Samain Thanksgiving Moon
We are not yet in the Trump era. Not yet. Not until January 20th. That doesn’t mean he’s not already stirring the waters. Nope. Just that he doesn’t have his hands on the levers of power right now. But, he will.
What to do? Here’s an e-mail I sent to Rabbi Jamie Arnold. I share it because I think the more we consider how to respond, the better organized we get right now, before Trump’s small hands start to twirl the nuclear codes, the better chance we stand of staving off the worst and perhaps creating space for some real advances.
Rabbi Jamie,
As I see it, they are three broad areas for action that will be necessary, not optional, over the next four years. I’m putting them in what seem like a logical order to me.
1. Climate Change As Kevin Trenberth pointed out in his excellent presentation, we are in a critical time for climate action. There are goals we must reach as a planet by 2050 and by 2100 in order to keep the earth habitable for humans. I believe, with Thomas Berry from his fine little book,
2. Economic Justice I believe that the root problem exposed in this election is the hollowing out of the working class. I grew up in a small eastern Indiana town where my friend’s and classmate’s fathers worked for General Motors. Without a high school education it was possible to earn a living wage, a wage sufficient for a house, a car, advanced education for the kids, healthcare and vacations. By 1974 my vibrant home town had plywood on its main street shop windows. People closed the drapes and left town in the dead of night, unable to pay their mortgages and face their neighbors. Those good union jobs were gone. The people who held those jobs and their children voted Trump in this election.
This is a bill that is long past due. And, it affects working class people of color as well as white working class folks. These are the non-college educated folks whose lives look bleak from within their communities. Solutions to this problem are known, just not emphasized any more. They include creating affordable housing, passing substantial unemployment benefits, providing job transition education especially when whole industries collapse (think coal mining right now), making sure that health care is available to all.
This is a particularly poignant issue for those of us with a college education or beyond. We have let working class pain go untended for years while we focused on identity politics, environmental politics, immigration and LGBT rights. All of that work, successful in many cases, was important. It’s just that while we were working on those issues we let the economic future of working class families dim, then go out.
3. Defense Another emphasis might be on rapid reaction teams that can respond to gay bashing, race baiting, rape culture and general disregard for those who are other. These teams must be ready to defend recent hard won victories like samesex marriage, the organizing of Black Lives Matter, the coalescing of women’s groups against the pussy-grabber in chief. But in my opinion this is a time for defense on these issues.
The safety-pin idea seems congruent with this action area.
I’m not imagining here what Beth Evergreen’s response to these issues could be, might be. I’m still too new to the area, two years, to have the kind of political knowledge and connections I had in Minnesota. But, I know there are local, county, state, national and international dimensions to all three of these areas. Discerning what those are and how Beth Evergreen might work on them is, to me, the next step.
