People Get Ready
Even though large tracts of America and many old and famous red States have fallen or may fall into the grip of DOGE-MAGA and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in the Bronx and along the border, we shall fight in the national parks and forests, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the streets, we shall defend our nation, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the public beaches, we shall fight to protect the public lands, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this nation or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our teenagers and youth would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World that is our beautiful multicultural future, with all its renewable power and grassroots might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
Who can resist rewriting Winston Churchill's best wartime rhetoric in a time like this? Okay, most of you probably can, but I can't. And I think all the bad news--and there's so much and it's so bad--is begetting some really good news. People are rising up. I feel a groundswell. There is a lot going on. There's a whole lot going on. And that's just what I can see, and I know that a whole lot of us are organizing, resisting, and not cooperating in a whole lot of ways we can't see yet. I'm horrified by what the Trumpists are doing and by the moral ugliness of it; but I'm moved and exhilarated by what a whole lot of the rest of us are doing, and the moral beauty of it. The horror and the wonder can coexist, just as the worst and best of us do.
Daniel Hunter, a brilliant strategist and analyst who writes regularly at the magazine Waging Nonviolence has a new piece there."We're seeing the beginning of mass noncompliance," he writes. And then he describes how first ordinary federal workers and then Trump cabinet members and heads of departments refused to comply with Musk's insanely demeaning "list five things you did this week" email directive. Daniel explains, "This is how noncompliance works. It’s a chain reaction of smaller to bigger dominoes — the smaller ones knock down the bigger ones and on and on until the bigger dominoes fall. What we just saw is the largest mass noncompliance with Elon Musk (so far).... This is the general direction we need to go. Musk says 'jump' — and we all say 'nope' and return to our lives."
Daniel is with Choose Democracy, whose mailing list is a great way to stay engaged with what's happening and what's possible (and I've had the good fortune to work with him a little lately). He points toward a crucial truth: the only power that Trump, Musk, etc. have is the power to give orders--they don't do much of anything else themselves. The other three hundred million of us have the power to not obey them and to support and encourage others who don't. Enforcement of those orders is mostly by threat, and we have seen people undaunted by those threats, at home and abroad (and some of those threats can prove to be empty, and some threats that can target a few people can't do much about hundreds of thousands or millions who won't comply; there's safety in numbers).
There is resistance inside the federal government, lots of it; we've seen the valor and defiance of workers keeping their integrity and doing their best to maintain the integrity of their work and their service to the rest of us. And of course the courts are the federal government and they are slapping down Trump-Musk overreach and illegality right and left. This is definitely not the glory days of the USA but it might be of the judicial branch right now, with even the Supreme Court saying its version of go to hell or at least five of the nine saying so (technically they declined to halt or reverse a judge's ruling that the Trump Administration had to immediately release almost $2 billion in foreign aid payments owed under existing contracts). There have been so many lawsuits filed, so many won, because so much of what Trump and Musk are trying to do is illegal overreach (and theft and grift and idiocy). This week Chief U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Beryl A. Howell declared, “A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution."
The most glorious lawsuit was filed this week--and even the parties filing it were thrilling to behold, because I never really thought I'd seen the Sierra Club and the Japanese American Citizens League (along with the Union of Concerned Scientists and OCA --Asian Pacific American Advocates) as suing together. It's a lawsuit against Musk, DOGE, and some Trump officials, which begins with pretty maximum boldness: "Defendant Elon Musk is not, legally, the President of the United States, nor is he a federal elected official of any kind. And Mr. Musk is not a Senate-confirmed officer of the United States. But he and his so-called 'Department of Government Efficiency' (DOGE)—not, in fact, a federal executive department—are lawlessly and unconstitutionally wielding sweeping power across the executive branch. As Mr. Musk and DOGE lawlessly seize power over large swaths of federal spending, decimate the federal workforce, and dismantle federal agencies, they are severely harming, and threatening further imminent harm, to everyday Americans."
The suit goes on to talk about the harm being done to national parks, including national historical sites important to Asian American history. We in this country love our national parks, which have sometimes been called America's best idea. They're maybe the most uncontroversial, most visible, most beloved part of the federal government, and they're under attack. People demonstrated at a whole lot of them last week--all over the country, including Arizona and Utah. A whole new group called the Resistance Rangers organized them (made up of, apparently, hundreds of former park rangers).
A whole lot more people are looking for things they can do – and if you don't join Indivisible (or organize your own chapter) or Third Act or look to Tesla Takedown or the Resistance Rangers or a local group, just remember a handful of people with a few signs in a public place is a protest, and the smaller your community the larger your impact is likely to be. And that pressuring elected officials, donating to groups like the ACLU, and other means of activism are also available to a lot of us, and just speaking up and not letting the truth get buried under lies matters. A huge percent– ultimately all of us--in this country are impacted by the destruction of a functional federal government and the attack on a whole lot of stuff we love and need, from reliable weather reports to public health to science research to sane international relations. In a way, Trump and Musk may be building the broadest coalitions this country has ever seen, or at least giving us the basis for such coalitions by injuring and outraging almost everyone.
Monday, I was at a Tesla protest on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, holding one end of my #defenddemocracy banner, when I fell into conversation with a retiree who'd come up from the coast to join in. We got to talking and he asked aloud what I've heard a lot of people asking: what will it take, how can we stop them, when will the tide turn? If I knew, if we knew, they'd know, and they'd know how to stop it. Well maybe they wouldn't because this is the stupid coup, headed by the declining Donald and the disordered Elon, who don't seem to get that their power is far from boundless and we have power too. They are already unpopular, and their actions have outraged and hurt huge portions of the population, so they're recruiting, but for the opposition.
Still, we don't know, and that's okay. We don't know exactly how much is enough, what outrage will light a fuse or what catalyst will civil society together. But we know a lot about how nonviolent direct action works and how civil society has, through largely nonviolent mass movements, toppled dictators and pushed back on coups successfully, again and again. Just last year we saw the Assad regime crumble after half a century of authoritarian and than a decade of brutal civil war. We saw what began in Bangladesh in June of 2024 as a protest of about 500 students led to a brutal government crackdown; the backlash against that led to regime collapse and the flight of the country's undemocratic ruler in August. We live in what has been an exceptionally stable country, but it's just been destabilized. In that instability is possibility--not to return to the world of January 19th, 2025, but to something other than this rampage of hate and destruction, this oligarchs against everything coup. If we seize it.
We know lots about how to prepare and build and organize and how important it is to do those things. We understand the physiology of blockades and strikes and occupations and uprisings, remember how and when they've worked before. But in the end, it's mysterious--somehow the situation becomes more intolerable or people become less willing to tolerate it, somehow people gather in larger and larger groups, somehow civil society acquires momentum and the opposition reaches a tipping point, somehow what looked solid crumbles, somehow the people in power become powerless, and the power of the public becomes irresistible. No one knows in advance how and when. We have work to do, and I see some of it being done. We have to do a lot more, and we have to do it wholeheartedly, and we have to do it not knowing exactly what it will take.
But we know how to prepare for it. How to form affinity groups or other tightknit in-person groups of people that trust each other and can support each other. How to build networks of such people. How to prepare for civil disobedience, for those of us ready to cross that threshold. How to think about where the pressure points are and how to apply that pressure. How to reach out to people who might not have agreed with us during the election but have been harmed or alarmed or outraged by what's going on now. How to build coalitions and invite people in.
How to hold onto our principles, to never lose sight of what we love and who we are and intend to be even if we're told we don't exist or don't have rights or don't have anything in common with others who are being attacked or face consequences for defending the vulnerable. I mentioned Syria and Bangladesh. Those people suffered far worse, far longer, than most of us in this country have or will, and part of what keeps me going is remembering those who kept the faith during dictatorships and death squads, from Guatemala to Czechoslovakia. I don't know when this regime will end or how, but I know that it will, and that we have a role to play in that and whatever comes after.
p.s. I might be showing my age, but "People Get Ready" by Curtis Mayfield turns sixty this year, and it's still a rousing song (and you can take its theology metaphorically; I did when I made it the title of this essay.). Here's a video of it and here's the opening stanza.
People get ready, there's a train a-comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
p.p.s. The War Resisters League published the classic handbook on nonviolent organizing and it's a free download (or a modest cost for the paper version) here (screenshot of part of the table of contents below): https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/handbook-for-nonviolent-campaigns/
