last good country

For Pete’s sake

I’ve watched most of the Republican debates.

I know a lot of Democrats say that Mitt Romney is the person we’d least like to face in November. That Romney is the most electable of the Republicans.

It’s crystal clear that Mitt Romney is completely out of touch with not just the 99%, but the 99.9%. Mitt Romney exists on a level where he really believes that he earned his fortunes the old fashioned way, through hard work, and damned if he’ll be criticized for that. Romney certainly did earn his money the old fashioned way—by being born into a rich, powerful, and white family. Who are we kidding, Romney’s father was governor of Michigan and ran for president, for Pete’s sake.

However, sometimes I do think about the contrast. While President Obama has not been the ideal liberal, progressive president, his candidacy and presidency have represented something important. He was not born into the ruling class. But, more importantly, his campaign in 2008 represented the idea that people could have a say in how things are run, and that we have a duty and obligation to step up and do the work.

I hear a lot of talk about how the 2012 election will be about choosing what kind of country we want to be. I think that’s dead on. We do need to decide where we want to go.

Mitt Romney and the broken Republican “establishment” (whatever that even means) represent a clear view. They are rich and powerful and they know what’s best for everyone. They talk about how they don’t want the “government” to tell people what’s best, but who they kidding? All they do is talk about how they know what’s best, and last time I checked, President is a government job.

Romney will tell you what’s best, he’s got carnal knowledge of the economy (because he’s been inside it), and just listen to him and everything will be just fine.

The alternative viewpoint is that there’s a whole lot of work to do. There’s a lot of work to do, and it’s hard work. It’s recognizing that there are often no easy answers, and that most of the work is grueling and thankless. But, it’s urgent work.

So I can see how a lot of people who have been beaten down and had their livelihoods destroyed might lean towards the first choice. They are sick and tired and upset and don’t want to think about it and just want all of this to go away. 

But I believe that something is happening. People are sick and tired and upset, but are beginning to realize that we, the people, are the only ones who can do anything about it. Voting for Mitt Romney isn’t going to make any of these problems go away. That’s what Romney would like us all to think, but to borrow a Gingrich attack, we aren’t that stupid and he isn’t that clever.

Voting for Barack Obama in November won’t make the problems go away, either. But voting for Barack Obama is a rejection of the notion that we should return to the idea that rich, white, usually old men know best and will take care of it for us.

The president isn’t perfect, and I don’t always agree with him and all of those other standard disclaimers. But I know this—we have had tangible victories that would not have been possible under a Republican president. I wish that some change would come faster. I wish sometimes we’d see more bold action from the president. But I also know that change comes slowly. And I also know that real change doesn’t come from the top down.

Mitt Romney is the perfect candidate to represent the Republican Party. He’s everything they have become. He’s everything politics in America has become. He’s condescending, patronizing, and hypocritical. He doesn’t believe in anything other than that he’d like to be president. As such, I’d be happy with him as his party’s nominee.

Romney represents the worst of American politics.

Meanwhile, more and more of us are stepping up to represent the best. I don’t believe that President Obama will solve all of our problems. But I’d much rather be fighting for change against an Obama administration than any other possibility.

Blackout

I’m all in favor of stopping SOPA/PIPA, but please remember that myself and 600,000 of my neighbors do not have Senators or Representatives.

Twenty-eleven, done

I go back and forth on whether this year went by in an instant, or if it seemed to last forever. It feels like it was only moments ago that the Draft Weaver campaign began, but that much more than a year passed since my grandmother passed away. I am so very thankful for the fact that years roll over, that we give ourselves the opportunity to hit a reset button.

I began this year with a hefty list of resolutions. I stuck with some of them, and let others fall to the side. I took some big steps towards my goal of being more involved, helping to launch a campaign for city council and change the conversation of that election. I learned so much from that experience, about organizing, politics, and most of all, people. I saw many people get involved for the first time—and do amazing things. We did so much in such a short period of time. I’ll always remember 2011 for being the year when people around the world decided that they were tired of waiting for others to stand up.

It’s really about taking chances. Trying something. Standing up. As Steve Jobs put it, “if I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best.” This year seemed to be about a whole lot of people realizing “if not us, then who?” As a city, as a nation, and as a planet we are facing problems that are both dire and complex. Our institutions have proven themselves unwilling and incapable of solving these problems. That leaves us. 

You’ll never regret trying and failing. I promise. I spent a lot of time this year realizing that. Maybe things get tough, or it seems like it doesn’t matter, but the effort is worth it. You don’t have to do big things to make an important difference. Small things matter just as much. I know we all don’t have the time or energy to do big things all of the time. Take it slow. No matter what, though, remember that you do matter and you do count and your voice is heard and is not nothing.

Aside from getting involved, 2011 was a big year for me for travel and my career. I spend a lot of time up in the air, flying nearly 27,000 miles. I ended up back in Seattle for the first time since 2006, and for the first time ever visited Los Angeles. 

I had the chance to spend a good amount of time in the city of Chicago this summer, which was wonderful. While in Chicago, I met many awesome people, took my girlfriend to President Obama’s birthday party, visited the Rush University Medical Center when I broke a wine glass in my hand, saw old friends, visited my family, and spent time at the Sierra Club Chicago office.

This summer, I decided that it was time to pursue a career change. I had been working in IT and operatons support at the Sierra Club, but wanted to switch to something more organizing or campaign oriented. I spent several months applying for jobs. I was not expecting much, due to the recession and the fact that there are a lot of people smarter than myself looking for jobs.

Eventually I was offered an opportunity to move into the Online Organizing department at the Sierra Club. I accepted that offer in October, and now officially am an organizer. It’s been quite an amazing change of pace, and I am very thankful to have the opportunity to help make some positive change.

I don’t know what will happen in 2012, but I know that if 2011 was the year of standing up, this will be the year where we fight. From the Arab Spring to Occupy, we are beginning to realize that The Powers That Be don’t always have to be. We are realizing that when everything that is important to us is under attack—we can, and must, fight back.

I have many memories from this year that I will hopefully never forget. Among them was something I overheard marching down K Street with Occupy DC after a Keystone XL Pipeline action at the White House. As we were marching—stopping traffic with a police escort—I heard a woman say,

I never thought I had any power. I never thought I counted.

2012. It’s time to stand up and be counted. 

Unthinkable convergences

“Can the unity cultivated in the encampments survive as the Occupy movement evolves into a more decentralized phase?  All sorts of class, racial, and cultural divisions persist within that 99%, including distrust between members of the former “liberal elite” and those less privileged. It would be surprising if they didn’t. The life experience of a young lawyer or a social worker is very different from that of a blue-collar worker whose work may rarely allow for biological necessities like meal or bathroom breaks. Drum circles, consensus decision-making, and masks remain exotic to at least the 90%. “Middle class” prejudice against the homeless, fanned by decades of right-wing demonization of the poor, retains much of its grip.

“Sometimes these differences led to conflict in Occupy encampments — for example, over the role of the chronically homeless in Portland or the use of marijuana in Los Angeles — but amazingly, despite all the official warnings about health and safety threats, there was no “Altamont moment”: no major fires and hardly any violence. In fact, the encampments engendered almost unthinkable convergences: people from comfortable backgrounds learning about street survival from the homeless, a distinguished professor of political science discussing horizontal versus vertical decision-making with a postal worker, military men in dress uniforms showing up to defend the occupiers from the police.”

—The Making of the American 99% And the Collapse of the Middle Class

“When will it come to America?”

“In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.

“As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.

“Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

“The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”

— Joseph Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, May 2011

Stand up, fight back

I don’t think I have all of the words to say any of this right, but here goes.

I remember over ten years ago attending my first protest march, down Halsted Street in Chicago. It was a march against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. I don’t remember how many people were there, and I don’t remember feeling particularly fired up. I had a vague sense of why people were there, but it didn’t feel important and it felt like there was barely any “movement,” behind it.

I didn’t go to the Pershing Park protest in D.C., one that would become infamous because of the police response. That event would go on to give birth to D.C.’s First Amendment Rights and Police Standards Act of 2004. 

Most of the time, most of us don’t give a lot of thought to the First Amendment. We may hear abstractions about why it’s important—or we study cases in a Constitutional Law course. I know that was true of me, at least. I was aware of First Amendment case law and such, but it was never really personal.

Then Occupy happened. I know I didn’t see it coming. Like most people, I was upset with what was going on in America, but I hadn’t found a way to vocalize it. Now, in a span of just a few months, so many things have changed. We’re having conversations in every city in the United States about how things are not right.

I don’t know how to solve many of the problems we are facing as a country. But, what I do know, is that the first step to solving them is standing up and saying things are not okay.

I’ve heard people say “what’s the point of camping?” The point of camping, and the point of occupying, is to make the statement that things are not okay and we are going to remind you every single day. We can barely keep our attention span as a nation on anything. Solving the biggest problems we have faced in decades will require a perseverance many of us thought we might not have. But damned if we have it. We have it in New York. We have it in Oakland. We have it in D.C. We have it at Berkeley. We have it at U.C. Davis.

So when I hear people say that we can’t allow people to camp overnight, because it violates some rule or regulation, I reject that. When I hear people say we can’t afford to “police” these protesters because our city budgets are stretched too thin—I reject that, too.

If we can’t come together as a nation and figure out how to support free speech when our nation is in crisis—well then, I don’t know that we even have a nation worth saving.

I don’t know where any of this is heading, or what the ultimate outcome will be. And that’s the most exciting part of this. Every time that a crackdown has been billed as the beginning of the end, Occupy has only grown.

People of all types are coming together to say that things are not right, but maybe together we can start putting our nation back together.

Yesterday was the 148th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Yesterday, people in hundreds of cities across the country continued to occupy and talk about how we can keep fighting the fight to make sure that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.