep my sanity.

This past year has taught me more about my own white privilege than I ever knew before. Like many other white people across the country, I have been reading and studying and talking to others about the ways in which I and other white, middle class people inadvertently assume and then reinforce our position in the center of things, leaving others to fend for themselves on the edges.

It has been a process of becoming more sensitized to the presence of white privilege in ordinary situations and transactions, trying to understand it more deeply, noting what other people are doing about it and learning how to take immediate action in the face of discrimination or bullying. I still have a lot to learn.

To learn is to build, to take raw materials stumbled upon and create something worthwhile. The actions ordinary people have been taking this past year to rebuild our collective commitment to living as equals have taught us how to address many inequalities and injustices we had been passively ignoring. All of that learning is ours to share and to build on in the years to come.