How We Rise: Solutions Journalist Sarah Van Gelder on Galvanizing Power through Joyful, Local Action.
Sarah Van Gelder has been thinking for many years about how we build power and create beloved community. A founding editor of Yes! Magazine (now on Truthout), her Substack, How We Rise, is an exploration of solutions and ideas for powerful actions to resist the rise of authoritarianism and create something that works for all.
Plus our popular segment, the Nonviolence Report with Michael Nagler!
Transcript
With gratitude to Elizabeth High for a beautiful transcript!
Stephanie Van Hook: Good morning everybody. I'm Stephanie Van Hook. I'm the host of Nonviolence Radio and I'm here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.
Nonviolence Radio explores the power of nonviolence throughout our world, and we help to reinterpret and reinform about how nonviolence works, what's happening. We speak with activists, educators, scientists; and we draw from all of these fields as well in order to bolster and support our analysis of how nonviolence seems to be doing today.
And Michael, you have been collecting a lot of news happening in the world of nonviolence. There's just so much going on right now from people preparing for No Kings 2 rallies, which will, by the time this show is syndicated, these will have happened, we'll be analyzing it on our next show too, to ceasefires in Israel and Gaza to Gen Z protests around the world that might not necessarily be using nonviolent means, but there's definitely still nonviolence in those movements. And I wonder what do you see tying all of this movement and agitation together?
Michael Nagler: Whoa. Thank you, Stephanie. That is a really important question and I've been, this might be a slight exaggeration to say I've been agonizing over it, but I've definitely been concerned about it. There's this marvelous plethora of creative not only obstructive, but sometimes constructive actions. Many of them are very small, some are not. They are all part of a single movement, and what I'm concerned about is to what extent are they aware of that? Because I think that there's a point at which that could help very much. First of all, it puts your activities in context. I remember a friend of mine talking to a businessman one time, and he hadn't done very well for his firm that year, and the employer said not to worry, we have a 200 year plan going. It's good to be able to put things into perspective and to recognize that on some level, which we're not really prepared to understand very well, but on some level, these episodes are all part of one another, they're all contributing to a kind of energy. That's one thing that I really like about modern science, that it gives us an awareness that everything that exists is energetic, and it propagates waves. And waves, they get weaker with the square of the distance or something, but it is not like waves are not things.
They so there's at least a very good analogy there for the way that movements here help movements there. Now, having said all that, it's also very encouraging that this has been enhanced by technology. Technology is a good servant and a bad master. I've read some hair-raising bad things about what the latest wave AI could be used for, but it also could be used for good.
Stephanie: Yeah that's part of the challenge, as I see it, is hearing about all of the bad things that can happen and the bad things that are happening, and not getting bogged down by the bad things, but rather being able to see them and look at them squarely and say, there's a way to resist or change or transform the situation, and how did we get to this situation the first place.This is where we need to go because if we get bogged down in all of the bad and all of the harm that's happening, and I think that's the promise of seeing these waves, as you call them, of movements, like that, what they used to say, the kind of the seasons of movements like it's Arab Spring or whatnot, or American Fall. This is where the American fall. So that there's ways of interpreting it. But my question really was what's generating this kind of, this ongoing agitation and there's not just movements copying each other or feeding off of each other, but rather there's also a global shift taking place that seems somewhat unpopular among everyday people.
Michael: I believe you are talking about authoritarianism.
Stephanie: Oh yeah.
Michael: Yeah. And it's an odd thing. It can sweep people up in enthusiasm, but soon after they begin to regret it because it's so counter-natural. Human beings exist in a regime of unity in diversity. No two human beings are exactly alike. And being able to bring out that diversity without disrupting unity is the struggle. Because that struggle is too difficult, instead of unity, people go for uniformity. And I believe that the mounting problems of the world have begun to make people feel helpless. And it's a well known fact that when people feel fear and they feel helplessness, they look around desperately for an authoritarian figure who will fix things for them, and it's a very wrong impulse.
Stephanie: This is really deep. Michael, you've answered my question in an extremely deep way, you've been thinking about this too quite a bit. Is there anything else that you want to say?
Michael: I want to say that inevitably this authoritarian impulse and the wave is producing a counteraction, and the hope is that we can come to some kind of. resolution without violence.
It's also true that there are certain very conspicuously violent geographical centers in the world right now. You mentioned Gaza, you know the Sudans, Ukraine. And, overall there is an encouraging slow trend, but very encouraging, to, how am I going to put this, drain away the glorious aspect of war fighting. And the more the technology advances it, the more it contributes to that demoralization and realistic assessment of what war is. I was just reading a letter this morning that Einstein wrote to Freud and he talked about, I wish I had the exact words, “war that archaic remnant of a barbaric age.”
And what with the awareness of moral injury today I come back to this a lot because I think its potential is very significant if we would really grasp what it means. Namely that people cannot injure others without injuring themselves. And the statistics are very grim and the phenomenon is indisputable; I'm one of those who believe that it's absolutely inevitable for every person, others look on it as a kind of infection now that only affects some people. Those are really good developments and I think what we need to do and we are doing is latch onto them and build, as I like to say, the history, the theory and the practice of nonviolence. And I'm happy to say all three are growing.
Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited; in a couple of weeks we'll have our friend Ofer Cassif back; he was on the show two years ago when the the war in Gaza, the genocide in Gaza was beginning. He's a Knesset member. He'll be back to talk more about the ceasefire and I think really helped to put some teeth into what you're talking about, which is this shift in awareness and understanding and the picture isn't pretty.
And then later today in the show, we have Sarah van Gelder joining us. And she's amazing. She's one of the founding editors of YES! Magazine and she's been thinking a lot about resistance and strategy and what people can do. So stay tuned for that. Michael, but in the meantime, you've been collecting news from around the world and right here at home. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what's happening in your Nonviolence Report?
Michael: Happy to. Yeah, that ceasefire that you mentioned, of course it's a blessed thing. It gives people a chance to lick their wounds, rebuild, find relatives. But like all half-measures with regard to war and security, there is a danger that it makes people seem rational; that we can turn this on or off at will. It makes people look kind and humanitarian when really all they're doing is rebuilding their weapon stocks. Mind you, I'm not saying there should not be a ceasefire. Like I say, it's a blessing, but we are called upon and it is happening that we are getting to look under the surface and look at motivations and drives and not just the technologies. There's been a big shift in that since the eighties when the Cold War, everybody talked about numbers of missiles and how many people would be killed without realizing that is a really seriously dehumanizing way to think.
I'll have another example of that in a bit, but here's a quote that kind of illustrates what I'm trying to get at. “We should always strive to change the logic of security. The deterrence logic should be dismantled and combined with reparative justice and the relocation of resources for human security.”
So this shows that the term security was one of those buzzwords, which was very positive, which would immediately arouse people's actions and responses. And yet it was being abused because what people meant by security was the ability to defend yourself against others who would attack you in a world. And the US Navy had a definition of peace one time, which was perpetual pre-hostility. And that is about as superficial as you can get.
But let me move on from this. Still talking about Gaza. There's the issue of what has happened with Greta Thunberg. She gave a really inspiring speech online right after the interception of the Flotilla, and it was something about it that wasn't very positive, I thought. She was talking to crowds and they were so enthusiastic, which of course is you've got to be enthusiastic. But they were so enthusiastic, they were shouting her down every time she tried to say something and actually she's a very smart woman and she had really good, insightful things to say and this all noise and no content thing was missing an opportunity.
And I'm seeing this against the background of a very big picture, that people are slowly beginning to realize that peace has, again, a history, a theory, and a long series of activities in the repertoire that you can use to bring nonviolence to bear in human relationships. There you have it.
We are slowly growing and I think there is no contrast, no conflict between theory and practice. They support one another, and it's a question of working out the right balance. And I see that happening in various ways, inside of and outside of academia, by the way.
So in this general line of thought, I've mentioned before on the show someone whose work I really appreciate, a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Bandy Lee. I first became aware of her because she was part of a group that produced a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” where they psychoanalyzed him, admitting that it's difficult to do that merely from statements. But here's somebody who's stated a lot and quoted a lot, so if you could ever do it without getting the person on the couch, you can to a great extent feel that you've got it. And they've now followed that up with a second volume about President Trump. But that's not what I want to talk about here. What I wanted to mention is, there is an ongoing course in violence prevention that she is doing, it's called the Causes and Cures of Violence. It's a 13 class series. I've watched most of them so far and all good things of that kind these days. It is recorded, almost positive, so if you missed some of them, get ahold of the remaining series and then go back and fill it in.
On this same general line, there is a website that I discovered recently, I'd like to share with you. It has a clever acronym, SAND, Science and Nonduality, and they explore the intersection between modern science and, well, mysticism. A very rich topic, it gets better all the time, but the point is that science and nonduality has recently gotten political. They've talked about things like Not In Our Name and so forth, and they have a very clever logo. I really admire it. It is Om equals MC squared.
And then, a friend of ours, Rabbi Cat Zavis from Berkeley has a community gathering going on called “Disentangling Judaism from the Violence of Occupation.” And once again, this is a matter of a term, a concept that is spread too thin and obscures violence, just as you were saying about security, this question of antisemitism has been, as a lot of people are saying, weaponized because of the shallow understanding that if you are pro-Israel, you have to let them do whatever they want. Not realizing that, as increasing number of commentators are saying, Israel is destroying itself. Violence only makes things worse, especially for those who perpetrate it. So, the hope is that these concepts will sink in deeply enough to where they will actually start to propagate throughout the media, and then they'll be picked up eventually in policy.
I have something else to say about that in a bit. But we're now in the 14th year of Campaign Nonviolence Action Days and there are 5,640 vibrant creative actions in communities spanning the globe and counting, by the way. And so we're now looking back at the conclusion of the recent event, October 2nd it ended, Gandhi's birthday, and this year's Action Days, I'm quoting from Rivera Sun, “was less an argument for nonviolence and more an experience of nonviolence embodied, a powerful culture of belonging popping up in thousands of places and nations, regions and continents around the world, showing what it's like to live the nonviolent life together: self, others, world and earth.” So there's an attempt right there to see it all in one framework. Like our model at the Metta Center, the Roadmap, which I'll refer people to for now, just all.
And Rivera also has a course called “How Nonviolent Action Changes Everything.” I want to say that there is a difference between nonviolence, the eternal force, and nonviolent action, which is ways of putting that force into practice. They both have their place of course, but we tend to think sometimes that nonviolence is just a state of techniques and actions, and to overlook the fact that we're really dealing with a very deep current in nature and human nature.
A friend of mine and a fellow journalist, I guess I could call myself a journalist, Bob Koehler, has been talking about a very unfortunate term that has cropped up in military circles for the last some couple of decades, “collateral damage,” and it's now being applied to people, and Bob says that this is a unique form of dehumanization. The people who are now labeled as “collateral damage” were just victims. They were not our enemies, they were merely in the way. But here's the part of Bob's language I really want to emphasize: “but the term did its job.” This is an ongoing theme that pacifists, peace-oriented people, nonviolence folks, have been trying to emphasize for a long time, and it deserves the emphasis and that is the way that words can cover and obscure actions and states of mind.
I am jumping around now, going abroad. Three years after the Women, Life, Freedom protests took place in Iran, leading conservative in Iran made a statement that the mandatory hijab laws are “no longer enforceable.” So that's an interesting way of saving face. An interesting in-between stage: they're not off the books, but they can't be enforced. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has also refused to implement the law, which is called the Hijab and Chastity Law, which was passed by previous parliaments and hard liners and their undue influence in those parliaments, which sounds a little bit close to home here. So for now, the laws will stay in place, but the harsh punishments will be removed and not enforced. And they did similar things with regard to cannabis and nonviolent drug offenses and other issues. And we have also here in the states.
Looking at one more item with regard to the Middle East, I want to bring up a very interesting group called Jerusalem Peacebuilders. They offer Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze youth, we often forget about the Druze in the Golan Heights and they're often dragged into these conflicts against their will. These are youth in these four categories from 14 to 18 years old; Jerusalem Peacebuilders is giving them the opportunity to advance in leadership, peacebuilding, cross-cultural communication, and interfaith understanding. And they do this in their summer institutes, and each program “prepares tomorrow's leaders for positive social change and community action.”
You get a feeling that there's a great deal of what they would say in French, –a lot of perturbation going on just under the surface. And another way of looking at what I was saying before about coalescing is “what would it take for that to really break out to the surface and become the mainstream?” It's so close.
Now here's an idea that I really like. You know how you feel good when other people start saying things that you've been saying all along. Here's an example of that. There was, back in December, there was a convention at Pondicherry, in India Pondicherry is famous for being an international center of Sri Aurobindo's widespread organization and very peace oriented. And they talked about seeking to establish a new kind of UN.
And these are very much along the lines that I've been thinking too. They're leaning on something called the Earth Constitution. And they want a UN, which I mean this is so timely now, given the, I have to say it, the impotency the inability of the UN to do anything to even moderate the genocide in Gaza. They want to see UN more capable to end war and protect human and environmental rights, and the Democratic World Federalists are advancing this concept. I just wonder, how is this going to grab hold and take off and “become viral” to use the phrase that we always use today?
So we have a lot of protests going on here of course The No Kings rallies and millions of people around the world have been protesting in support of Palestine. When I read the number, even I was surprised. I knew the media wasn't going to really cover it. I knew there was more than I was hearing about. But I was very surprised to see the vast number. And it's really on just about every continent except Antarctica. Nobody's asking the penguins how they feel, but the point is that this story and six other really major stories were listed recently on Nonviolence News and other websites that I was just surfing around on and none of these seven critical stories was even visible to the US media. That is such a critical change that has to happen, and that's why I'm very glad that we'll be interviewing someone from alternative media very shortly.
I wanted to mention too that there is a, a new registry available for Catholic conscientious objectors, and that's bringing up the whole long tradition of conscientious objection in the Christian church, which was very strong in the first century and then rapidly petered out, has been rediscovered in waves ever since then. I think we're about in the seventh wave. PAX Christi, USA has announced the launch of this No Just War Registry for Conscientious Objectors. There again, that was a concept that really had to be dismantled. the idea of “just war.” And it was named in honor of Benjamin Salmon, who was a Catholic layman and a World War I conscientious objector. There's a very interesting book by an Australian CO in World War I. It's a hard story to read, but we do have to realize on the one hand, the violence that was exercised against them and how much better off we are now. There is real motion going forward there. It needs to go a lot further.
Getting right back home here, there was the trial of Zoe Rosenberg versus Perdue Farms going on. Sorry, I haven't been able to really catch up with the status of it. She could be getting five years plus damages, similar to what happened to Wayne Hsiung. And the interesting note that I wanted to cite here, it gets touching, she has a friend called Raven Deerbrook and she is a former member of that animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere. And she has now made a statement that it wasn't Zoe's fault; she was the instigator and she dragged Zoe into it. I'm not sure whether or not that's true, but it's a wonderful gesture of nobility, in the course of a grueling conflict, ongoing and very local.
Stephanie: Thanks so much for all of this news, Michael. Any last pieces of news before we transition to our next segment of the show?
Michael: I just would like to mention that after October 7th, no leading politician outside the Arab parties has dared to propose anything concrete for the Palestinians. I cite that because the recognition of it means that it's something that we now might be able to address or they might be able to address. I think that solution, whether it's two-state or however it ends up, has got to happen now, and I think the whole world knows that.
Stephanie: Yeah. Thank you so much for this work that you do on the Nonviolence Report. The fact that you have to jump around from conflict to conflict and place to place and constructive action to resistance just really shows the amount of work that's happening everywhere and that we try to bring on guests or have deeper conversations every show where we can just go into one topic a little bit more because there really is so much going on and I think that you are really showing that to us. So thank you so much, Michael.
Michael: You are so welcome, Stephanie.
Stephanie: So we're going to take a quick break and we're going to come back for our next segment with an interview with Sarah van Gelder. She's a writer and founding editor of YES! Magazine and her Substack now is called How We Rise.
Music
This is Nonviolence Radio. That was MC Yogi, Be The Change, one of our favorite songs to play in mid-segment here at Nonviolence Radio. All right. We have our guest with us today, Sarah van Gelder. She's a writer, she's founding editor of Yes Magazine and her Substack, “How We Rise,” is a beautiful exploration of resistance and protest and solutionary thinking for how we move forward in the moment that we're in. Welcome to Nonviolence Radio, Sarah van Gelder, It's very nice to have you here.
Sarah van Gelder: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Stephanie: I've been following you for a bit and I saw that you were on a countrywide tour to look for solutions and talk to people.
Sarah: Yes, I did that and I wrote a book about it called “The Revolution Where You Live.” But that's a few years back. That was when Trump was just barely on the horizon. So it's been a few years, but I learned a lot about what was going on. I decided to stay away from the coasts and really get into the heartland of the United States and went to the Rust Belt and Appalachia and a number of Indian reservations and just really explored what people's lives were like and what kinds of change they were bringing about, people who are normally out of the gaze of the corporate media.
Stephanie: Ah, yes. And I imagine that has really influenced where you're thinking now and your new substack, “How We Rise.” I'd love at this time of increasing overwhelm, this is definitely a new strategy from the Trump administration and the last one, this flood the zone, this, “everything everywhere, all at once” kind of approach, and I'm just curious about how you're making sense based on your long research and your long work with media and talking with people and looking for solutions. What are you seeing happening right now?
Sarah: First of all, I think it's really clear that the second Trump administration is fundamentally different for, I think, mainly two reasons. One is that he has this expertise of the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 and a bunch of convinced ideologues that are extremely far out on the Right and he's really selected for those rather than the more mainstream Republicans that were part of the first administration and the chaos that was part of the first administration.
And the second reason I think it's different is because I think Trump realizes he could easily wind up in jail or certainly prosecuted on a number of fronts if he doesn't retain his power. So I think there's a level of desperation there.
Yeah, so it's definitely a different moment, there's a lot more competency in terms of that flooding the zone strategy more so than the chaos of the first administration. And I think it has overwhelmed a lot of us, especially in the beginning months, where it just seemed you'd be trying to respond to one horrific new initiative, or your friends being dragged off the street and disappeared and then the next one would just come right on its heels. And it was, and is really hard to keep up with that level of overwhelm. So I think the response has taken a little while to galvanize, but I think the, for example, the No Kings rallies have been a really important response in terms of just giving people a sense of how powerful we are, that we still represent enormous numbers of people throughout the United States and, including in all these small towns that are showing up is just so sweet to see that this protest isn't all focused just on the big cities in Washington D.C. That it's really distributed everywhere.
Stephanie: Yeah. Recent research from Erica Chenoweth out of Harvard in this nonviolence research lab that they're having there points out that protest is really alive right now in the United States, and so much that there's been more protest happening in the past eight months or nine months than during the first eight months of the last Trump administration.
For example, this is an unpopular president right now and that we're really speaking to it and that there's been more protests in typically Red zones, Trump areas, which is new, which really shows that when protests starts getting into those spaces that generally don't have protest or don't resist a Red president, that it shows that the movement is really growing, even in these smaller towns that are generally Trump supporting, that these small protests are really mighty protests too, which is heartening to hear and to know about, I think.
Sarah: That's right, and one of the things that's really important about this moment is that the Republicans are shutting down the government rather than restore healthcare to people in those Red zones. The cuts in Medicaid are going to have huge effects including shutting down rural hospitals and potential cuts in Medicare for the elderly as well, and Medicaid as it affects the elderly and the subsidies for people to be able to afford the exorbitant cost of health insurance, even if they are working, those subsidies. So those are the things that the Democrats are fighting for during this shutdown, and those are affecting people across the board. And yes, I think the popularity, if you look at the polls, the popularity of the Trump administration's actual policies is really quite weak, it's underwater on basically everything, including the issue that he had originally had the most popularity on, which is immigration enforcement. So yes, the popular will is definitely turning against him. The question I think for us now is can we galvanize enough power to actually stop these horrible policies and to have a fair election so that we can actually choose a different direction? Because I think there's a lot going on that is seeking to undermine the fairness of the midterm elections, and that's really terrifying.
Stephanie: I would love to dive into that with you some more, Sarah. I was thinking about the title of your substack, which is “How We Rise,” and this “how” mentality seems urgent and important to me that it's not the going to the protests or informing ourselves about what's happening because you know, we do those out of urgency, but when we talk to each other about how. How do we build this future together that we need? How do we reform an entire political system? How do we galvanize power amongst us? I feel like you are someone who's really been thinking about that. How do we do it? And I'm just curious of what are some of the ways that you see that happening or where do you see work that could be done in answering that “How?” question?
Sarah: Yeah, I think that is exactly what I've been agonizing about and thinking a lot about all my life, but especially since the election and there's both a short term and a long term answer to that, but I think in both cases, building power locally is a really key part of it. If you want to be a dictatorship, but you have lots of power centers all over the country choosing their own path, that's much harder to do.
We have power over things like keeping our local election system fair. In the United States, elections are not run by the federal government, they're run by state and local officials. So we can do a lot of work there to keep our elections fair.
We can do work locally to support our immigrant neighbors and coworkers and friends against ICE raids. There's certainly some limits to what we can do, but all over the country, as I'm sure you've seen in the news, there are people who are observing, who are protesting, who in some cases are videotaping even making it very difficult for ICE to simply kidnap people off the street and disappear them. And it's absolutely essential that that kind of work continue as well.
But the other thing we do is build the resilience so that we support one another and keep our own energy strong because we have a long ways to go. To me, this is a moment when the collapse of the American Empire is becoming very clear. I think a lot of us thought it would happen eventually, that we would no longer be able to dominate the world as we had in previous decades, that our wealth would have to be more in proportion to the rest of the world and not necessarily extracting so much from the rest of the world, not necessarily extracting so much from Mother Nature, that we were going to have to come to a different relationship with our world. And the way to do that, I believe, to reinvent the kind of world that we want to have post-empire, is also local. And whether or not we wish that was happening, some of us really wish we would live in better attunement with the natural world and what the natural world can offer. Whether or not we wish to do that, Mother Nature in the end will enforce that. So it's far better if we do the work locally to build resilient and sustainable communities now. And then we're in so much better condition as this transition occurs.
And one other piece of that is that, a lot of our communities, we hear that they're very polarized and some of that is true, but I don't think it's nearly as true as it is being projected by the national media, especially things like the Right-wing influencers. I think at the local level, we have a lot more in common. There's a lot more things we all want. We want our schools to be good. We want our drinking water to be drinkable. We want to get along with each other. We want to deal with, support each other through the difficulties that life creates for people everywhere. We want to be able to support each other and get support, and I believe that we can, even though it's tough, we can create the kind of nourishing communities locally that attract people and that attract them to the notion of being inclusive and supporting everybody regardless of their station in life.
I think that's actually what people really yearn for, and it's only when they despair and believe that isn't possible and that all the others are violent and will prevent them from living a decent life, I think that's when people are willing to resort to the kind of Right-wing “me first, I don't care about people who are different than me,” I think that's what brings that out. So at the local level, we can create beloved communities. We can actually create a sense of belonging, of joy, of fierce love and resistance that’s very attractive, that really can draw people in.
And we can especially do that if we take people where they are. We don't necessarily expect them to share all of our views, but we're willing to build a foundation based on our common humanity.
Michael: Oh, thank you so much, Sarah. This is Michael chiming in. Hi there. I really resonated with your idea of attractiveness. I thought for a long time that this is key, that if we can take things out of the boring into the attractive that they would happen. But I wanted to ask you, to what extent do you think these local community efforts and the networks and new ideas and new forms of organization will continue past the emergency. Let's assume we have a good electoral outcome. Are people just going to go back to the same old? Or will some of these things be so attractive that they'll be permanent gains?
Sarah: That remains to be seen. I think a lot depends on the work we do today and what kind of infrastructure we're building. And I don't think our country's going back to the same old. Even if the elections turned in very different directions and MAGA was repudiated I don't think we can quite go back. I think there's been too much that has been dismantled. And I think the end of Empire is still ongoing, whether or not MAGA is hastening that process. So I don't think going back is really a question. I think it's a question of, how will we choose to go forward? There's certainly very dire versions of that, where what replaces what we have now is just increasing violence and increasing gated communities. I'm going to, bunkers and I'm going to keep mine for me. But ultimately, even a lot of people who have taken that view realize that in the long run you really can't survive all by yourself. You really do need a community.
And that means in some sense, we need to figure out how we do that together. So I think that's where we get to go with this. We say, for example, if all these healthcare cuts that the Republicans are trying to push through or have pushed through and the Democrats are trying to push back on, if those all go through, a lot of people are going to lose their health insurance and any access to healthcare.
That would be a moment to say, “You know what? That whole insurance system was pretty corrupt anyway, let's just go for Medicare for All.” We can do that at the state level. We don't have to wait for a federal initiative, so let's not hope that we can go back and in fact, I think one of the reasons there was an opening for MAGA to make the progress it did was because the Democratic party leadership at the national level became so complacent with the corporate rule that we have and that has made health insurance, for example, so unaffordable and done so much to damage people's trust by excluding different kinds of procedures that they needed. I think there's a real damage to the Democratic national party by the fact that they were so complacent and willing to go along with that. And I think now we need to step up and say, “You know what? That really wasn't the solution we need. We need Medicare for All, and we're willing to fight for it.”
Stephanie: I am somebody that I'm really interested in our local politics and, community radio for example, like here we are talking, being able to share news and information within our local communities. Using radio stations, I think is an excellent tool and in terms of discussing the divides or looking for solutions together. There are still a lot of politics that take place within local communities where people are somewhat brainwashed to look at one another in terms of an enemy or seeing ourselves in a fight instead of working together toward a shared beautiful vision of community. You know what I mean? We still have these deep conflicts in our communities that are also being lit by the national news, telling us, “don't trust your neighbors. Don't trust Democrats. They want to see you dead.” Literally, I've heard these things and so how do we do it? How have you seen communities just leading the way?
Sarah: Yes. So I think part of it is to realize what kind of numbers we're talking about. We're not really in a situation where the country is divided in two. For example, most people tune out politics. So they're not MAGA, they're also not progressives out on the street protesting. They're doing other things with their lives, and if you look at the election results, I think it's also important to say around a third of the people voted for Trump, around a third voted for Kamala Harris, somewhat less, and around a third voted for none of the above, or they stayed home.
And some of them did that very consciously. because they didn't like Kamala Harris's position on Palestine. And some of them did that just because they were fed up with the whole system and didn't believe it was making a difference. So if you take that as a sort of a starting point. I think trying to directly engage with people who are committed MAGA followers is probably not going to be very productive, although there may be openings with family members or people who you have a deeper trusting relationship with.
But basically I think the strategy that can work is to galvanize power among those who share an agenda, like Medicare for All, just as an example, to galvanize power. And that means not just analyzing this, not just saying it's a good idea, but organizing and really looking at the ways in which power can be exercised in a society. And that, I think has often been missing in that strategy.
And then the second thing is to be building in ways that are constantly inviting all the people in the middle, the people who may not be engaged because they don't trust the process or because they have never been invited or because they don't feel like the people who are doing the inviting look like them or they can relate to. So find all sorts of different ways of opening the doors and creating a very inviting, inclusive, joy-filled space that people want to be part of.
So like I was thinking the other day, there was a big rally in Seattle. You probably heard the stories in Portland about the inflatable frogs. So they're bringing a sort of joy to that. But in Seattle, they did something like that when a big, church-based organization. One is Valley very close to a neighborhood that's predominantly LGBTQ very friendly for that community. And it felt really hostile. And so the first time they did that, there was clashes with police. But the second time they came back, instead the community got together and had a beautiful big kazoo concert right adjacent to that event. And if you were a young person just looking at, which one looks like more fun, you'd have to choose the kazoo party. So I think that's part of our challenge is to just make the work we do so full of joy and invitation that it really attracts people to at least learn more about it. And at least consider that, maybe the people involved are not in fact evil people, but they're just people who care deeply and want a better world for everybody.
Stephanie: Can I put out another idea here as well is that as we're galvanizing power that we don't step on people that need to be a part of that process too. Learning skills because consensus is a skill or decision-making while using a different kind of power requires a skill and a confidence and time. And so learning new ways of making decisions without just forcing decisions on people.
Sarah: Oh, I totally agree with that. Yes, that's so important. And not only is it an important democratic tool, but it also brings about a wisdom that's greater than the sum of the parts. If you really do that well, you come up with so much more brilliance than if you just have one person after another to fight for attention and then a vote. So yes, I totally agree with you.
Stephanie: Yeah, and I'd say the same thing around skills and conflict. Learning how to talk to one another, learning how to listen to each other without feeling threatened or the need to overpower somebody with the urgency of what we feel needs to happen.
Sarah: Totally agree with you. Yes. I'm so glad you brought that up.
Michael: Sarah, I want to put in a note of appreciation here. You have been, through positive futures, working on really the infrastructure of the kind of change we need. And recently I was reading David Brooks, who I read him a lot, and he talked about this trajectory from the cultural to the societal to the political. And we so often try to fix things in reverse by just going to the political and not realizing that there are these deep cultural changes with regard, for example, to who we are, how are we related to one another and to the planet that will become a new politics. So I'm really glad that you're giving us that orientation.
Sarah: Thank you. And it's been a thrill to see David Brooks starting to speak about some of the things that we all have been talking about for years. Thank you for pointing that out.
Stephanie: Sarah, in, in addition to your substack, How We Rise, what are some other media that you would suggest people look into as we wrap up today's show?
Sarah: You may or may not know that YES! Magazine has ceased publication. That happened this spring and the only good news out of that is that Truthout has taken on the archive of YES! Magazine and is also publishing a monthly newsletter that builds on YES! types of themes. So that's one I recommend is to check out Truthout and to check out their publication of this new YES! newsletter.
Stephanie: Sarah, thank you, we have 10 seconds left. Thank you so much for joining us today!
Sarah: Alright, thank you.
Stephanie: It's been great having you.
Sarah: This was a thrill.
Stephanie: Bye.
Sarah: Okay, bye.