2017 February

I really hate the expression “self care,” but I have been developing strategies for keeping my news feed from overwhelming me with anxiety, despair and anger. At the risk of appearing anodyne, I will share my five-point plan.

1. Practice harm reduction with intake of news. Try to keep social media to specific times of the day and limit the length of exposure. I will admit that I’m struggling with this one, but making some headway.

2. Keep devices out of the bedroom. Read a book before going to sleep—preferably something unrelated to current events. Right now I’m reading The Bedside Book of Birds and Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker.

3. Find time each day—even fifteen minutes—for something you enjoy. I love to bake, to doodle, to knit, to listen to music, to study Armenian, to walk in Central Park, or to watch an old film. Do something creative. Go to a museum. To this end, look at this beautiful slideshow of photos by Gordon Parks.

4. Spend time with people you like or love. Go out for a meal with friends or family. Have friends over to watch a movie. Call someone you haven’t talk to in a long time. Start a reading group (also read about the radical history of reading groups).

5. Practice daily resistance. Send a post card, make a phone call, or go to a meeting or a protest. Organize. Resist. Even five minutes a day can help ward off despair.

Annals of Resistance

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is this week’s hero of the resistance. She attempted to read Coretta Scott King’s 1986 letter opposing Jeff Sessions’ appointment as a judge on the Senate Floor. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used an arcane rule to vote her into silence, saying, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” She was banned from speaking during the rest of the debate so she left the chamber and continued reading the letter, streaming it over Facebook live. And thus was an Internet meme (and a call to resistance) born: “She persisted.” May we all persist and resist.

A mysterious benefactor has been giving away copies of Orwell and Atwood at a bookstore in San Francisco. The goal? “Read up, fight back!”

The Nation has provided a guide to groups organizing resistance to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This is primarily focused on electoral organizing and citizen lobbying.

Action items

#PostcardsToBannon: Send a post card to “President Steve Bannon,” which is sure to annoy the hell out of #45. (And let’s avoid the name and just refer to him as #45.)

Read and join the call from Nancy Fraser, Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Angela Davis and others for a Women’s Strike on March 8, International Women’s Day 2017: “The ‘lean-in’ variety of feminism won’t defeat this administration, but a mobilization of the 99% will.”

The Ides of Trump: send a post card to the White House on March 15.

Sign up for the excellent Daily News Roundup from Jewish Voice for Peace.

Know Your Enemy

This scary yet essential piece The Data That Turned the World Upside Down is an exposé about the shadowy big data firm Cambridge Analytica, backed by the shadier Mercer family who brought Bannon and Conway to the Trump campaign.

This long read piece by Mike Davis is a brilliant and incisive analysis of Trump’s election victory: The Great God Trump and the White Working Class. He has a strong indictment of the Democratic Party. The crux move for us going forward is going to be wresting control of the party away from the neoliberals who foisted Hillary Clinton on us as a candidate. Davis sees it as a struggle between Obama and Sanders. He says,

The real opportunity for transformational political change (“critical realignment” in a now-archaic vocabulary) belongs to the Sanderistas but only to the extent that they remain rebels against the neoliberal Democratic establishment and support the resistance in the streets.

Trump’s election has unleashed a legitimation crisis of the first order and the majority of Americans who opposed him have only two credible political rally points: the Sanders movement and the ex-president and his coterie. While our hopes and energies should be invested in the first, it would be foolish to underestimate the second.

We have work to do!

Nancy Kricorian

To be part of a crowd of over half-a-million people is an experience both intimate and abstractly large. Three moments during the speeches at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C. particularly held that balance for me. Sophie Cruz, a six-year-old girl whose parents are undocumented immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, moved us all to tears with her beautiful and elegant words, spoken in English and then in Spanish, saying, “Let us fight with love, faith, and courage, so that our families will not be destroyed.” African-American civil rights activist and revolutionary Angela Davis told the assembled, “We dedicate ourselves to collective resistance.” Linda Sarsour, an organizer from New York City and one of the national co-chairs of the march, declared herself “unapologetically Muslim-American, unapologetically Palestinian-American, unapologetically from Brooklyn, New York.” She went on to tell us, “If you want to know if you are going the right way, follow women of color, sisters and brothers. We know where to go, because when we fight for justice, we fight for it for all people, for all our communities.”

It was an exhilarating, exhausting, and empowering experience to take to the streets with hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children who are determined to fight against the Trump Administration and its assaults on women, the disabled, immigrants, the indigenous, LGBTQ people, our public educational system, our environment, and our civil and human rights. I couldn’t help but remember other mass mobilizations I have joined. In 2003 millions of people took to the streets around the globe in attempt to prevent the Iraq War. George W. Bush dismissed us then, saying he didn’t pay much attention to “focus groups.” We were unable to stop the Iraq War, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destabilized the entire region, and led eventually to the horrible carnage and destruction we have been witnessing in Syria. Marches and rallies are important sources of strength and inspiration—but that strength must be used for the long struggles that follow.

I was pleased to learn from newspaper reports that the huge defiant crowds only steps from his seat of power enraged Donald Trump, and I have to believe that if we are able to harness the passion and determination of so many people taking political action for the first time, that we will be able to protect our most vulnerable individuals and organizations. If we succeed, our cities will become sanctuaries for the undocumented, our states will enact legislation mitigating the harms coming from Washington, and our mass civil disobedience against gas pipelines and other projects that threaten our air and water will engulf and stop corporate pillage. We will wrest control of the Democratic Party from the neoliberal establishment that backed the disastrous candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and put accountable elected officials into office. But I have to be honest. I’m afraid, and I’m unsure of exactly where best to focus my energies when the attacks on the values and institutions I care about are coming not daily, but hourly.

For now I join the ranks of my friends in Palestine, where Trump’s collaboration with the Israeli right wing will cause untold suffering. I join my friends in Armenia, who struggle every day against the kind of kleptocracy Trump now installs here in the U.S. I join my friends in Turkey, where harshly repressive measures are targeting journalists and academics, and in its Kurdish region, where violence has destroyed much of the architectural heritage of Diyarbakir’s Sur and where many communities have been subject to state terror.

I join a global community that struggles against tyranny and amplifies the humane in the human. As American writer and activist Grace Paley put it: “The only recognizable feature of hope is action.” I hope, because I act.

Nancy Kricorian

January 2017

New York City

Written for Agos Turkish-Armenian weekly
https://web.archive.org/web/20170126065707/http://www.agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/17561/trumptan-sonra-umut-ve-eylem

Nancy Kricorian