I am happy to see that we keep moving forward (maybe just getting some of the being pushed back reversed?) little by little. Among other things it means people have not given up. I'll mention a few that are close to home, but there are more. This one is particularly striking:North Carolina’s Moral Monday Movement Kicks Off 2014 With a Massive Rally in Raleigh.
On February 1, 1960, four black students at North Carolina A&T kicked off the 1960s civil rights movement by trying to eat at a segregated lunch counter at Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro. Two months later, young activists founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh, which would transform the South through sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration drives.
So it was fitting that North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement held a massive “Moral March” in Raleigh today which began at Shaw University, exactly 54 years after North Carolina’s trailblazing role in the civil rights movement. Tens of thousands of activists — from all backgrounds, races and causes — marched from Shaw to the North Carolina State Capitol, where they held an exuberant rally protesting the right-wing policies of the North Carolina government and commemorating the eighth anniversary of the HKonJ coalition (the acronym stands for Historic Thousands on Jones Street, where the NC legislature sits).
We need the momentum to grow as it did back then. This is no time for sitting back and watching. If my sense of how systems work is at all correct, we will see leadership springing up along with the mass movement for the "leadership" has always been an effect not a cause.
Here in Virginia a man I have defended as a great person first, rather than a politician, has become our Lt. Governor. He just cast the deciding vote in the Senate to overturn some of the ugly legislation passed by the know-nothings who held office the past four years. Here is a petition to sign and a partial explanation of this phase of the clean up. Our new Attorney General has acted to reverse the ban on marriage equality. I'll eat a little crow here for clearly elections do matter. Then I will point out that elections alone were not even responsible for these victories but they were a necessary part. My frame of reference has to be my experience as a movement leader and foot soldier in the Vietnam era. Read on below.
When people turn out in large numbers and sign petitions and write letters in large numbers even relatively stupid politicians have to take notice. No one can interpret precisely what this all means but they have to wonder that something is happening.
Our collection of thousands of draft cards and the resistance brave young people exerted to the draft were not the simple cause to the end of the draft for complex events do not have single, simple causes, except in republican rhetoric.
I write today with the same hope I had when the occupy movement was at its beginnings. It is people, masses of people that frighten the plutocrats who run the system,as much as anyone really 'runs" it. These are not just republicans.
The struggle is a complex one and the way the struggle appears in the media has no resemblance to the actual struggle. The house and senate elections are part of that struggle. They will not decide its outcome but merely dictate what happens in one phase of it.
The real struggle is in the way people will behave from now on. Will they sit back as poison is dumped into their water? Will they sit back as Unions are crushed and then cry because they no longer have jobs or unemployment? Will those with jobs sit back as their real wages go into the pockets of the plutocrats? WE see a new wave of strikes and protests. Do we who are relatively comfortable do all we can to support them?
Women are under assault and we have pushed back. It works, but only if it becomes a way of life rather than token gestures. The forces of oppression watch and wait. If we relax, they move. If we keep the pressure they look for new fronts where we may be weak or weary. It has never been very different. So many have actually given their lives in this struggle so no price is to high to ask if you really believe in he human values we are fighting for.
Those of us who have been through the last movement phase of the struggle have scars to show it. We also learned how very hard it is. One lesson came when electoral politics literally destroyed much of what we had gained. Balance is important. Without the people moving elections are a distraction.
So as I approach my 78th birthday I write some more. Soon I'll be gone and you won't be exposed to my thoughts. But then, unless I have written them down or told them to someone they will be gone forever. That goes for my scientific work as well. It was not what the plutocrats need for their profit machines so it will die with me.
We saw it all through a dense fog back in the last movement. It is much clearer now. Even then we did not need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.