June 21, 2017
After last night’s outcome in the Georgia and South Carolina elections I’m challenged to stay optimistic. At least my search this week for role models that encourage optimism did not have to venture far – it found its perfect target right in Beaverton, or, more precisely, at Powell’s in Beaverton.
Naomi Klein was in town on a book tour for her new book, No is not enough, written with lightening speed during the last 5 months ( it usually takes her that number in years to complete one. ) As you know, she is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of capitalism. I closely follow her writing in the Guardian and the Nation, and get regular instructions by progeny to read her books (The Shock Doctrine was the last.)
The evening unfolded in conversation with Jo Ann Hardesty, who served in the Oregon House of Representatives from 1995 until 2001. You probably know her from her Voices from the Edge Thursday mornings on KBOO. You should, in any event, it’s a terrific program.
Moving introductory remarks and territorial acknowledgement were given by Cathy Sampson-Kruse (she was also part of the water protectors in ND.)
Closing remarks with support for local activists were offered by folks associated with The Leap. https://theleapblog.org/aboutleap/
The house was packed, mean age, due to the presence of babies, probably around 40, modal age more like 65, a sea of us gray going on white-haired folks…..
Below is a link to a short essay that basically encapsulates the discussion that unfolded yesterday. I am quoting the very last paragraph which was mirrored by Klein’s closing remarks.
“For decades, elites have been using the power of shock to impose nightmares. Donald Trump thinks he’ll be able to do it again and again—that we will have forgotten by tomorrow what he said yesterday (which he will say he never said); that we will be overwhelmed by events and will ultimately scatter, surrender, and let him grab whatever he wants.
But crises do not always cause societies to regress and give up. There is also always a second option: that, faced with a grave common threat, we can choose to come together and make an evolutionary leap. We can choose, as the Reverend William Barber puts it, “to be the moral defibrillators of our time and shock the heart of this nation and build a movement of resistance and hope and justice and love.” We can, in other words, surprise the hell out of ourselves—by being united, focused, and determined. By refusing to fall for those tired old shock tactics. By refusing to be afraid, no matter how much we are tested.
The corporate coup that Trump and his billionaire cabinet are trying to pull off is a crisis with global reverberations that could echo through geologic time. How we respond to this crisis is up to us. So let’s choose that second option. Let’s leap.”
The most interesting part of her talk focused on the fact that saying No is not enough, we have to fill it with a Yes that proposes alternatives. For me the urgent question is how to conceive of and formulate alternatives that realistically work as political programs. Not (just) to get elected but to change the dominant system of policies and political philosophy, of the economy at the base of it all.
Klein signed her book with “Stay Brave” – a fitting exhortation from a woman who inspired optimism.
