B4. Radical Ecology

This article Remembering civil rights icon Bernard LaFayette was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Everyone lovingly called him “Doc.”

Today is my last morning waking up in Japan after an incredible 20-day trip through Taiwan and my homeland. This morning, I woke up to a flood of text messages telling me that Dr. Bernard LaFayette, who everyone lovingly called “Doc” had passed away.

Doc, in addition to being one of the most important teachers I have ever had, was a legend of the civil rights era — the first organizer to go to Selma, Alabama, co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, national coordinator of the original Poor People’s Campaign — as well as the co-author of the Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation training philosophy and author of his personal memoir, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”

Being on the other side of the world, moving through long days of travel and family schedules, I thought I would not have much time to process it. But today, on our last day here, we decided to let our daughter nap at home instead of going out. Suddenly I found myself with a couple of quiet hours to myself. In the stillness, memories of Doc began flowing, and I felt the urge to sit and share a few stories about the man so many of us loved.

Like so many wise elders like Desmond Tutu or the Dalai Lama, Doc had a childlike quality to him. He was always joyful and playful, almost carrying an innocent, naïve presence despite the violence he had lived through, experienced, and fought against — having been beaten and arrested dozens of times and surviving an assassination attempt. He had an unwavering hopefulness about him, a lightness that somehow coexisted with the immense history he carried.

After my first ever Kingian Nonviolence training, I was so inspired that I called him on the phone. I told him right then and there: “this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

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A few months later, I found myself attending the Kingian Nonviolence summer institute in Rhode Island, studying to become a certified trainer. This was where I first met Doc in person. Now, almost 17 years later, it is still what I am doing — pursuing a deeper understanding of the word nonviolence and what it means to become a better practitioner of it.

Each evening during the summer institute, he gave a lecture where I felt like I was trying to write down every word that came out of his mouth. Not only did that experience deeply ground me in a principled approach to nonviolence, but I was also blown away by how strategic he, and the leaders of the civil rights movement, were. It felt like all of the organizing I had done up to that point was being put to shame.

I remember him telling me that he and his colleagues would often plan to engage in civil disobedience on Friday afternoons, so that by the time they were getting booked in jail, the courts would be closed and the city would have to keep them over the weekend. This put additional pressure on them, since they would now have to house and feed dozens of students over the weekend.

He shared that when they held marches and they did not have a large number of participants, they would march two-by-two with a little bit of space between each pair to make the march look longer than it actually was.

I was clinging to every word, realizing that this tradition carried a depth of discipline and strategy that I had barely begun to understand.

Kazu Haga with Bernard LaFayette and David Jehnsen, the co-authors of the Kingian Nonviolence curriculum.

It was such an honor to hear his stories. Doc loved to tell stories. Once, he casually told us about eating ribs and playing pool with Dr. King — “Martin” he called him. Stories that collapsed the distance between the historical figures we read about in books and the real human relationships that shaped the movement.

I also had the honor of co-facilitating multiple workshops with him, including one in Santa Cruz, California. After the first day of that training, I found myself in his hotel room listening to stories late into the night. At some point, it was getting pretty late and his wife Kate had fallen asleep on his shoulders. I was also getting tired, so I remember looking over at my friends and saying something like, “It looks like Kate’s tired, so maybe we should get going.”

Doc immediately stopped me and said, “Oh no, it’s fine, it’s fine…” and just kept talking. For hours.

Elders can talk forever. But I loved that about him.

It was also sweet to witness his relationship with Kate, herself a civil rights icon. After all those years together, he still opened the door for her every time. They always held hands. She would tease him about the sweets he’s not supposed to be eating. There was such tenderness between them. It was a quiet, beautiful expression of the love that sustained them through a lifetime of struggle.

Many of his stories stayed with me, but one in particular always moved me deeply. On his first day organizing in Selma, he was beaten bloody. His white T-shirt was stained with blood, and he wore that same shirt for days afterward so people in Selma could see how serious his commitment was.

I remember him telling me of practicing the teachings of Rev. James Lawson, the original trainer of the movement, and trying to look compassionately into the eyes of his assailant even as he was being beaten.

That kind of courage is hard to comprehend.

I had the honor of being with him in Selma once. Doc was the first organizer from SNCC who wanted to try to organize the city where, as he always liked to remind us, “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared.”

Despite the fact that Selma was considered a “no-go zone” by national organizers, Doc went and set the stage for what would become Bloody Sunday and eventually the Voting Rights Act. Walking around Selma with him, I felt like I was in the presence of living history (people often referred to him as a national treasure). Every time we walked into a restaurant, people would recognize him and stand up to greet him. You could feel the weight and gravity of the history he carried with him.

And yet he never seemed heavy with it.

I also remember a meeting once with the executive committee of an organization I was part of. The committee, made up mostly of people my age, had gotten into a conflict. Doc happened to be sitting in on the meeting. He didn’t interrupt or intervene. He just sat there, watching and smiling quietly as the heated conversation unfolded.

At the end, we asked him if he had any thoughts.

He said that watching us reminded him of how he and his colleagues in the civil rights movement used to argue with each other all the time. He told us that movements spend about 40 percent of their time in conflict with each other, and that we shouldn’t worry about it too much.

It was grounding hear that sort of perspective from someone who’d lived through it all. Even the elders of the civil rights movement fought with each other. Conflict wasn’t a sign that something had gone wrong, it was simply part of the work of being human together while trying to change the world.

Doc carried history in his bones. He had lived through brutality and transformation, through moments that reshaped the course of a nation. And yet what I remember most about him is not just the history, it’s the spirit.

His joy.
His stories.
His hope.

His undying commitment to his golf game. For a period of his life, he refused to travel for workshops and speaking engagements unless he could fit in a round of golf. The only time I ever played a full round of golf was with him. And, to be completely honest and candid here, his game probably should have been better than it was given how much he played. But he still kept at it, with that ever-present smile.

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This morning in Japan, as messages kept arriving on my phone, I felt the loss of someone who shaped my life in ways I am still discovering. I am still clinging to the wisdom that came from listening to Doc. Sitting here in the quiet while my daughter naps in the next room, I am reminded that the work Doc gave his life to was never just about one generation.

It moves from hand to hand, story to story, teacher to student.

Doc helped pass that torch to so many of us. And now it is our responsibility to carry it forward — to keep studying, practicing, organizing and striving toward the Beloved Community he devoted his life to building.

One day, when my daughter is older, I hope I will be able to tell her stories about a man everyone called Doc. About his courage, his laughter, his hope, and the way he believed so deeply in the power of nonviolence.

What a gift it was to know and learn from him.

This article Remembering civil rights icon Bernard LaFayette was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Why loyalty shifts are key to defeating autocrats was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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After previously representing the ICE agent who killed Renee Good, Minneapolis attorney and Republican politician Chris Madel ended his gubernatorial bid, saying “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which as a group has offered only limited resistance to accelerated attacks on democratic norms, issued an unusual “special message” denouncing indiscriminate mass deportations. And the National Rifle Association, or NRA, which has been closely aligned with the Republican Party since the 1970s, criticized the Trump administration after Alex Pretti’s killing for “demonizing law-abiding citizens” who exercise their constitutional right to protest and bear arms. 

These are examples of loyalty shifts: individuals, groups and institutions moving away from anti-democratic leaders, movements and parties, and in the direction of pro-democracy forces or values. As the quality of American democracy continues to decline under the second Trump administration, effective resistance will require a multifaceted strategy, including mobilizing voters, nominating viable candidates, delivering on the material needs of ordinary people and strengthening accountability mechanisms. However, a crucial, if overlooked, part of this strategy must involve creating the conditions for loyalty shifts among those who legitimize and provide resources to the administration. This will weaken its hold on power and open space for a renewal of American constitutional values.

What are loyalty shifts?

Imagine a spectrum of loyalty to authoritarian forces, moving from active loyalty to passive loyalty, neutrality, passive disloyalty and then active disloyalty. Loyalties shift whenever an individual or group moves from one position to another. The spectrum is a useful visual because it captures the incremental nature of loyalty shifts. Most people will not ordinarily move from a place of loyalty to disloyalty — a sharper break that can be called defection. What’s more, movement across the spectrum may be neither linear nor irreversible. For example, although the NRA criticized the administration’s Minnesota conduct, it simultaneously said that “progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs.”

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Loyalty shifts take many forms: speaking out against unconstitutional abuses of power, resigning from jobs that further authoritarian agendas, remaining in one’s job but refusing to carry out specific directives, participating in protests or boycotts, and mobilizing other defectors. For example, ICE and CBP officials have continued to work with the administration while simultaneously expressing their frustration and disillusionment with its rogue tactics and systemic lack of training.

Importantly, loyalties can shift by both “breaking” from and “binding” within the groups and institutions where one is a member. The resignation of Minneapolis FBI supervisor Tracee Mergen after Renee Good’s death represents one highly visible tactic or “moment” of breaking. (At the same time, resignations can be strategically fraught decisions, as one’s successors may be even more sympathetic to authoritarian agendas.) By contrast, the many internal conversations Mergen likely had with her colleagues to persuade them to resist political pressures represent an important kind of binding. Binding tactics — which can even include trying to nudge a fellow churchgoer away from MAGA over dinner — may be more difficult to observe, but are perhaps more common and no less important than breaking tactics.

Loyalty shifts are rarely isolated events and often set off cascades of similar shifts, as can be seen in the growing number of resignations by federal prosecutors in Minneapolis. Following the initial refusal by the law firm Perkins Coie to bend to pressure from the Trump administration, others like Jenner & Block and WilmerHale followed suit, filing lawsuits against the administration instead — a strategy that has worked to those firms’ advantage.   

Once “first movers” have taken a stand, others will be inspired or emboldened to follow them, either by changing their beliefs about constitutional abuses or by acting on beliefs that they had held all along. This phenomenon was widely analyzed at the end of the Soviet Union, where people previously had the incentive to conceal their true loyalties for fear of being ostracized, punished or worse. Acts of increasingly open defiance changed this and helped topple a Soviet dictatorship that had lasted nearly 70 years. As repressive governments are seen as less powerful — when it becomes clear that the emperor has no clothes — and others demonstrate against it, large numbers of people can suddenly withdraw their support.

Why do loyalties shift? 

Much of our knowledge of the causes of loyalty shifts comes from research on military defections. During the 2010-11 Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings, for example, militaries withdrew their support from autocrats who had been in power for decades. These events might not seem initially relevant for our understanding of loyalty shifts among faith leaders or businesses. Yet many factors that determine whether soldiers will shift their loyalties or not — fear, ideological discomfort, economic self-interest — will resonate with the experiences of civilian defectors.

Pragmatic motives loom large in loyalty shifts: Will defecting help or hinder myself and my family — physically, financially and otherwise? Will I be respected by movements opposing the regime and protected from retribution, or scapegoated for the regime’s crimes? Psychological, moral and ideological factors also play a key role: these include the costs of aiding a repressive regime and disillusionment with its lies or broken campaign promises. Of course, these factors can also discourage loyalty shifts, insofar as defectors lack a support system or an alternative community to join. It is critical in places where right-wing authoritarians are in power to build up conservative business or religious associations, media outlets and community groups that back pro-democracy agendas. 

Loyalty shifts often hinge on social ties. For example, police officers will be less likely to arrest or shoot people in the communities where they live. This is surely part of why so many ICE agents in Minneapolis came from distant states, such as the South Texan officers who killed Alex Pretti. 

Social networks are also critical to activating one’s higher loyalties — such as political duties to uphold the Constitution or universal moral duties — that transcend partisanship and can provide a principled basis for defection. Yet material consequences are critical too, especially when appeals to principle and social networks alone may prove insufficient. Accordingly, it may be worth emphasizing material pressure (e.g., boycotting an authoritarian-aligned business), social pressure (patronizing the business and persuading its owner), or both.

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People make choices to defect based not just on what they want, but on what they think other people and groups are likely to do. Shifting social norms and normalizing dissent by former regime supporters can thus send a powerful signal that encourages further loyalty shifts. To that end, it is a promising sign that protest is growing in rural and conservative areas of the country, and that greater fissures within the MAGA base are becoming evident. These are driven by anger over the Epstein files, rising living costs, and FEMA withholding aid from red cities in blue states. Beyond protests, participation in community support activities like providing food to distressed families, organizing “quilt-ins,” and accompanying people to court appointments have provided meaningful on-ramps to people from across the political and ideological spectrum.    

Offering moral and material support to potential defectors is key to encouraging further shifts. At the same time, doing so raises a key tension or tradeoff. On the one hand, it may be necessary to encourage a “way out” for defectors and provide selective amnesty in the name of defeating autocrats. On the other hand, doing so can undermine efforts to ensure accountability and prevent future abuses. This “persuasion-punishment tradeoff” will have key implications for reconciliation and the rebuilding of democratic norms.

In addition to these more individual and social factors, structural factors — such as the economy  — play a key role in motivating loyalty shifts. Poor performance convinces corporate leaders or political elites that the administration is unable to govern effectively. Conversely, businesses may refuse to defect because they fear the loss of quid pro quos with the regime.

Dysfunction within the authoritarian party also influences loyalty shifts: whether it becomes unpopular, unable to secure election victories or policy goals for its members, divided into acrimonious factions, or loses control of the media narrative. All of these make it difficult to sustain politicians’ loyalties. In addition, as the party becomes more “personalistic” and unpredictable, defection may seem like a reasonable way of minimizing uncertainty. 

By the same token, democracy will be especially fragile — and oppositions will struggle to resist unconstitutional abuses — in places where authoritarian parties or leaders are very popular.

Loyalty shifts matter

Social scientists have shown that loyalty shifts are critical to whether authoritarian governments are successfully removed from power as well as whether subsequent governments can improve levels of freedom and democracy. As authoritarian leaders consolidate power across the world, loyalty shifts can help bolster both democratic resilience and resistance. Resilience refers to how social and political institutions — courts, media, opposition parties, civil society organizations — persist over time and recover from authoritarian attacks. This will demand loyalty shifts among the judges, bureaucrats, journalists and others who occupy such institutions. Their unwillingness to enforce unconstitutional measures will limit the administration’s capacity to weaponize political institutions for authoritarian ends.

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By contrast, democratic resistance refers to the efforts and agency of pro-democracy forces. This includes building alliances to defeat autocrats, suing autocrats and organizing demonstrations. Loyalty shifts will bolster these efforts by increasing the size and diversity of pro-democracy movements, especially when they actively welcome regime defectors. All of this is crucial for success, as it removes the sources of power that autocrats rely upon.

Strategic implications

To reverse the present state of erosion, we all have a role to play in creating the conditions for loyalty shifts. A large number of factors motivate these shifts, many of which stem from self-interest and are specific to one’s position: businesses shift their loyalties as autocrats intervene in the free market, religious leaders as autocrats repress or jail their congregants, and judges as autocrats undermine judicial autonomy. Democracy advocates should continue to emphasize that authoritarianism is bad for business, patently unchristian and a disgrace to the freedoms that veterans have fought to uphold.

A second, related implication concerns the salience of democracy as motivating loyalty shifts. It is a mistake to assume that democracy movements will be composed of individuals and groups for whom democracy is of central importance. Although for some the trampling of democratic freedoms will matter a great deal, some or even many loyalties may shift simply because the administration is perceived as weak or the economy as faltering. Members of conservative religious groups may defect from an administration they see as deprioritizing a pro-life policy agenda.
 
This last point highlights a tension of sorts: on the one hand, it is important to emphasize shared democratic principles as transcending policy disagreements; on the other hand, effective organizing may still require emphasizing concrete policy failures such as affordability, rampant corruption, or law and order. Navigating these and other tensions will remain a critical challenge for the U.S. democracy movement in the months and years ahead.

This article Why loyalty shifts are key to defeating autocrats was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Mondelēz International — the food giant behind Oreos, Cadbury, and Toblerone — has spent years cultivating an image as a sustainability leader, earning high environmental scores and pledging to eliminate…

This article Trump and his enablers must be held accountable for the war on Iran was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article was originally published by Truthout.

As news broke that the United States and Israel had launched war on Iran, two posts kept showing up over and over on my social media feeds. One was from the Israeli military’s official account, which stated an oft-repeated phrase: “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

The other was a video from the Iranian city of Minab, where the first reports of casualties were emerging. The joint U.S.-Israeli attack had hit a girls’ elementary school; the death toll kept ticking higher and higher. At the time of publication, Iranian authorities said 108 people, mostly schoolchildren, had been killed in the strike, with many more injured.

Plenty has been written, in Truthout and elsewhere, about the totally incoherent justifications for this war, the illegality of it, the potential for regional disaster, the joke it has made of the very idea of diplomacy. All of this was and continues to be true, and all of it is important to raise. But more than anything, we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble.

Last year, when Israel and the U.S. launched the strikes that would be prelude to this attack, I wrote that the two countries were “shedding even the pretense and facade of the principles of a rules-based international order that has already worked in their favor.” In the wake of those strikes, once the immediate violence ceased, we largely heard crickets from U.S. lawmakers. This, despite the fact that those strikes, like these, were illegal under U.S. and international law. We cannot let this continued lack of accountability stand. If we do, what will happen next?

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Over the years, U.S. and Israeli leaders have become increasingly vocal about their hopes for “greater Israel” — the boundless expansion of an apartheid state. Before the start of the current assault on Iran, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a favorite in the country’s upcoming elections, accused Turkey of being the hub of a threatening axis “similar to the Iranian one.” This war is not about Iran’s nuclear program. It is not a war to free Iranians from a repressive regime. This is a war to preserve U.S. power and hegemony across the entire region.

It is also not accurate to say that Israel is dragging the U.S. into a war against its choosing. Reporting has shown that these two nuclear powers were in lockstep in their planning of this attack. In order to stop this violence, we need to really contend with how it started. The U.S. is hardly a victim here.

This state of affairs is intolerable. I am disgusted to know that my tax dollars are being spent to bomb my ancestral homeland. I was sickened to wake up to messages from family members telling me that the city where they live was under attack from the country where I live. I’m terrified now that Iran’s government has cut internet access yet again, leaving us disconnected from our loved ones. No fear, of course, can compare to the terror of being on the receiving end of missiles or guns, whether they are wielded by a foreign power or your own government; Iranians have been killed by both in horrifying numbers over the last year. But for those of us in the diaspora, the fact that it has now become routine to check in on family and friends living through untold violence does not make it any less traumatic.

Despite the abject horror of this moment, we cannot afford to slip into despair. There is still space for things to get much worse, but, more importantly, there is still so much left that we must protect. No one can predict what will happen over the coming days and weeks, but we know they are likely to be filled with more violence and uncertainty. We need to use every single tool at our disposal to chip away at the war-making systems inflicting this horror, which are so thoroughly embedded in the heart of the United States.

We can start, of course, by demanding that Congress immediately pass a war powers resolution to put an end to this destructive assault. Beyond that we can lift up the call being made by groups like Defending Rights & Dissent for Congress to impeach not only Donald Trump but every single member of his cabinet who had a hand in making this unjust and illegal war possible.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Our elected officials need to publicly explain why they hemmed and hawed over a war powers resolution before these attacks occurred, despite an obvious military buildup.

We must demand that every member of Congress who has voted to increase our military budget to nearly a trillion dollars account for their choices. We must push those members who have personal investments in the military machine — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — even further. They need to explain their conflicts of interest, and why they continue to profit off this death and destruction. Lawmakers who take money from groups like AIPAC that are relishing in this war especially need to answer for their votes.

It’s also imperative to not view this war in a silo, but instead see it as part of the same violent, hegemonic project that has been conducting genocide and spreading violence across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and beyond. We must hold elected officials accountable for failing to uphold U.S. and international law by continuing to support the transfer of weapons to Israel as it commits genocide against Palestinians. We must make it politically toxic for those lawmakers not to support legislation like the Block the Bombs Act, which aims to stop such transfers.

We also can’t expect elected officials to do more just because we ask them to. We need to build power. We must support grassroots movements like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that seek to make war, apartheid, and genocide too costly to wage. We must back campaigns like Taxpayers Against Genocide that are searching for legal avenues to keep federal funds from being used to violate human rights.

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We can wage campaigns against death-dealing corporations and make sure that war-profiteering is exposed and subjected to public outrage. The No Tech for Apartheid movement has long been organizing to push Silicon Valley to stop supplying the Israeli military with computing power, and has already found some success. The Israeli military’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in Gaza has received a great deal of reporting; now that OpenAI has announced a deal to allow the Pentagon to use its models in their classified networks, the fight against AI has taken on renewed urgency. Campaigns across the country against data centers are now also a crucial nexus of resistance against militarism.

So too are campaigns for immigrant rights and against deportations. In the wake of the U.S. strikes against Iran last June, the Trump administration rounded up Iranian immigrants for deportation. Those deportations continued into this year, even as the Iranian government staged a brutal crackdown on protesters. As we prepare for war to rage across the region, we can demand the U.S. and Europe open their borders to people fleeing violence and despair. We can continue to show the links between the occupation of cities by federal immigration agents here at home and imperial wars waged abroad. The enemies of democracy here are also the enemies of democracy abroad.

Some of these demands may seem futile under this murderous president, backed by an obedient Congress, and with a Supreme Court that has offered comparatively little restraint. But this unaccountable bureaucracy makes it all the more essential that we build grassroots power to issue these demands and force those in power to heed them.

Polling shows that this war is unpopular. Trump may be an authoritarian, but he is not entirely invulnerable, nor are the elected officials who have given him pass after pass. We cannot let him believe for a second longer that he can get away with something this wildly illegal or recklessly dangerous without accountability. And we cannot let the leaders who follow him believe that they, too, can unleash such violence without consequences. After all, would we be here if there were any real repercussions for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the continuing genocide in Palestine? We need true accountability for these crimes. And the only way to get it is to wage a struggle against militarism every day — not only in moments of crisis, but whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.

This article Trump and his enablers must be held accountable for the war on Iran was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article A successful general strike requires trauma-informed mutual aid was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The dream of a national general strike to paralyze multiple major industries or corporations is gaining traction. 

Across the nation, voices are rising with a righteous call for collective action at scale, especially in the wake of ongoing local economic strikes and protests against the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. The Day of Truth and Freedom on Jan. 23 gave a glimpse of the power of everyday people to make the system tremble. Over 50,000 people poured into downtown Minneapolis in the middle of the workday, braving temperatures of 20 below zero. Roughly a thousand businesses were shuttered, and organizers estimate that a million Minnesotans supported the action. The level of participation demonstrated the power of strikes to energize activists even as we have been grieving the murders, blatant cruelty and torture perpetrated by ICE agents. 

What has happened in Minnesota will only add momentum to other efforts to build toward general strikes: There is a national call to strike when 3.5 percent of the current U.S. population commits to it, an ongoing push for regional strikes by Blackout The System and a plan by the United Auto Workers for a general strike on May Day 2028. These calls for general strikes reflect a yearning to reclaim agency from systems that profit from exhaustion, division and despair. They also emphasize that to halt the slide into fascism and climate collapse, we must disrupt business as usual, awaken a shared sense of moral and civic sovereignty, and wield our collective economic power.

Recently, Aru Shiney-Ajay, a Minneapolis-based organizer with the Sunrise Movement, said in an interview that Jan. 23 “was a fantastic start.” But to get to a real general strike, she added that “it’s going to take a lot more work.” 

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Indeed, pulling off a successful long-term general strike in this large and diverse country will require unprecedented organizing. It will place great demands on each of us — on both a personal and collective level.  

This need for deeper organizing could be seen when the call for a “general strike” on Jan. 30 did not materialize nationwide despite the increasing momentum after Alex Pretti’s murder. 

As we lay the groundwork for future strikes, we should not overlook another essential ingredient to their success: Strong movements require deep mutual support. We must ensure that strikers and their families have their fundamental needs met when conventional economic systems are being challenged. We need to support one another despite the messages we receive from our culture that it is unsafe to rely on one another. In other words, we will not be able to strike at scale and over the long-term unless we learn how to collaborate through distrust, fear and trauma.

Practicing interdependence amidst trauma

We must learn to depend on one another for our very lives: for food, shelter and safety from violence. This sort of dependence is called, in movement speak, mutual aid. Mutual aid — the practice of voluntary, reciprocal exchange within a community — is not a peripheral support activity; it is the essential infrastructure that will make a prolonged strike possible. The promise of mutual aid is that we learn to depend on one another rather than rely on the broken institutions we’re striking against.

In the past, notable mutual aid networks have been organized in response to the COVID pandemic, natural disasters and to support teacher strikes, among many other causes. And under tremendous risk, inspiring and self-organized mutual aid efforts have sprung up — neighborhood by neighborhood — in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and other cities targeted by ICE over the last year. 

Previous Coverage

How LA is uniting to provide mutual aid for those impacted by ICE raids

However, the scale of mutual aid needed for a long-term general strike will be much larger than anything we have seen to date. It wouldn’t be just the marginalized or immigrant families that will need “aid.” People who are currently employed and supporting others will also need to survive without relying on mainstream structures. The mutual aid networks that emerged over the past two months in Minneapolis are a solid step in the right direction. Beyond the rent assistance and food delivery systems for immigrants sheltering at home, restaurants, places of worship and coffee shops have opened their doors to feed neighbors for free and supply ICE patrollers with gas masks, hand-warmers and whistles. We need to continue building on this momentum.

The hyperindividualistic capitalist script tells us to rely only on ourselves, that we must work hard and make enough money to secure our own food, health and shelter. But that system is designed to fail, and too many of us and our neighbors are vulnerable, exploited and denied access to our basic human needs. A poorly planned strike risks making those injustices even worse if people step away from their sources of income. This is the trap: We wouldn’t need to strike if we had a safety net, but without a safety net, striking is far more difficult.

Mutual aid is how we break this circular logic. But here’s the big problem: Collective traumas have robbed our society of the willingness to depend on one another — to give and receive support as if our lives depend on it. Mutual aid is a trust fall, but many of us still need to learn to trust one another. Past or ongoing money and class trauma make some of us believe that our economic privilege was justly earned — that we have the right to hoard our resources and to not share what we have with others. For others, financial stress keeps us stuck in the systems that are killing our biosphere and degrading our souls. Racism causes a similar spiritual degradation, teaching us that some people are more deserving of our support than others.

Our bodies are so traumatized that interdependence feels unsafe for most of us. We believe the narrative that living alone with a six-figure salary is safer than living in deep interdependence with our community. Or that working four part-time jobs to pay our rent is our destiny, and no one can help us change this fate. Our inability to trust one another is capitalism’s great victory. The unspoken truth is that we are lonely, traumatized, dysregulated and grieving. We are trying to build a movement with bodies and hearts locked in states of fight, flight or freeze. We can make brilliant intellectual arguments for mutual aid, but without an embodied sense of safety, healing and belonging, these networks remain abstract — impossible to lean on when the paychecks stop.

But I am not traumatized!

“But I’m not traumatized!” I have heard this so often in my work of bringing trauma healing practices and frameworks to activist communities. Especially from men and white people. Any conversation about emotions can seem like a waste of time in a culture obsessed with productivity and rationality. But in a world in which we are bombarded with news of genocides perpetrated with our tax dollars, unhoused people dying on our streets, a mental health crisis among children, an opioid epidemic, police brutality, mass extinctions and unfolding climate chaos, none of us are shielded from the violence of this world. Our collective stubborn insistence that we are “just fine” can actually be a symptom of disassociation and trauma, not a sign of true well-being.

Crucially, the most insidious and primal traumas are personal. Too many of us did not receive the unconditional love from our families and society that is so essential for human flourishing. We were treated as less than the sacred beings that we are. Even worse, many of us have experienced acute familial violence. I also never fail to be struck by the fact that 60 percent of kids in the U.S. have faced at least one of the following: sexual abuse, physical beatings, domestic violence or alcoholism in their family. And personal trauma can be rooted in many realities of life beyond childhood abuse: intergenerational racial pain, dysfunctional societal power dynamics, and income and wealth disparities.

How do we enable more people to participate in the mutual aid that will be essential to carrying out a general strike? We can share information about how neighborhoods can meet fundamental human needs. We can advocate for healthy, grassroots decision-making. We can educate one another about conflict resolution processes and transformative justice. But does information and political education alone inspire people to act? No.

It is important to recognize that an intellectual understanding of mutual aid is fundamentally different than actually practicing mutual aid. Many of us understand that our daily actions harm the water, soil or other species, yet we continue engaging in them. We understand that there is no truly ethical consumption under capitalism, and yet we continue to consume. Our habitual consumption despite knowledge of its harms can intensify pain and trauma.

Consider the legacy of scarcity: A person might intellectually champion a political movement, but when the moment comes to contribute, they are flooded with a paralyzing anxiety they don’t understand. Later, they remember a story: “My mother lived in her car before I was born.” This isn’t just a memory; it’s an inherited, somatic warning that shouts, “Your safety is your money alone! Sharing is risking destitution!” The body’s survival impulse overrides the mind’s political commitment.

Or consider the shame of dependency: Another organizer, eager to dedicate themselves fully to the movement, feels a knot in their stomach at the idea of quitting their corporate job. The obstacle isn’t a lack of conviction, but shame at the thought of becoming dependent on others. In a society that equates self-sufficiency with virtue, the vulnerability of needing support can feel like a profound moral failure. Trauma whispers in our bodies that we should stay in a compromising job rather than face the perceived humiliation of mutual reliance.

Moving from the theory to practice of mutual aid means confronting the emotional and traumatic barriers that block us from exercising true interdependence. To build a resilient movement, we must bridge this gap between knowing and feeling. We must embody the beauty and joy of radical interdependence with other humans, and with the Earth itself.

Unless we can access the subterranean emotions preventing us from living this radical practice, it will remain little more than an intellectual exercise for most of us. Political education, when not coupled with emotional sensitivity, doesn’t land in our hearts. In fact, political education without trauma awareness can bind us deeper into our siloed opinions where we don’t see each other’s genuine needs and grief under the surface of our opinions. Many of us debate meaningless political differences rather than actually practicing mutual aid.

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A trauma-informed practice of mutual aid in our daily life would look like us acknowledging our past traumas, fears or hesitations and yet offering our time, money and even bodies to our community members. This ability to “see” our traumas and act in spite of them is possible when we can tap into a strong sense of groundedness — and even joy — in our sense of belonging to our community, and hopefully our spiritual practice.

The power of multiracial coalitions

A general strike — and the mutual aid effort necessary to sustain it — requires a multiracial coalition. A multiracial coalition is crucial not just as a moral necessity, but also as a strategic necessity rooted in demography, economics, history and the current reality of who serves as essential workers. Historically, some of the most militant and class-conscious segments of the U.S. working class have been workers of color, precisely because they face the compounded exploitation of low wages, unsafe conditions and systemic racism.  

A multiracial coalition will make the movement less vulnerable to attempts by the ruling class to break strikes by exploiting racial differences through the age-old tactic of “divide and conquer.” Workers of color are disproportionately concentrated in the most exploited and strategically vital sectors (e.g. warehousing and logistics, hospitality, domestic care and agriculture) where a strike would have maximum impact. Therefore, a multiracial coalition would be able to mobilize workers at the economy’s critical chokepoints and build on the most effective traditions of labor struggle. A strike without this foundation is a ship with a hull breach; it may set sail in calm weather, but it will not survive the storm.

Building a multiracial coalition depends on confronting racial trauma. This trauma isn’t an abstract concept. It lives in the daily, embodied experiences of our potential comrades. It shows up in our meetings, in our resource sharing and in our silences. We witness it arise when a low-income femme of color calculates how to ask for rent help from her community while listening to others casually plan their summer vacations. She may wonder, “Can they truly understand what ‘mutual aid’ means when my survival is only an abstraction to them?” 

Or imagine a gentle, well-intentioned white man who can recite the statistics on racial wealth disparity but cannot feel in his body the pain of the mother in his group who works overtime to make ends meet. He overlooks her deep fatigue, the fear of a single missed shift, or the weight of an entire lineage of forced resilience. His intellectual declarations for justice become a wall, not a bridge. He has an inability to fully embody the empathy he feels. Such a man needs to move beyond intellectual understanding to feel the pain of his friends as if it were his own. He can only do this by opening up to his own layers of grief and trauma.

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These moments are not mere interpersonal friction; they are the manifestations of unhealed racial and class trauma. They are why, despite our best intentions, our coalitions fracture. Why, for example, the #MeToo movement fractured under accusations of racial bias.

Unaddressed trauma — the wild inner impulses of wrath and grief — does not vanish by suppression or avoidance. This pain can only begin to transform when it is wisely witnessed with love by our own selves and fellow human beings. By shining a light on emotions and experiences that feel neglected and shameful, we can begin to heal and move towards deeper solidarity with one another.

How can we face this trauma? 

Modern psychotherapy could be a good starting point for different kinds of activist groups. But we do not have enough well-trained and affordable therapists to confront the scale of trauma we are facing.

Many ancient healing lineages, including Indigenous and Eastern spiritualities, have also been offering us pathways for healing. In contrast to the individualist approaches common in Western healing, these approaches emphasize the creation of belonging with one’s community and the Earth itself. Modern spiritual leaders like Joanna Macy have curated pathways for healing collective ecological trauma, drawing on some of these ancient lineages. Some younger and people of color leaders are creating new integrated practices that address other kinds of trauma from both modern psychological and ancient spiritual community-based frameworks (search for facilitators here). 

Healing is, of course, not easy — it’s full of pitfalls, but it cannot be bypassed. Our mass movement must admit that a general strike can only succeed if we face our traumas head-on.

As we prepare to engage in nonviolent struggle, we must also learn to care for each other. This is the quiet, unglamorous work of our time. We must slow down to build the relational fabric for true mutual aid that will make any future strike not merely possible, but unshakable. 

This article A successful general strike requires trauma-informed mutual aid was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article Elders are a powerhouse of the US pro-democracy movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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As a senior, I’m trying to do my part to push back against the daily dismantling of the nation by the Trump administration. And I’m not alone.

Around 25 percent of adults in the United States are seniors. We are a powerful demographic for reclaiming and restoring democracy in this country. We want to build upon the 250 years of its existence and support its return to a position of international leadership.

In my 85 years as a citizen of the U.S., I’ve done my best to be a good one. Never shy to engage with worthwhile causes, I have been involved with disability rights, vocational rehabilitation, special education, domestic violence prevention and rehabbing offenders, senior services, youth services, food and water security, and immigrant and minority rights. I have tried to advance justice in the U.S., and some 16 plus other nations in which I have worked. Yet, since 2016, my pride in my own government has waned precipitously.

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I now live in a senior independent living facility with some 50 other seniors. We are often willing to overlook our increasing infirmities and dwindling resources to engage with passion and determination. We take great pride in having a positive influence on our children — both biological and otherwise — by teaching them our values and how to uphold them.

I have scores of senior friends and family members — some are more physically capable, but many have limited mobility or are even homebound. However, all of them are engaging in civil resistance in meaningful ways. I’ve learned from them that there are many opportunities for peaceful engagement in the resistance.

Those with limited mobility are posting and commenting on social media. Those with economic means are donating to progressive candidates. Many are phone banking and writing postcards to voters and potential voters with groups like Seniors Taking Action. Others boycott businesses that support the current administration, write letters to the editor and call in to radio talk shows.

I’ve seen many seniors (and non-seniors) with canes, walkers and wheelchairs at all of the protest events I have attended. At one demonstration, an elderly, disabled fellow showed up in a wheelchair equipped with hydraulic lifts that put him at eye level with the other protesters. He was not only able to see what others saw, but others saw him, his sign and his strength as a demonstrator with the same passion and potency.

Jeanne, who turns 100 later this year, at a protest on Aug. 31. (WNV/Bill Winkley)

I have a friend who turns 100 later this year and uses a walker to travel any distance from our communal residence. She is one of my role models, and has taught me how to maximize my presence and impact at large demonstrations. Last summer, she made careful preparations for the No Kings protest, which was planned at the federal building located roughly a mile from our home. Before the event, she made two round-trip trial runs to build stamina and reassure herself it was doable.

When I arrived at the protest, she had already strategically placed herself where her homemade sign could be seen and she could see, hear and engage fully with the activities. At a subsequent event, with yet another sign, she was one of several League of Women Voters who sported a banner extolling their values. My friend is a firebrand who never misses an opportunity to participate.

Another friend in her mid-70s has been totally blind since early childhood. She marches in most if not all demonstrations in her area. She religiously contacts her elected officials at both the federal and state levels, expressing her appreciation for deeds well done, dismay for bad moves, and suggestions or demands for more effective action. As a Latina woman who grew up in a poor neighborhood in El Paso, the child of a single mother and sister to four younger siblings, her life experience and upbringing has taught her the importance of advocating for herself and for others. With ICE violating the rights of so many minority folks right now, she is standing up in both English and Spanish, and making sure she is heard loud and clear.

My spouse, Stan Coleman, a director, actor, vocalist and pianist, directed a local theater production of the 1936 play “It Can’t Happen Here,” based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author, Sinclair Lewis. The performances opened the audience’s eyes to the existential threat Trump and his followers pose to our way of life.

John-Roy Wilson, a fellow resident at our senior independent living facility, at the MLK/NAACP march in Eugene, in 28 degree weather on Jan. 19. He is 80 years old and a Vietnam War veteran. (WNV/Bill Winkley)

Other seniors have engaged in the boycotts of Target, Disney and ABC, as well as Tesla Takedown. Other elders are leaning on their alma maters to support critical issues like student organizing and protesting, avoiding campus repression, standing up for immigrant student rights, and refusing to buy into the authoritarianism of Trump’s campus compact. Since schools depend on alumni for financial support, especially through legacies, seniors are leveraging their position as potential donors to shore up their colleges’ willingness to defy Trump’s efforts at coercion and control.

As part of our resistance, my spouse and I have chosen to be active founders and members of the local chapter of States Win, formerly known as Sister District Project. This national effort works to support key state-level candidates for office through marches, bar trivia fundraisers and direct donations. Seniors make up more than 50 percent of our chapter. Additionally, our queer, senior walking group (called the “Talkie-Walkies” because we do more talking than walking) frequently sits for hours in front of our main library here in Eugene, Oregon, inviting passersby to register to vote.

Two of the founders of our States Win chapter, both women in their mid-to-late 70s, regularly travel to the home area of the candidates we are supporting and spend days knocking on doors to promote them. They report few negative reactions to their presentations. Could their age or the fact that they are seniors — and have expended considerable effort and expense to do what they are doing — be a factor in this positive reception? SDP’s impact nationally has been formidable: We helped flip both Virginia and Washington State from red to blue trifectas, where all three branches of the state government are now dominated by Democrats.

Making donations is one advocacy activity many seniors can do with little effort. Almost every person I know participates as a donor, in small or large amounts, often as just one way they engage in political activism. My spouse and I have developed a profile for those we support: We look at their platform and what in their history informs it; how they have performed in other political positions, in advocacy groups and in movements; how they have overcome difficulties to be successful; their support for minority rights; and their passion for all of the above.

Phone banking has been shown to be effective in swaying non-voters and regular voters to vote for progressive candidates. It is an activity one can do from home with proven impact. Many, many of my elderly friends participate. Writing postcards can be a solo act from the comfort of one’s kitchen table or a social event with a group of like-minded activists. Seniors might be the largest demographic engaged with postcard writing. One friend, in particular, has handwritten over 1,000 postcards in the past two years.

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Signing petitions, joining and supporting advocacy groups such as Southern Poverty Law Center, Amnesty International and the ACLU, door-to-door canvassing, writing letters and emailing, are all methods of civil, peaceful resistance that countless seniors are involved in.

Additionally, with isolation being associated with dementia, the social value of many of these activities can be meaningful. Being with others builds awareness and commitment, both of which foster mental health, along with civil resistance. In Eugene, many of us gather at a store called Materials Exchange Center for Community Arts, or MECCA, where people make signs using both new and used materials, and share ideas with others of similar persuasion. My 84-year-old supper tablemate never fails to show up at a demonstration with a new and clever sign she created at MECCA. Folks often photograph her with her sign.

Importantly, all of these resistance efforts are nonviolent, which has been shown to be the most effective way of waging struggle. Trust us on this. Not only have seniors lived long enough to know what works, the book “Civil Resistance: What Everybody Needs to Know”proves it. Erica Chenoweth demonstrates that nonviolent movements have succeeded twice as often as violent ones over the last century. Along with my fellow senior activists, I often attend Chenoweth’s webinars with the Ash Center at Harvard University.

The activism carried out by our nation’s elders is laudable and extensive. Attend any rally, march, protest and look at the amount of white hair in the rising sea of protesters. Today’s seniors are not sitting at home knitting sweaters for our grandkids or pasting memory photos in albums. Nope, we are out there pushing back and fighting for a far better gift for them: We are assuring a future where we have a fully restored and improved democracy.

Don’t mess with seniors!

This article Elders are a powerhouse of the US pro-democracy movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How high school students are organizing walkouts against ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Jan. 28, Jalysa, a 17-year-old student at William C. Overfelt High School in East San Jose, California, led a walkout during sixth period. More than half of the students in her school left class and walked 20 minutes to a local Target where people had been targeted by ICE. 

The students chanted “Si, se puede,” “La raza si, la migra no” and “Hey hey, ho ho, ICE has got to go” while waving Mexican flags. They were escorted by grassroots community groups Jalysa had reached out to, who came to show support and act as security. The walkout turned into a protest that included speeches and performances from the school’s mariachi and folklorico teams, as well as Aztec dancers.

“A lot of people, especially adults and Trump supporters, think that the youth are just gonna sit back and let this happen, but we are not for that at all,” said Jalysa, who asked that her last name not be shared due to safety and privacy concerns. “Walkouts raise awareness; it lets everybody know that youth really do care.”

The students at Overfelt High School are among thousands across the country, from California to Iowa, Texas and Maryland, who have walked out to protest ICE and show solidarity with immigrants in their communities. The walkouts began in early 2025 after Trump’s inauguration, and the tactic reemerged in January following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the arrest of five-year-old Liam Ramos by federal immigration agents in Minnesota. Mostly led by juniors and seniors, the students organize on Instagram pages and group chats. While many of the walkouts occurred on or around the Nationwide Day of Action on Jan. 30, students have continued holding walkouts and are forming coalitions across schools to expand their reach.

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The Jan. 28 walkout at Overfelt High School marked the first anniversary of a walkout Jalysa organized on Instagram after Trump took office in 2025, inspired by videos of other student walkouts. Since that action, which also drew more than half the school, “I felt like my community and my school just changed so much — we all know that we have something in common now,” Jalysa said. “People actually do want to say something — they just want to see somebody starting it, and then they want to continue it and keep going. I had people come up to me after the walkout and say, ‘I want to help.’”

Prior to the walkouts, Jalysa had conversations with her school administration. Her principal said that he would support the students, and nearly every teacher in the school let Jalysa do an in-class presentation to recruit participants.

Jalysa plans to coordinate with students at other schools to plan another big action for May Day.

“My hope would be to see some change, maybe the government will actually realize that what’s going on is bad,” Jalysa said. “Like, why are you taking families apart? Why are you taking people who obey the laws, who pay taxes? I just find that so devastating. They’ve been doing the same tactics for over 100 years with the Natives, with the Japanese and now with the Latinos. It’s really heartbreaking. I just want people to wake up.”

Building to a statewide walkout

Other coalitional efforts are in the works, like California Youth Unite, a group of students from more than 30 schools around the state organizing a walkout on Feb. 27. The coalition works in collaboration with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and advocates for an end to policing and surveillance in addition to advocating for immigrant justice. California Youth Unite co-organizer Lauryn Chew said she hopes that a mass mobilization of schools, rather than scattered walkouts, will send a message across California that the youth want ICE out of the state. 

“We were hoping that making this a statewide, coordinated but also decentralized movement would enable us to make sure that our politicians, our local governments and all of the people who are involved in ensuring that ICE operates know that we are still watching and that we didn’t just do it to skip school for one day,” said Chew, who is a high school senior in Orange County, California. “We genuinely care about the safety of our neighbors.” 

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Chew and her co-organizer Cindy Chen worked with students from San Diego to Sacramento to come up with a list of demands that include the abolition of ICE and transparency in local law enforcement policies, divestment from policing and investment in communities, and protections for students’ free speech. 

She notes that many adult organizers of actions like the Jan. 30 National Shutdown have talked about not going about business as usual — and that students’ business is attending school, so it is their best way to protest.

“We’re drawing attention for disrupting the traditional process [of] going to school,” Chew said. “And I think that’s a really powerful way for us to send a message that the lessons we’re being taught in school — or are supposed to be taught in school — about standing up for justice and freedom need to actually happen. In order for us to do that, we have to take action, even if it means not coming to a class.”

Chew hopes to continue building the network of schools and youth with recurring walkouts, not just a one-time action, and by expanding to offer mutual aid in the community. She also hopes the coalition will help students stay connected to each other once they graduate and go to different schools around the state and country.

Braving repercussions

While Jalysa received support from the Overfelt High School administration for the walkouts, Jaide Kaltenthaler, a 17-year-old student at Rosamond High School in Southern California, had a different experience. When she and a handful of other students approached the administration about their plan to walk out in protest of ICE raids and murders around the country, administrators said that any senior who participated could be banned from prom and barred from the graduation trip to Disneyland without a refund. 

Kaltenthaler and her co-organizers went through with their plan. After a week of promoting it on social media daily, around 100 students had pledged to join. The organizers also arranged an in-school protest for the students who didn’t want to leave school property. 

When Kaltenthaler arrived at school on Feb. 3, the planned day of action, she went straight to the drama room carrying multiple protest signs and supplies to make more. Other organizers brought snacks, water, a first aid kit and more signs. They worked until third period making signs and passed them out during their nutrition break, reminding people that they were walking out. 

Dozens of Rosamond High School students in Southern California walked out on Feb. 3. (Instagram/@rhs.actions

When Kaltenthaler walked out of class at 12:20 p.m., dozens of students were already waiting with signs in the quad. Her co-organizer, Isabel Rojas, played Bad Bunny, Green Day and Maná on a speaker. 

The students walked out of the campus gates and down the street waving their signs and chanting “one struggle, one fight, immigrant rights are human rights” in a protest that lasted two hours.

“I thought that it was important to do the walkout and to protest against ICE because they’re killing citizens, terrorizing neighborhoods and tearing apart families,” Kaltenthaler said. “I think that it’s so disheartening and hope to show that there are people who are holding out hope for and fighting for a better future.”

After the walkout, no students faced repercussions. Rojas said many teachers were supportive and said they were proud of the students. She also said many people encouraged them to continue their organizing, and that the support has inspired them to come up with future plans.

Meanwhile, students and faculty at other schools have seen repercussions. In a Virginia high school, 303 students were suspended for participating in a walkout (they responded by walking out again), and another 100 were suspended in a high school in Oklahoma. The attorney general of Texas launched investigations in four school districts, including Dallas and San Antonio, to see if teachers or administrators facilitated the protests. In Los Angeles, a high school teacher got fired for letting students walk out. 

Standing up for the community 

At Covina High School in Southern California, a small group of students attempted to walkout on the Nationwide Day of Action on Jan. 30, but the vice principal restricted them from doing so.

After witnessing their attempt, junior Mireya Rubio was inspired to organize another walkout with more lead time to prepare and promote it. She got the administration to agree to give students a day of excused absence for the walkout.

“This was something that I saw my school wanted to do, it just needed a lot more organization,” Rubio said. “I didn’t see anyone stepping up for it, so I decided that if no one was going to do it, I would.”

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Like Jalysa and Kaltenthaler, Rubio made an Instagram page to promote the walkout. Students from her school quickly followed the page. Other nearby schools messaged her that they were also doing walkouts and asked to collaborate. They formed a coalition of seven schools and made a group chat to coordinate a walkout where they would meet in the same spot to draw more attention. They are timing their walkout for Feb. 27 to be part of California Youth Unite’s statewide action.

When Rubio learned about the East Los Angeles Walkouts of 1968 in her AP History class, she never imagined she would be leading one herself. But as the daughter of immigrants in a predominantly Latino community, she feels like it is important to stand up for immigrant justice. 

“I think that’s the big motivation for me, and why I push so hard to do good in school and organize things like this, because I feel like I want to reward my mom’s sacrifices and everything that she’s done for me and my sister,” Rubio said.

“Most of our community is made up of immigrants and Latinos, so I think people just feel connected to it due to affecting their loved ones, and then personally seeing the fear in our parents every time we go out or hear something,” she said. “I feel like that really motivates a lot of people to try to stand up for change.”

This article How high school students are organizing walkouts against ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article How to build emergency response systems for the long haul was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Targeted state violence and rising fascism are being met with creative organizing by people in Minneapolis and across the country, from mass marches to neighborhood mutual aid to ICE watch foot patrols. These are all beautiful manifestations of resistance that have kept many people safe and demonstrated widespread repudiation of the Trump administration’s policies. 

Yet as state-sanctioned violence becomes more coordinated, normalized and national in scope, we must continue adapting our response systems to shifting needs. Emergency response structures set up in moments of crisis can often lead to isolated, reactive decision making with responsibility falling on a few shoulders, creating the conditions for burnout, security failures, movement fragmentation and individual and organizational missteps or even collapse. 

Here we can draw on some hard-earned lessons from our predecessors in the decades-long international accompaniment movement, who witness, stand with and provide security support for human rights defenders, communities and activists under attack by authoritarian regimes in Latin America. In response to sometimes devastating losses, accompaniment organizations developed a set of skills and strategies over many years for collaborative, sustainable decision making to respond to security incidents while under conditions of constant threat. We ourselves learned these skills in our many years of working with accompaniment organizations in Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia from 2008 to 2022.

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We share here principles and practices from this legacy, which we hope organizations and networks, whether formal or informal, can use to develop emergency response structures that are sustainable, don’t overly burden a few individuals with the difficult decision making, actively build collective capacity and shared analysis, and support skill-building for more people in our movements.

What we present here are suggestions, and we invite you to adapt them to particular organizations and situations. They may take a bit more planning and preparation than may seem available in moments of urgency. But if we want to sustain our movements for what, unfortunately, is likely to be a long struggle, we must begin now to put durable, collective and supportive structures into practice.

1. No one person decides alone

Decision making in emergency security situations is emotionally and mentally taxing. Stress can narrow our literal and metaphorical fields of vision. And because the weight of a decision can be incredibly heavy to bear — especially if things go wrong — no one ever made a decision alone in the accompaniment organizations of which we were a part. We had clearly established protocols for which people, based on their roles in the organization, would come together for specific emergency response decisions.

For example, we established regional subcommittees based on where a security incident occurred. Each subcommittee was composed of a security lead, a representative from the advocacy team and on-the-ground volunteers, who worked together to assess, analyze and respond to emergency situations. 

Applying this principle in a U.S. context, organizers of a publicly advertised protest could set a team of folks who gather at an office or a home to monitor social media and news reports for security incidents or threats, and be ready to make decisions about emergency response.

2. Prepare decision-making structures and roles beforehand

Emergency response or crisis moments are when people are most activated and are also the most likely to lead to organizational, interpersonal or movement conflict. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, we are being subjected to situations of prolonged violence directed at ourselves and people we care for. We want to show up in the best way possible, yet often also feel frustration, impotence or rage. 

In our accompaniment organizations, we mitigated stress and conflict (to the extent possible) by having clear processes and roles for decision making. 

First, we frontloaded as many decisions as possible before an emergency, allowing us to focus on the situation at hand rather than spend time debating who would do what and delaying important support for the impacted individuals. Knowing who is going to be involved in emergency response reduces the need for conversation and shortens the response time.

The Peace Brigade International accompanies the Front of People in Defense of Land and Water in Amilcingo, Mexico. (Facebook/Peace Brigades International)

We have seen this play out in high-risk moments in our accompaniment work. For example, when we responded to nationwide protests that extended over months and saw daily murders of protesters by military and police forces, we set up a rotating decision-making group. Because roles and communication channels had already been agreed upon, colleagues didn’t have to debate who should verify information, call other allied organizations or set up our emergency response protocol. They could simply act.

Second, we made decisions in consensus. While clear decision-making structures are essential, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be hierarchical. We’ve found in our accompaniment work that decisions are easier to implement when everyone has a hand in shaping them. A consensus-based decision-making structure keeps any one person from carrying the whole mental load (see “No one person decides alone”) and lets us actually use the full brainpower in the room. We all come with different lived experiences, risk tolerances and ways of thinking, which means we’re bound to catch things others won’t and, luckily, vice versa.  

This works best when folks talk it out together and create a clear timeline to decide. In the example above, if the group got stuck, they would start with a quick break to rest and regroup, and if that fails, go to a smaller predesignated subgroup — and, if even that doesn’t work, have a clear fallback decision-maker. Something else we’ve learned: Consensus tends to work better when we trust each other and each other’s criteria, so it helps to make the effort to get to know each other, grab a coffee or go for a walk before the emergencies happen.

3. Some participants in decision making should be offsite 

It might seem logical that those directly involved in the emergency response should be onsite, able to see the situation firsthand and respond immediately. In fact, we learned in our accompaniment work that involving folks offsite as advisors or even decision makers can provide essential perspective, bring in crucial information and further spread the decision-making burden. 

In one protest scenario, while tensions escalated on the ground, an off-site team a few blocks away tracked both police staging and local news sources and relayed that information back to organizers. This wider view allowed on-the-ground leadership to make informed choices without relying only on what was immediately visible.

4. Rotate the decision makers

Holding a decision-making role in an emergency situation is not easy; it means putting your body on high alert, navigating complex situations and grappling with violence directed at our communities. This, unsurprisingly, takes a toll on us over an extended period of time (more on this below). 

Previous Coverage

Lessons in courage, care and collective action from the international accompaniment movement

Even if we believe we can hold this indefinitely, the reality is that, without moments to regulate our nervous systems, our bodies normalize the constant alertness, making it harder to activate when necessary and to properly analyze what is truly an emergency. We want our emergency decision makers to be well-rested, regulated and connected — for their wellbeing and ours, too. 

That’s why we recommend that the decision makers in an emergency situation shift on an agreed-upon rotation. Depending on organizational structure, the best rotation might be every protest or event, or it might be a time period, like a week. This not only gives us a chance to skill up more folks in emergency response (always a benefit for our movements!), but it also gives us decision makers a chance to rest and recharge.

In the protest scenario previously mentioned, once things settled for the day, the people who had been making decisions rotated out. Some went home to sleep; others took quiet time away from phones and updates. A few days later, once they were rested enough to look at what they’d learned and what might need to change next time, they checked back in for the follow-up stage.

5. Institute Urgency Guides

Prolonged emergency situations make it harder over time to accurately recognize urgency. When everything feels critical, true emergencies can become blurred. Clear guidelines help mediate this by providing structure and clarity for decision making under sustained stress. In our accompaniment work, we used the following guidelines to categorize our responses: 

On alert (prior to emergency): The situation seems to be escalating. We have seen a few signs indicating the risk level may be increasing (increased presence of armed actors, state or non-state, counter-protesters gathering, surveillance signs, suspected infiltration, etc.). Start to notify the security team (on and offsite) and start to implement increased security measures.

Immediate response (minutes to hours after): The emergency situation is active; the threat has not yet passed and there is potential for the situation to escalate or repeat. The physical and emotional well-being of impacted individuals is prioritized immediately. 

Rapid (24 to 48 hours after): The specific situation has passed, but there is potential of it repeating in the near future. This could be because we will go to the same location in the next few days, or the event we are hosting will continue, or the aggressor is still nearby or indicating potential harm to our communities. 

Follow-up (a few days to weeks after): The situation has passed. Here we focus on analysis and whether we need to adapt our organizational and movement strategy. This is also a great time to broaden the analysis by including allies in answering questions like: What was the aggressor’s desired impact? Have we seen this strategy used before? What are the increased security measures we may need to implement based on this situation? 

We have used this for years in accompaniment spaces, allowing us to clearly mark stages in our response and who had to be involved. For example, when activists we were supporting suffered an assassination attempt, the attention moved from split-second decisions (immediate response) to checking in with impacted participants, ensuring medical attention, locating others who could be targeted next and finding safe houses, to adjusting security plans for the next day and watching for signs the situation might flare up again (rapid response). Later still, the group circled back to look at what had happened and what it meant going forward (follow up).

6. Establish ways to take care of yourself and your team before and after taking on decision-making roles.

When stepping into an emergency response decision-making role, it is essential to shore up your emotional resources before an emergency and repair your heart and mind afterward. This will look different for everyone, but all organizations and networks should dedicate time and space for everyone involved in emergency response to do this. You might employ the same tools for shoring up and for repairing: They could include a nice walk with your dog, tea with a close friend, reading a good book or taking a bath. 

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Whatever you need to rest and recharge, identify those activities and build them into your plans. We know this is hard, and to be clear, this level of care has not always been consistently present within accompaniment organizations; its absence often contributes to rapid turnover and diminished response capacity. Naming this matters. After more than a decade of collective work in emergency accompaniment, we have seen clearly that constant crisis response is not sustainable if people’s nervous systems are never given real opportunities to rest and regulate.

This is why we believe it is so important to speak directly about intentional, collective care practices not as an ideal, but as a necessary condition for the longevity and effectiveness of accompaniment and emergency response itself. 

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel

These tools aren’t a panacea for the real risks presented by escalating state violence. They won’t stop all arrests, injuries, raids, deportations or assassinations. They won’t undo the harm already done or bring back the people we’ve lost. But the more we incorporate skillful emergency response tools into our repertoire, the more we can stay connected to one another under pressure, reduce preventable harm, and keep showing up again and again without burning out, fragmenting or turning on each other. 

None of this work is new. We are drawing from the accumulated knowledge of mentors, organizers, human rights defenders, journalists, accompaniers, medics, lawyers and movement elders who have spent decades responding to fascist and authoritarian governments across regions and generations. From underground networks resisting military dictatorships, to civil rights organizers facing state-sanctioned terror, Indigenous land defenders, abolitionists, anti-colonial movements and transnational solidarity networks, people have long been building collective security, emergency response and care structures under conditions that mirror in many ways what we are facing now.

Luckily, this means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to know how to look to the past, to other contexts and to each other for guidance and support. The more intentional we are, the better we’ll be able to keep up the struggle so that, one day soon, we will not just have survived fascism but defeated it.

This article How to build emergency response systems for the long haul was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article Rev. Jesse Jackson’s deep commitment to peace was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Amidst the many public tributes to the Rev. Jesse Jackson for his leadership in social justice, only a few have mentioned his deep commitment to peace and support for nuclear disarmament. I was fortunate to work with Jackson on these issues and knew him as an active participant in the peace movement.

I first met Rev. Jackson in 1980 soon after I became executive director of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Jackson invited SANE and other national peace groups to join a march in Washington, D.C. for jobs, peace and justice. I also allied with Jackson and civil rights leaders in supporting the proposal to establish a national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

To deepen cooperation, I invited Jackson to serve as a member of SANE’s Board of Directors and join our national executive committee. Jackson agreed and designated his foreign policy adviser Jack Odell as his representative on the board. Odell had served as the head of fundraising and voter registration for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He brought decades of labor and civil rights experience to his role at SANE and was an invaluable adviser as we sought to build a larger and more diverse peace movement.

In the early 1980s the peace movement grew rapidly by supporting the Nuclear Weapons Freeze, which called for a bilateral halt to U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons testing, production and deployment. Jackson was an early and active supporter of the freeze. He was the keynote speaker at one of the largest public rallies for the freeze, the Peace Sunday event of 90,000 people in Pasadena, California in June 1982. Jackson went beyond the freeze and called for reversing the arms race and slashing military spending, positions we also adopted at SANE. He was a strong advocate of no first use of nuclear weapons.

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In the early stages of the Nuclear Freeze movement, a debate emerged over the question of political focus. Some Freeze organizers argued for a narrow emphasis on nuclear weapons issues. I and others said that the peace movement could not be silent in the face of the growing U.S. military intervention in El Salvador and support for the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua. With strong encouragement and support from Jackson, SANE joined the growing movement against U.S. imperialism in Central America. We continued to support the nuclear freeze and a halt to nuclear testing, while also working to end the wars in Central America.

As Jackson condemned U.S. intervention against Nicaragua, SANE became actively involved in lobbying against military support for the Contras. When President Ronald Reagan called the Contras “heroes,” SANE sponsored an advertising campaign describing their actions as “terrorism” not “heroism.” Jackson used the same theme in the primary debates during his 1984 presidential run, calling on the U.S. to “stop our funding of terror in Nicaragua and El Salvador.”

Many praised Jackson for his ability to negotiate with governments and armed actors for the release of American hostages. In January 1984 he succeeded in persuading Syrian President Hafez al-Assad to release U.S. Navy pilot Lt. Robert Goodman. Later that year, he arranged for the release of dozens of American and Cuban prisoners held captive in Cuba. In June 1985 he traveled to Lebanon for negotiations with Hezbollah to arrange the release of some of the U.S. hostages victimized by the hijacking of TWA flight 847.

The call for a nuclear test ban was a central part of the Nuclear Freeze. It was a specific, easily verifiable first step toward ending the arms race. The issue unexpectedly assumed increased importance in August 1985 when the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announced that Moscow would begin a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing.

SANE and the Nuclear Freeze campaign leaders seized upon the Soviet action as an opportunity to build support for a mutual test ban. Together the organizations announced the Appeal to World Leaders, a petition drive to gather a million signatures in support of that goal. We also decided to create a peace movement delegation to deliver the petitions in person at the Geneva summit.  Jackson enthusiastically supported the idea and agreed to head the delegation and serve as our spokesperson. Many in the peace movement considered Jackson a people’s secretary of state and were happy to have him as our leader.

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By coincidence, the annual Nuclear Freeze conference in 1985 was scheduled for the weekend of Nov. 15-17 in Chicago, two days prior to the beginning of the Geneva summit. The conference was turned into a rally and send-off ceremony for the citizens’ delegation to Geneva. Jackson was the keynote speaker, and rallied the crowd with an exhilarating and impassioned plea to “give peace a chance.”

Balloons were released and music blared, and the conference turned into a rollicking celebration. In the midst of the excitement, with delegates cheering and reaching out to us as we passed by, our delegation with Jackson at the lead left the stage and marched out through the hall to depart for O’Hare airport and the flight to Geneva. It was an exhilarating moment. We had the sense of being emissaries for peace to demand that world leaders halt the arms race.

Prior to the trip we had sent numerous letters and inquiries to the White House and the Soviet embassy in Washington requesting meetings. We received no response from the U.S. government, but when we arrived in Geneva the next day we were informed by the Soviet mission that a “high official” would meet with us the next day.

We huddled late into the night with Jackson to discuss how to handle the meeting. We agreed that we would urge the Soviet Union to extend its moratorium on nuclear testing. We also agreed, at Jackson’s urging, that we should show our political independence by challenging the Soviet Union on human rights concerns. He recommended that we focus on the plight of Soviet Jews and other minorities in the Soviet Union, and we agreed.

The next day we waited anxiously in the hallway of the Soviet mission. Soon a fleet of limousines arrived and Gorbachev and his entourage swept into the building. He approached us with outstretched hand to greet Jackson and members of the delegation. Jackson immediately got down to business and raised the points we had agreed upon the night before. Gorbachev responded positively to our appeal on nuclear testing and spoke about the need for “real disarmament.”

He did not address the concern about human rights, however. At this point, as the interpreter was translating Gorbachev’s remarks, Jackson interrupted and challenged the Soviet leader to respond to the question about human rights. Taken aback by Jackson’s audacity and obviously shaken by this unexpected challenge from the peace movement delegation, Gorbachev quickly regained his composure. He denied the issue, saying that Jews have made valuable contributions to disarmament.

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For the rest of the encounter the atmosphere was more cordial. Justine Merritt from a group called Women for a Meaningful Summit presented Gorbachev an artistic image of flowers and children. Jackson then directed Gorbachev to the table where the boxes of petitions were placed and he and I formally presented them. “How many signatures are here?” he asked. The final count was 1.2 million, we reported. Impressed at this outpouring of public concern, Gorbachev responded, “these petitions represent the hopes of millions of Americans.” It was a fitting final comment, as he shook hands again with everyone and departed.

News of the citizens summit and the dramatic photo of Jackson squaring off with Gorbachev appeared in newspapers and on broadcast outlets all over the world the next day. Much of the reporting was negative, as journalists paid little attention to the test ban appeal and accused Jackson of upstaging Reagan, but the core message of the action was clear and undeniable. The peace movement was on the global stage, with Rev. Jackson as our spokesperson, presenting our appeal to end nuclear testing and reverse the arms race.

Change did not come immediately, but in the following years, with citizen pressure continuing to build, Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to negotiate for arms reduction and the Cold War came to an end.  Jackson and the peace movement helped to make that possible.

This article Rev. Jesse Jackson’s deep commitment to peace was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article Activists are racking up wins against a false climate solution was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Last June, California climate and environmental justice groups celebrated a victory a long time in the making. After an opposition campaign that built alliances across movements, turned out supporters to hearings and generated 50,000 public comments, a company gave up plans that threatened to wreak havoc on the state’s forests.

The corporation behind the defeated project, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, proposed building two mills in Northern California’s Tuolumne and Lassen Counties to turn wood from nearby forests into pellets to be burned for fuel. 

Globally, the burning of wood pellets made from trees, known as forest biomass, has become one of the fastest-growing false solutions to climate change. It is turning some of the world’s last intact forests into fuel that’s used as a substitute for coal, mainly in Europe and Asia. 

GSNR’s mills would have sourced wood from California forests already under strain from a drying climate. Burning wood contributes to climate change, with some estimates placing the carbon footprint of this type of energy generation close to that of coal. Even so, the company’s backers tried selling their project as “green” energy.

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GSNR planned to export these pellets via the Port of Stockton, where local environmental justice organizations said increased industrial activity would further pollute communities already suffering from some of the worst asthma rates in the state. 

“This project would have transformed California in a very negative way,” said Gary Hughes, a California-based organizer for Biofuelwatch, one of the organizations involved in the campaign. “Grassroots organizing put a stop to it.” 

The coalition that stopped Golden State Natural Resources joined a global movement that has achieved real momentum, leading to major defeats for the industry last year in the Netherlands, Mississippi and Washington State.

“The movement against the forest biomass industry is winning,” said Michél Legendre, campaigns director for the Dogwood Alliance, which fights to protect forests in the U.S. South. “People exposing this industry for what it is have put it on shaky ground.” 

Uncovering false solutions 

The narrative propping up forest biomass as an energy source is that burning wood from trees is climate neutral, because the carbon that is released can theoretically be reabsorbed if the trees are replanted. However, this fails to account for how carbon from wood combustion remains in the atmosphere for decades or centuries before trees can fully regrow.

Other sustainability claims made by the industry, like that it uses mainly leftover slash from logging, have also been debunked. Industry whistleblowers and environmental groups engaged in ground-truthing — in which activists tail logging vehicles to see what they are cutting — say they have witnessed biomass companies harvesting whole, mature trees, including old-growth trees in British Columbia.

“This industry is a glaring example of corporations responding to the climate crisis with greenwashing as they try to make a profit,” said Merry Dickinson, a lead campaigner for the U.K.-based Stop Burning Trees Coalition. “In the process they’re destroying people’s health and livelihoods.”

Dickinson joined the movement against forest biomass while she was a university student in Yorkshire, home to the U.K.’s largest biomass power plant and single biggest source of carbon emissions. The Drax Power Station formerly ran on coal, but began transitioning to burn entirely wood pellets in 2012. The U.K. government supported the move by providing Drax with roughly a billion pounds in annual subsidies. 

“When Drax announced they would stop burning coal, we climate activists celebrated,” said Katy Brown, a campaigner with Biofuelwatch in the U.K. “But when they started burning wood instead, it began to feel like a hollow victory.”

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West Coast climate activists battle the false ‘solution’ of forest biomass

Dickinson co-founded the direct action group Axe Drax in Yorkshire. This led to her becoming an organizer of Stop Burning Trees, a coalition working to educate the public about Drax’s climate impact. A major goal was to end Drax’s government subsidies, which were coming up for renewal.

“We did street outreach, knocked on doors in communities around the Drax plant, and built relationships with workers and unions,” Dickinson said.

In February 2025, the U.K.’s Minister for Energy made an announcement: Government support for Drax will continue through the period from 2027-2031, but at half the current level. This suggests Members of Parliament are at least beginning to see Drax’s subsidies as a liability. 

“Drax having its subsidies extended is far from what we wanted,” Dickinson said. “Still, the deal they got is far from being what Drax wanted, either.” 

U.K. activists have continued pressuring Drax. In May, Axe Drax nonviolently disrupted the company’s annual meeting, blocking entrances to the building where the gathering took place and delaying its start time by an hour. Meanwhile, biomass opponents won a victory in mainland Europe when plans for a massive biomass power plant in the Netherlands were canceled last year.

Drax, which has expanded into the global market, now operates pellet mills in the U.S. and Canada, sourcing much of the wood burned in its Yorkshire plant from the U.S. South. In 2024, Drax also entered a partnership with Golden State Natural Resources in California. 

But as support for Drax wanes in the U.K., it and other biomass companies are also running into trouble in North America. Thanks to opposition from local communities, several new or existing biomass pellet projects have been shelved or shut down in the past year — including in the industry’s heartland. 

Recent wins

When Mississippi state regulators denied a permit for a Drax pellet plant in the small community of Gloster last April, the decision showed how grassroots pressure is starting to push policymakers to take a harder line toward the forest biomass industry. 

Drax was requesting a change to its regulatory status that would have allowed it to emit more air pollution and increase the volume of pellets it could produce. When Mississippi’s Environmental Quality Permit Board met to discuss the plan, locals fed up with existing pollution from the plant turned out in force. 

“The community of Gloster packed the room,” said Legendre, the Dogwood Alliance campaign director. 

A rally in Mississippi to oppose the proposed Drax wood pellet plant permit. (Dogwood Alliance)

The board’s initial vote to deny the permit was later reversed after a flurry of public relations work by Drax convinced state regulators to backtrack and side with the company. However, the effort Drax had to expend to get its way in an industry-friendly state suggests the movement against biomass is having a real impact. 

Other biomass projects in Mississippi, a regional hub for the industry, were outright defeated last year. In February, biomass giant Enviva announced it would close a plant in the town of Amory, which once processed up to 115,000 metric tons of pellets annually. A massive new Enviva plant in Bond, Mississippi, is also unlikely to move forward. 

Industry attempts to expand to the U.S. West Coast have run into resistance, too. GSNR’s California development plans were opposed by a diverse coalition including forest defender groups, climate activists and environmental justice organizations like the Stockton-based Little Manila Rising. 

“It was a kind of unprecedented urban-rural alliance that came together to fight this project,” said Hughes, of Biofuelwatch. 

Another proposed Drax pellet mill in Longview, Washington, drew opposition from nearby residents and local climate groups. That project would have processed up to 450,000 metric tons of wood annually, exposing surrounding working-class neighborhoods to air and noise pollution. In December 2025, Drax put the project on indefinite hold.

“I am glad the Drax pellet project is gone from Longview,” said Diane Dick, a longtime climate organizer in the community. “I look forward to their forest destruction business being gone from North America.”

Drax also recently closed an existing pellet plant in British Columbia, citing a challenging business climate. Even so, the forest biomass industry in North America is far from defeated. Corporate giants like Drax and Enviva still operate pellet mills in Canada and the U.S. South. A smaller company called Pacific Northwest Renewable Energy has proposed building a large pellet plant in Hoquiam, Washington. Several existing power plants in New England also run on biomass pellets, with plans in the works for new projects that are opposed by activists. 

“As long as harm is being done to communities affected by biomass plants, this story isn’t over,” Hughes said. “We’re not going to declare victory when we’re far from getting to the end of this fight.”

Growing the movement 

Up to this point, organized resistance to forest biomass has come mainly from those who are directly affected by the industry, and a relatively small number of regional or international groups focused specifically on this issue.

“What we’ve done so far has been with a very small subset of impacted communities and those who care about Southern forests,” Legendre said. “I can only imagine what might happen when we bring the movement to a larger scale.”

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Part of this process entails getting the broader climate movement to more explicitly embrace stopping forest biomass as one of its goals. 

“People who are already involved in other climate campaigns might feel, understandably, that they can’t take on another fight,” said Brown, of Biofuelwatch. “But something as simple as organizations who work on fossil fuels incorporating opposition to forest biomass into their existing messaging can really help, without creating a lot of new work.” 

In 2024, Enviva filed for bankruptcy, restructuring itself as a private company. Its troubles are another sign opposition to the biomass industry is having an effect — but activists fear the new structure will make it easier for Enviva to avoid public scrutiny. Meanwhile, Drax has floated building a data center in Yorkshire to prop up demand for its power plant.

“We have a real chance to put the final nail in the coffin of Drax and the biomass industry,” Dickinson said. “But they’re never going to be the ones to put themselves in the ground. It’s our job to fight them to the very end.”

This article Activists are racking up wins against a false climate solution was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article Why activists should take friendship seriously was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

My whole life, I’ve regarded friendship as a happy by-product of activism — a reward for all the sacrifice, but little more. That view got a jolt when my friend Frida Berrigan, reviewing my new book about the post-9/11 antiwar movement, wrote: “Varon conveys that the real strength of the peace movement . . . is friendship.” Hmm. 

I met two of my best friends through the anti-Guántanamo group Witness Against Torture. Countless friendships formed in the groups I studied. Friendship, Frida claims, defied the “War on Terror,” based in fear, suspicion and racism.

The second jolt came when reading Benjamin Shepard’s terrific “On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting.” For Shepard, a dear friend of friends, friendship is essential — both the means and the end of change-making. I met my wife, Alice Meaker Varon, and another one of my closest friends through the 2004 sensation Billionaires for Bush.

Touché.

Ben Shepard takes friendship seriously, while making the case that we, as activists, should do so too. The book is hardly a systematic treatment of friendship. Instead, it is a shape-shifting account of Shepard’s own journey through the great progressive causes of the last four decades, from HIV/AIDS activism, to global justice, to opposition to war and now fascism. Studded throughout is wisdom about friendship, from Aristotle to Adrienne Rich, along with Shepard’s tender remembrances of love, loss and fellowship at the barricades. 

There is a long philosophical tradition that sees friendship, especially with virtuous friends, as itself an act of virtue. From experience, we all know that friendship — in its connection and contention, happiness and hard times — is a crucible for the formation of both our character and capacity in the world.

Shepard’s conceit is to see that capacity as a potent, if underappreciated, political force. 

Some of the book’s most arresting lines are those Shepard worked to learn, like the greeting of an HIV/AIDS activist to her staff: “Thank you for coming to work today!” That work, based in the respect of friendship, saved lives.

Ever humble, Shepard reveals himself as something of a national treasure. He seems to know everybody, in New York City at least. There must be three of him, my wife and I joke, because he’s at every protest. He always has a giant smile and kind words to match. He’s the kind of person who makes you feel good about yourself and whatever your small effort is that day. Bless such people. 

Shepard never goes so far as to say that friendship, in itself, is resistance. (J.D. Vance, no doubt, has friends; Hitler surely did too.) But he makes the political case, quoting philosopher Bennet Helm, that friendship is a “joint exercise of autonomy in defining the kind of life worth living.” Friendship, put otherwise, can be figurative. The goal of so much activism is to give the public and policy spheres a hint of the decency, empathy and compassion we privately seek. 

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These recent years have been so awful, in part because too many Americans have embraced a cruelty and toughness in public life that violates what they expect from themselves and others in the realm of friendship. Friendship, Shepard implicitly argues, is a standpoint from which to reject right-wing ideology, on personal as much as political grounds.

Shepard hardly glazes up activists’ commitment to friendship. Much of the book is about the soul-destroying ploys of too many on the left to tear their comrades down. The most intense parts of the book concern what may be termed the left’s own “cancel culture” (though Shepard avoids the term). It is one thing, he argues, to disagree with the position of an ally on some specific issue. It is another thing to accuse that comrade of being a bad person, through and through. I winced, and nearly cried, when reading of an ACT UP activist, at the height of the AIDS crises, being nearly ex-communicated for taking a “safe sex” line, to the ire of ACT UP’s “pro-sex” radicals. Shepard offers plenty of dispiriting examples, surely triggering grief in the reader from their own experience. Hillary vs. Bernie vs. Trump broke close bonds. No doubt, Oct. 7 and Gaza did too. 

Shepard is a fierce fighter for all that is good and just. He has lived a “big life,” in no small part by allying with big personalities, like the legendary HIV/AIDS activist Elizabeth Owens, whose life as a Black queer woman from the Bronx is so different from Shepard’s own. But, intramurally speaking, Shepard is a lover, not a fighter. His insistent message is that people broadly on the same side share vastly more than whatever may separate them. The best play is almost always coalition, alliance. Divisiveness divides, and saps our power. Almost never do we look in retrospect at such schisms over ideology — or worse personality — and judge them worth the strife.

I have learned this all over again in a recent, terrible struggle against wicked austerity at my university, the New School, in which faculty and staff jobs are on the line.

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The stress is enormous, as the stakes are high. There are power plays, stretching years back, in our spirited resistance. But there are, more importantly, fundamental issues of worker justice on the line, demanding solidarity and true efforts to listen, understand and even change one’s position.

Shepard endorses solidarity, while reminding us of the simple act of human kindness — based on shared aspirations and responses to shared hardships — that make solidarity real.

Through it all, Ben smiles. He takes the prefigurative seriously, along with the succor (and sexy connection of queer struggles of the 1990s) of the group experience.

Maybe I smile too little because I don’t value enough the friendships we create. Maybe you do too.

Thank you Ben, my friend, for pointing us to a better way.

This article Why activists should take friendship seriously was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.