REBECCA SOLNIT – While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.
Tag: Rebecca Solnit
5 Lessons from the K-pop Fans who Fizzled Trump’s Tulsa Rally, and the Black Organizers who Led the Way
TAMIKO BEYER – As K-pop fans and Black organizers and artists are demonstrating, joyful, powerful movements draw more people in and reflect the kind of world we want to live in.
Coronavirus Is a Historic Trigger Event—So Let’s See a Social Movement Rise
PAUL ENGLER – There are times in history when sudden events — natural disasters, economic collapses, pandemics, wars, famines — change everything. They change politics, they change economics and they change public opinion in drastic ways. Many social movement analysts call these “trigger events.” During a trigger event, things that were previously unimaginable quickly become reality, as the social and political map is remade
Protest and Persist: Why Giving Up Hope is Not an Option
REBECCA SOLNIT – I began talking about hope in 2003, in the bleak days after the war in Iraq was launched. Fourteen years later, I use the term hope because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both. Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able write it ourselves.
Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence
REBECCA SOLNIT – If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part.
Occupy Everything – Lessons Not Too Late for the Learning
DAVID SWANSON – When the Occupy Movement lost its presence on television and therefore in real spaces that are never quite as real as television, it left a positive lasting impact, difficult as yet to measure fully, but observable in many areas.