Tingle Alley

2017 Resistance Actions: Week 3

maudnewton:

My agenda for the week is below, if you want to scroll down.

I was in D.C. for the march on Saturday, and it’s truly impossible to convey the energy and size of the crowd that was there. Gauging by the photos and videos I’ve seen and the accounts I’ve read, that was true all over the country. The sign above was one of my many favorites.

I met a woman who traveled on one of four official march buses from Birmingham and two women who traveled one one of four official march buses from Knoxville. They said one of the Knoxville buses was a double-decker. The woman who sat next to me on the train back from the march was from Montana and had family members with her. Carrie traveled from Asheville, as did my stepdaughter and her mom and several of their friends. Max and many of my friends marched in New York. Other friends marched in Oakland, in Boston, all over. My mother-in-law marched in St. Pete, where the march, like many of the marches the country over, was the largest in the city’s history. 

Having lived and spent time in communities where progressive ideas are ridiculed and reviled, I think it’s really important to recognize the bravery of people who marched in places where their convictions are in the minority. As someone said on Twitter: 

Monday: Over the weekend Kellyanne Conway claimed Americans don’t care about Trump’s tax returns, so today I’m calling the White House and writing both email and a letter to the White House saying, “I am one of the 75% of Americans who care about your tax returns and expect you to release them. Your secrecy flies in the face of our open, democratic government. The people have a right to know what taxes you pay, how much you owe and to whom, and where your investments are.” 

• Phone: 202-456-1111 (update: I’m told the White House has closed the comment line permanently and is referring callers to Facebook)
  
• Email: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
  
• Letter: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500
  

I’m also putting Jennifer Taub’s April 15 “Show Us Your Tax Returns” protest on my calendar. I propose that we all wear red hats, since we know he and his businesses are in the red. If you think you’ll attend on April 15 and are on Twitter, please retweet this to help spread the word. Finally, I’m going to call House Oversight again and condemn their inaction on Trump’s financial secrecy and conflicts. 

Tuesday: Today I’m calling my Senators again about Trump’s nominees. I did this last week, and you can read about it here. If I could, I would also be at the rally against Trump’s nominees outside my Senators’ Manhattan offices, 780 Third Ave.New York, NY 10017, at noon. Details and registration at MoveOn.

Wednesday: Tonight my activism group meets. I’m going to check back in beforehand with Democracy North Carolina to see what they’re planning in the early part of this year to try to safeguard voting rights, since that’s a major part of what we’re working on. At the suggestion of fellow group member Alexis Coe, I’m also going to let Obama know that I’m glad he’s trying to help debunk the fake “voter fraud” meme that has captured the imagination of the right and that I hope his foundation will focus on helping to protect voting rights. I wish he had done more work on this (and on a number of other things) while he was in office, but I’m glad he’s not just walking away now.

Thursday: Today I’m going to call and write to the White House (see Monday for contact details) denouncing the planned Obamacare repeal and Medicare privatization. I’ll also going to call my Senators and my representative and (because he is refusing calls and letters) write to Paul Ryan at his house. (700 St. Lawrence Ave, Janesville, WI 53545).  More than 43,000 people may die each year if the Affordable Care Act is repealed. And the eradication of the ACA will affect everyone, including those of us who have health insurance through our employers, who insure our college-age children on our plans, who have pre-existing conditions, and who might one day end up racking up medical bills that exceed the kind of lifetime insurance company caps that used to be in place and the law now prohibits. 

Friday: Today I’m going to take the first 10 Actions in 100 Days action suggested by the Women’s March organizers. I’ll print out one postcard for each of my Senators and one for my representative and tell them about “the issue I care most about.” It’s actually impossible to choose one, but nothing threatens our democracy more than Trump’s secrecy about his finances and his commingling of his personal business concerns with our system of government, and so that’s what I’ll write about. Again. I’m likely to make some calls today, too, and if I do I’ll post about them at Twitter. 

Saturday: Today I’m going to make some donations locally.

Sunday: I’m still reading that John Hagee book about the “Four Blood Moons” and the end times, and thinking about evangelicals and the Rapture, what I’ll write about it, how we maneuver against those ideas. My mother, who voted for Trump, and told me at the end of a recent phone call “it’s later than you think” (i.e., the Rapture is nigh) has this poster hanging over her desk. 

2017 Resistance Actions: Week One

maudnewton:

Here we are at the start of a new year, not knowing what to expect, trying to cultivate a little hope amidst our very reasonable trepidation. We’ve got a lot of work to do. 

Over the holidays I did some soul-searching about how I can be most effective balancing my own resistance (and my work and family) with writing about it. One thing all my furious blogging in the early aughts taught me, and that Twitter has continually reinforced since, is that it’s easy to exhaust oneself by airing news and frustration and opinion on the internet. This exhaustion is dangerous because it can lead to a feeling that you’ve done more concrete things to effect change than you actually have and prevent you from summoning the energy to actually do anything at all other than internet railing. I want to avoid that as much as possible. Things are too dire; there’s no time to waste. Also, I’m old.

So I’m going to experiment with a weekly plan. From time to time I’m sure I’ll come here over the course of the week and add other things I’m doing and recommending. No doubt I’ll also be on Twitter more than I should be. If you’ve been following along here but would prefer daily actions, I recommend signing up for Flippable, Daily Action, Resist, Our Revolution, and Action Now, or any combo thereof, and choosing what makes sense on any given day.

Monday, January 2: Many government offices are still closed, so today I’m signing Bernie Sanders’ petition to protect health care and sending form email on the same subject to my Senators courtesy of the League of Women Voters. I don’t sign many online petitions or send form email these days, because they’re of notoriously dubious efficacy, and calling is so much more effective. I trust Sanders really will go in there and tout all those signatures, though. I also need to take a look at some details of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s anti-bigotry project; I’m informally helping to strategize and organize on that. If you’re a writer or editor who hasn’t signed up, you might want to commit to writing or editing a piece. I’m also reading and thinking about Zephyr Teachout’s advice to show up and talk to our representatives in person, ideally in groups, no matter how small.

Tuesday, January 3: Congress is back in session. I’ll call my Senator and Congressional representative again and ask them to protect the Affordable Care Act and Medicare/Medicaid. (If you haven’t yet, I suggest programming their numbers into your phone so you can contact them more easily. I also recommend downloading an app like Countable, which makes all the numbers easy to find and access.)

Wednesday, January 4: I’ll call my representatives and urge them to continue denouncing Trump’s conflicts of interest. I want them to make a ruckus as Republicans continue to hold up legislation that would require him to resolve those conflicts before taking office. (In the case of Schumer, one of my Senators and the Senate Minority Leader, I’ll urge him to speak out a lot more forcefully against Trump’s unprecedented conflicts, and to do his best to keep steering the legislative narrative so it’s impossible for Republicans to sidestep the issue.)

Thursday, January 5: I’ll call the office of my Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman (212-416-8000), to thank him for investigating the alleged fraud of the Trump Foundation and for investigating the alleged malfeasance of Exxon Mobil and to continue using his power to ensure that Trump and his cabinet are abiding by New York law. Maybe you’d like to call your own attorney general’s office and urge them to join the joint NY/MA Mobil investigation and urge them to take a close look at any activities of the Trump Foundation in your state. If your attorney general is unreceptive, maybe you want to spend a little time trying to find out who else is running in the next AG election and whether you might want to volunteer to support that person.

Friday, January 6: Today I’m calling my state representatives and asking them to support proposed legislation that would require all future presidential candidates to release their tax returns. A similar bill was proposed in Massachusetts. If you’re not in a state currently considering this kind of law, maybe you want to suggest something similar to your representatives. Open States is a great way to find your state legislators.

Saturday, January 7: I’m volunteering at the local soup kitchen and trying to get to know more about how and where to volunteer politically in my (still relatively new-to-me) neighborhood.. 

Today’s Action: Planning How to Contribute to My “Sewing Circle” aka Organizing Locally

maudnewton:

Today I’m going to put some time into thinking about how I can best coordinate locally with some women who are working together to pool resources and ideas so we can oppose Trump in the most effective, concrete ways. We’ll be meeting up after Thanksgiving but I’ve set aside time today to organize some of my thoughts.

The effort is in keeping with a concept the wonderful Carrie Frye, a dear friend and my writing partner, shared on Facebook last weekend:

Sewing Circles Against Totalitarianism (SCAT) is an idea that’s meant to help us band together, support, and encourage each other in the hard work ahead. Here’s what it is: You get together with a group of people who live by you and form a “sewing circle”:

“The term sewing circle usually refers to a group of people, usually women, who meet regularly for the purpose of sewing, often for charitable causes while chatting gossip and politics.” (Wikipedia.)

SCAT Sewing Circles meet once a month. Each Sewing Circle will decide for itself but you can of course make this meeting a true stitch & bitch. (If that sounds like a nightmare, then don’t.) We organize now and locally, because we are stronger in person and together, and because the kind of help that’s needed will vary community by community.

Within a SCAT sewing circle: 

• Members encourage each other to commit our time and energy to the organizations already doing good work in our community and country, as well as to engage more actively with our local and state government to build a more progressive, inclusive platform. *You* choose what particular issue, cause, or nonprofit group’s work matters most to you; your Sewing Circle is there for support, accountability, brainstorming, and networking to help you stay the course over time.

• We work together to identify where additional immediate help is needed among our neighbors (groceries, escorts, Plan B donations, legal resources, calling local representatives, etc.) and to coordinate action.

We do this with humor and good faith. We do this believing in connection. We do this in resistance to any “new normal.” And we do this in the belief that small stitches can add up in time to something bigger.

And in her latest Tiny Letter, which I highly recommend subscribing to, she writes: 

On a strategic level, I think it’s important to start now getting local organized social networks like this in place. More than this, just on a human level, I realized last week that I felt better—and strengthened—when I was talking to the other puffy-eyed, sleepless-looking, vibrating-with-foreboding women that I was running into. One woman said to me, “I can’t breathe.” It was the second time we’d ever spoken to each other. I keep thinking of Masha Gessen’s essay “Autocracy: Rules For Survival” and its line, “This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It’s no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.” One nice thing about having a sewing circle is that, at least one night a month, you’re guaranteed of not being the only hysterical person in the room.

When she and I spoke about all this on the phone early last week, we agreed it’s important to have local contacts in place now partly in case we all end up having to take  our strategic planning – and even other communications – offline. At no point did either of us accuse the other of being hysterical, which I guess is one reason we’re such good friends. 

(Unlike my mother and her mother and her father, I can’t sew worth a damn, so I will not be doing any actual sewing.)

Sewing class image is from Wikimedia Commons by way of Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the UK.

catherine-nicholas:

I started a tinyletter!  It’s about the Kardashians (and murder, and women, and invisible laws and shadow trials).  I’ve so enjoyed the tinyletters I subscribe to.  Here’s a little list:

Black Cardigan by Carrie Frye: light and clever, earnest and broad.  For people who like Harriet the Spy, Hilary Mantel, and occasionally discovering an archaic word.

when I sing along with you by Zan Romanoff: the complications of accomplishment, the many weirdnesses of publishing, and One Directionitis.  @zanopticon has not one but TWO books coming out, this feels like riding shotgun next to her on the way there.

Like This by Meaghan O’Connell: Love her in NY Mag, love her here.

Reading the Tarot by Jessa Crispin: “Day Five.  Tower again. Fuck off, I think. One time I pulled Temperance 10 days in a row. I was in Budapest and then en route to Timisoara. Things were not going well.“

Coffee & TV by Ruth Curry: if you want to cry about someone else being moved to tears by Orphan Black

Intermittent Theories by Lucy Morris: Lucy Morris can just write the shit out of a newsletter.  “This is perhaps why things I wrote when I was 22 do not particularly embarrass me, as I understand they are supposed to; I fault myself for many things but never my attempts at understanding something in the center of it all, and in the face of that endeavor, it has always been difficult for me to care about the fine-tuning of structure or the making of sentences.“

mmmm, vol 1. by cassiem: She moved to DC, what now?