Ryk Groetchen The recent post by Peter Coyote about comportment at charged demonstrations, and the backlash that followed from various quarters about respectability politics and race- and class-based values in activism got me thinking: Who is really creating blueprints for demonstrators, based on lived experience and study of what has worked to create effective resistance movements in the past?
The recent post by Peter Coyote about comportment at charged demonstrations, and the backlash that followed from various quarters about respectability politics and race- and class-based values in activism got me thinking: Who is really creating blueprints for demonstrators, based on lived experience and study of what has worked to create effective resistance movements in…
Friends don’t let friends enter highly-charged and heavily armed oppositional demonstration spaces without a clearly articulated plan and a high level of coordination with well-defined allies.
Trusting our instincts only works when we are very familiar with our environment and aware of the ways that a situation can change.
Keyboard warriors pushing the “rage is justified, property damage is not violence” narrative don’t realize it, but they are practicing a very effective and time-tested technique, that one can see being implemented around the world. It’s the same technique that is used to prepare child soldiers to die. Children are recruited or abducted to fight…
Here’s what I imagine the keyboard warriors pushing the “rage is justified” and “property damage is not violence” narrative believe about the LA riots in ’92: They believe that the 63 people who died and the nearly 2500 people injured were all batoned by police in riot gear or the National Guard. They believe that…
When you read a piece of advice about attending a protest from a seasoned peace advocate that rubs you the wrong way or doesn’t reflect your perspective, it’s because they’re expressing their lived experience. It’s not about you. They will probably be thankful when you share your advice, based on your lived experience. They didn’t…
To the many brave voices calling out Peter Coyote’s advice regarding peaceful demonstration tactics as representative of an entitled, race- and class-based, and performative nod to respectability politics: I hear you, and I recognize this perspective. I would challenge that perspective as confusing symbology with strategy. I see it as being based on a false…
It’s not that kindness is a moral imperative because it’s convenient. Kindness is a moral imperative because unkindness done to one turns that one’s grandchildren into monsters who will return that unkindness a thousandfold. Even if the unkindness being done to Palestinians were to stop today, with all of the trauma that has been inflicted…
Meth makes you feel powerful.
Healthy habits make you powerful.Rage makes you feel powerful.
Discipline makes you powerful.
Understanding human cognitive bias, and the psychophysical mechanisms that compartmentalize our experience so that we can navigate in a world of endless variation, let us recognize that the rainbow is not actually made up of discrete bands of color – that is an illusion created by our senses. As comforting as it may be to…
