Staying elected

 I'm getting emails telling me to press my Democratic senators and congressional representative to hold the line against the Trump administration and demand guardrails against the blatantly unconstitutional devastation and pillage of DOGE and cabinet members purposely selected to destroy their agencies or use them as tools of Trump's personal vengeance. These are worthy and necessary goals, but they're running up against the endlessly grinding wheel of the election cycle.

New Hampshire identifies as Republican even though the entire Congressional delegation is Democratic. Those Democrats manage to piece together enough factors to appeal to a majority of voters. But it could flip at any time. The majority in the state legislature are Republicans, and mostly hard right. The countryside is studded with Trump flags and signs even now.

Without a Congressional majority, Democrats can't do anything that will stop Trump completely. Even if they could, Democrats in swing states would have to impress enough right-leaning independents to retain their seats so that they could continue the fight. If they lose, a senate seat goes out of reach for six years. A Representative goes out for two. If that provides or perpetuates a Republican majority, their program continues, perhaps with new energy.

It's not just about staying in power. It's about continuing work in progress. The Republicans have the power now because they have no work in progress in the government. They can sub in any yokel who can get elected to swing a sledgehammer or a pickaxe. The painstaking work on their side has been done in places like the Heritage Foundation and right wing media. All of that has just been a setup to get their wrecking crew in place. They could literally just jump up and down and throw feces at this point.

You might think that Democrats would then be free to field a variety of candidates, but for some perverse reason the Republican shit show still draws significant support. It manages to attract a small percentage of self-identified "thoughtful" voters who believe that they are supporting some kind of coherent policy. Once they realize that they've wasted their vote it's too late. Maybe they reject the candidate they picked the first time, but their conservative leaning means that they're ripe to believe the marketing they hear and see about the replacement goon put up next by the Republicans.

The Democrats aren't a pure force for good by any means. In states where they are the entrenched power, human nature dictates that they succumb to corruption at the same rates as their right-wing counterparts. Maybe the goals of it are different in some cases, but the methods are still questionable or illegal. It's significant that the Trump administration has reached across the aisle to pardon corrupt Democrats like Eric Adams and Rod Blagojevich. It proves that criminality is the unifying principle, not any of the political, economic, and social philosophies they claimed as talking points in the campaign. Rod Blagojevich?! Who even remembered who that was? His name was fun to say, though.

I can tell an elected official what I wish would happen. I can advise. But I know that they know things that I don't. They're dealing with the situation in person, and coordinating information from their state and districts. They have to run the calculation constantly to find the balance between what a portion of their constituency says it wants and what will actually fly. I'm as disgusted and disappointed by John Fetterman as anyone, but I also know that he's balancing the input from his diverse state, attempting to represent them fairly and stay in place to advance better values when the opportunity arises. He seems like a duplicitous asshole to some of us right now, but maybe he's not a complete Manchin or Sinema.

At least he's no Tulsi.

Is it ideal? Of course not. But the strength of democracy is also its weakness. At every election, the candidates have to persuade a majority of eligible voters to pick them. The process never ends. Every action is scrutinized and analyzed, packaged and presented by all interested parties to guide the choice for or against.

The revolution will not be comfortable

 Listening to an analysis of right wing media coverage of the Super Bowl halftime show, I could hear the anxiety masked as dismissiveness in the voice of the mostly white commentators.

Racism is only one aspect of the authoritarian power play, but it's fundamental. From the 17th Century onward, slave owners and their neighbors feared slave uprisings. Later, in the 19th Century, the first super-wealthy industrial capitalists feared labor uprisings. In both cases, the power class used deadly force to attempt to break the will of the oppressed.

Frederick Douglass is quoted as saying that "power never concedes anything without a demand." Power is never willingly surrendered. Sometimes this calls for armed conflict. Much of the time, however, social and political change succeed because the holders of power succumb to some other kind of pressure, whether it's conscience, or economics, or they simply extend themselves too far and fall flat.

In the case of women's suffrage, holders of power became allies and willingly elevated the political status of women. The people who could vote had to be convinced to surrender their undiluted power. In the case of Black civil rights, holders of power in the white supremacist system had to become allies and vote for the change. Sure, there was violence associated with both movements, but it was only one factor in convincing the holders of power to give up some of it. The whole organism of resistance and change combined many elements. The same goes for the progress that labor made, before the ownership class started exploiting philosophical wedges to pit workers against each other over cultural issues. Power was conceded.

This time around, the conflict is not between a single oppressed category and a relatively homogeneous majority. The argument started back around 1980: are we a country that takes care of everyone, or one that lavishly rewards ruthless scrambling for personal wealth? Are we a united nation that recognizes the value of all contributors, all the way down the economic continuum, or one that values humans purely monetarily? Right now, a lot of people who could quiet down and make the best of it are still talking a good game about resistance and change. How long will they last when they figure out what change really means?

Make no mistake, the regime in power now is very very bad for the country and the world. But the antidote to them is for people who might be rather comfortable right now to be permanently, willingly less comfortable as part of the rebalancing of social opportunity and respect. These people are mostly white or think of themselves as white. They're well off under the current economic system, when the current economic system is largely responsible for the rise of the movement that is destroying the country. They were winners because they pleased their masters or entrepreneurially exploited the inequalities to enrich themselves, even if they faithfully voted Democratic.

Change is coming no matter what. It could be the widespread death and misery that will follow full implementation of right wing social engineering, or it could be the reordering of the economy to improve circumstances at the bottom very much to the detriment of the top and a chunk of the middle. There is no third option. The status quo is dead. We can't get back to it and we shouldn't want to. This can be done without rewriting our Constitution, although we will need an amendment or two. The fundamentals are sound as long as the full scope of We the People isn't limited to the originalist concept of We the White, Male Property Owners.

The good news is that the system that improves life at the bottom also frees up everyone along the entire spectrum to have more of their own time to spend as they wish. A well-ordered economy using the lavish talent pool available if we quit being obsessively competitive could easily have shorter work days and weeks and still get everything done that needs to be done. It will require examining our goals and the costs associated with them. It will mean the death of go-go, unrestrained consumerist capitalism. And good riddance.

The US is no longer a great power

 Isolationists have succeeded in taking the United States from being a global power and a force for good and converting us into a global threat and an untrustworthy ally, possibly forever.

The politicians who cultivated a base of voters who live in anger and fear thought that those voters were stupid and apathetic enough to remain controllable. But somewhere along the line they started believing their own shit. We have a whole regime devoted to destroying our strengths both domestically and internationally.

We could have been great. Sure, we made mistakes, usually propelled by the same greedy impulses that have now led to this complete undoing of all progress. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. The same is true of corporations. But in the case of nations those interests can align with what's kind, moral, and just, as well. Everything does come down to philosophy eventually.

Kindness, morality, and justice, have gone in the shitter with this regime. It's all about the money and power.

It is much easier to impose a regime of cruelty than one of kindness. A free society always contains the seeds of its own destruction. The people who hate the freedom of anyone who is not like them will take advantage of the freedom to speak and assemble, to spread their anger and fear to anyone susceptible, and organize their militias and pressure groups. 

The fact that the regime's budget proposal rips away large sections of the social safety net for chronically underpaid "essential workers," the elderly poor, and children proves that they hate spending money on much more than foreign aid. They're demonstrating if not admitting that they consider anyone below a certain financial threshold to be a useful idiot at best and vermin at worst. And you could be in both categories.

The oligarchs believe that they do represent American values. They represent you, because you would certainly do what they are doing if you had the chance. This is depressingly true in a lot of cases. Now it's our nation's global posture. Turning inward has never worked out well for us in the past. We always get blown out of our complacency by world events and have to play catch up because we had let our global awareness and capability deteriorate.  This time around, our rivals will fill in behind us, and then sweep over us. The current regime is the most ignorant, inept, and corrupt in the history of the United States. Their lust for power will end up leaving them with none, and the rest of us with the ruins of what had been a promising young nation.

We could dust off the Constitution and start applying it in the more inclusive way that those soft-headed liberals had been suggesting before we decided to go ahead with the right wing's experiment in unbridled greed and cruelty. It will be too late for US standing as a global leader. We might even be a vassal state of China by then, in which case our Constitution is just a historical curiosity for underground scholars to remember wistfully. Same goes if the victor is Russia, but I don't think that Russian leadership is capable of global dominance the way the Chinese are.

Republican Suppression of Women

 The Republican Party has steadily advanced a campaign to drive women out of positions of power in public and corporate life. But have they, really?

From Phyllis Schlafly onward, the trend has tilted to dump women back into dependent, subservient roles in which their only power comes from their ability to manipulate their heterosexual husbands. Some factions of the party now openly seek to reduce the ability of women to register to vote. A few even talk about repealing the right altogether.

A snippet in a summary of Mitch McConnell's career caught my eye. A woman named Janet Mullens, who worked on his senate campaign in 1984, was quoted as saying, "He intuitively knew that women worked harder to prove themselves. He was woke before woke, I guess."

That's not woke. That's exploitation. Republicans have kept it so that many women would be discouraged from trying, but the few who do try will be so incredibly motivated that they will do four times as much for two-thirds the pay, provided you start them off at half pay first so that two-thirds looks like significant progress.

Sexism being rampant in the male, regardless of party affiliation, Democrats have been slow to inch in the direction of full parity and respect. That said, they've advanced a bit further than the right wing on this, because their definition of liberty encompasses a more realistically diverse population. But the sentiment will remain in the male psyche. Guard against it always. "Not all men" think that way, but the attitude has centuries of cultural reinforcement.

The question boils down to whether allowing all roles eliminates some by default, and how the women filling those roles will be fairly compensated. A woman who chooses to remain childless or delay reproduction to pursue a career or other interests should not devalue one who chooses stay at home with the kids. The reverse is also true. But it keeps getting framed as a war between two monolithic positions. That's without even factoring in sex and gender diversity that further complicates the binary choices so beloved of simple minds.

Compensation extends beyond a paycheck. We've lost sight of that in this world where billionaires strive to become trillionaires while we all watch from below, some in admiration, some in horror. The very fact that no amount of money or power seems to be enough shows that what they devour is almost instantly digested, leaving them craving more. If it was just drugs or sugar, they wouldn't be hurting as many people, but its the lifeblood of economies they're guzzling with vampirish lust.

There's more than one way to play the game. Women seeking power or proximity to power work their way into the existing system as hardworking servants or bejeweled decorations. Many of them you see today on the right have themselves made into caricatures of femininity, to the extent that's medically possible. Sorry, Marge. You'll have to get by on CrossFit and crazy. But the others go for the boob jobs and hair extensions along with their semiautomatic weapons and flamethrowers. They leave behind a trail of dead dogs and goats, sticky puddles in theater seats, and other attention seeking behavior to prove that they are no shrinking violets. Will there always be a place for them in this and every future conservative administration? Or are they energetically building their own prison? And are they secretly looking forward to that?

No woman could stay in the Trump administration without deferring to Big Daddy. As feisty as they act, it's still in the framework of what makes a girl attractive to the menfolk. "Hell, she can shoot a gun, change the oil in her pickup truck, cook supper, and still fck my brains out that night and tell me I was great!" Yeah, then she spends a suspiciously long time shut in the bathroom with her "electric toothbrush," but let's not pick at it too much.

From the women's side, flirtatious behavior is the dangerous game they use to make the men feel generous. Occasionally they'll get too close and have to put up with sexual assault, but that's just part of being a large-animal trainer. You're going to get stomped, or kicked, or bitten sometimes. Maybe some of you die. It's a small price to pay for keeping men manly. 

The tyranny of normality demands that women be that way and support men being locked into the hierarchical world view that has framed every power structure among religions, nations, and corporations throughout history. You're either climbing the ladder or you're one of the rungs being stepped on. It remains true as long as we decide that it must be that way. Perhaps it is genetically inescapable, as conservatives have long asserted. I wonder, however, what some of the shrimpier members of the alpha male booster club would do if they were trapped naked in a locker room with a handful of larger assailants bent on power-raping them to assert dominance. Just you and whatever you were born with, against them. No weapons, only strength and whatever skill you have chosen to cultivate for your physical defense. This is the world you chose.

The bullies are in charge of the playground now

 A minuscule majority of the voters who actually bothered to show up in November, 2024, put into office the worst executive branch in American history, and paper-thin majorities of GOP enablers in the House and Senate.

In "A Christmas Story" the narrator states that "in the kid world, you're either a bully, a toady, or a victim." In a momentary triumph, Ralphie beats the bully so badly that if it happened in a schoolyard today he would be charged with aggravated assault. Many of us smaller, nearsighted boys had similar experiences growing up, though perhaps without Ralphie's primal ferocity.

In the adult world, bullies organize. The fascist movements of the 1930s were just super organized bullies. The regime in the United States today formed a coalition of narrow-minded bullies, because narrow minds are easier to capture and control. The coalition will fracture, because the factions want different things, but it won't happen soon enough and completely enough to save American stature and power in the world.

The tech oligarchs want to use up the Earth to build their starships and leave behind the dead weight of people they consider inferior. It's a grand sci-fi fantasy. Thus they are strip-mining the government for resources that can be transferred to them in contracts and subsidies, making those inferior people subsidize their greatness through our taxes.

The ideological bullies include the Christian nationalists who want to cement the patriarchy and the libertarians who just don't want to pay taxes. There's some overlap between the libertarians and the religious dictatorship, in which male libertarians feel adequately  liberated as long as they can control their subservient women and shoot nearly anyone who pisses them off. But true libertarians want everyone to be able to shoot anyone who pisses them off, and to make bank on all of the toll roads and other privatized services that are going to be so wonderfully efficient and profitable.

The oligarchs consider nations to be tools to help control labor costs in the short-sighted grovel to control what's left of the planet's resources. The libertarians imagine exuberant anarchy in which they always manage to draw faster and shoot straighter in a world no longer encumbered by law enforcement.

To beat these bullies will take more than a single Ralphie to go berserk. It will take more than a handful of Ralphies to administer the beat-down. It will take the impossible dream of millions of ordinary voters getting together to defeat the voter suppression and gerrymandering, to ignore the oceans of money that the oligarchs will use to flood the election with advertising. It will take damn near all of the indoctrinated toadies defying the demographics that put them all in weird, sprawling voting districts and voting against the candidates that we all know were anointed for them.

The toadies think that they're bullies. Remember Scott Farkus's shrimpy little sidekick trying to exchange shoulder punches with him? "Scut" escalates until the little guy gives up. And when Farkus goes down, Grover the toady has no one. All he can do is run, and threaten to tell his dad.

The toadies of the current regime haven't been abandoned yet. The bullies are still in charge. Their little cheerleaders keep wearing the clothes and displaying flags and stickers. In the administration itself, politicians like Marco Rubio, who once considered himself a presidential contender, shames himself and his country as the Secretary of State. Republican senators and representatives abdicate their responsibility to stop the bully in chief because they support and expect to profit from the devastation.

The victims are starting to mount up. They're not the legions of illegal immigrants that the presidential campaign assured its followers would be marched onto cattle cars and made to disappear. It's thousands of federal employees, most of them far from DC, who, until yesterday, contributed vital funds to the local economies where they were working and living. It's workers at businesses who just had federal contracts canceled. It's veterans losing health care and mental health support. Thank you for your service! The silence of Republicans about the betrayal of veterans proves that Donald Trump was hardly the first person to consider them "suckers and losers." These are added to the casualties of Republican health care and reproductive rights policies who have been adding up since the midterm elections of 2022.

Victims include any of us who like to visit national parks and forests. Do you like good roads? Enjoy the state of the pavement now, because this is the best it's going to be for the foreseeable future, unless you happen to live near a rich neighborhood or along a route important to the burgeoning private space industry. The rest of it can crumble and rot in the name of tax cuts and deregulation.

Anyway, as long as the regime leaves the forms of democracy in place to set the stage for their sham elections we have the power to surprise the shit out of them by voting en masse for their opposition. That may lead to the sort of accidental deaths that plague opposition candidates in Russia. Then I don't know. 

I'm just glad that I never had kids. In the meantime, whether you have kids or not, it's time to step up and vote in favor of the younger generations. They deserve a planet that hasn't been hollowed out and burned over, presided over by bullies.

Final note: being asked or even required to accommodate people who diverge from an exclusively white, male, hetero stereotype is not bullying. It's the opposite.

War is expensive

 The current regime courted voters by claiming that they would bring down prices for ordinary citizens who felt overly burdened by price and availability problems with some items. They also characterized the party they ran against as warmongers likely to plunge us into World war III.

We've been on the verge of World War III for my entire life. The sense of doom hung over us before I was born and persists today. It takes its place beside the fear of Hell and the fear of public embarrassment as leverage that social leaders use on the masses. It's a good one, too.

The regime started a trade war immediately, billing it as a good economic move. It's not, of course. Tariff costs are passed directly to the consumers, whether the company they're dealing with is directly affected or not. Prices rising anywhere is an invitation to prices rising everywhere. Also, everything really is connected, so what seems unaffected can't really remain untouched. This is especially true with the new tariffs announced on aluminum and steel. These basic structural metals are in everything, more or less.

As costs rise here, civilians are paying the costs of leadership's insistence on hostilities. Meanwhile, civilians in targeted foreign countries are paying the costs of their leadership's retaliatory tariffs. It's always the common people who pay the highest price for any form of war. And if your politics are based in anger, you will have war.

Americans get nostalgic for World War II because all of the major destruction took place somewhere else. This country was the ultimate home front. Popular music continued to evolve and advance. Sure, there was rationing, and people lost loved ones, but the economy hummed along with war production. Everyone had a sense of shared purpose. They could ignore peripheral costs to the planet and the future, like the prodigious amounts of petroleum dumped into the oceans as warring forces sank ships full of oil, and chemical fires raged in bombed industrial and urban centers in Europe. Gotta get through this awful war. The citizens went without things. Their freedom of movement was restricted at least by fuel rationing, if not by little inconveniences like being thrown into an internment camp for the duration.

By the end of the war, the dawning Atomic Age pointed a charred, bony finger toward the threat of what a future conflict would bring. The Atomic Age melted into the Nuclear Age within a few years, raising the temperature of the fireball even higher. You want this? Do you? Bitch about the Boomers all you want, but that generation was raised with unprecedented levels of indulgence alongside the assurance that the grownups were going to start something any day to incinerate it.

Here we are today, in a trade war that shows no signs of slackening. Inflation is climbing when we were assured that it would snap off like a light switch. At the same time, the executive branch is yanking us out of alliances that were forged in that glorious shared struggle of World War II and its aftermath, and declaring its intention to destabilize the Middle East, annex the territory of allies, and do it all with a military force composed exclusively of white, straight men, apparently. 

It would take a lot to get nations chucking nukes at each other, but maybe not as much as you think. People with their finger on the trigger came close to making the mistake numerous times during the Cold War. Would the US have dropped its cute little atomic bombs on Japan if any belligerent country had the potential to retaliate? However, a hostile stance leads to skirmishes that can lead to battles that can lead to ground wars that can be used to pit Oceania against Eurasia or Eastasia in a perpetual struggle that might not even really exist except for the poor conscripted idiots sent off to provide the verification of their mutilated or dead bodies.

Cynics would say that we have had that for years. If true in any way, it has only been in its infant stages. The desire to control territory and expand regional influence is real. In the full 1984 version, the wars are more of an endless stalemate welcomed by the authorities controlling each entity. Maybe one day a single power might prevail, but in the meantime the stalemate served the top tier quite well.

If you finished the book, though, the spokesperson for the top tier of Oceania, O'Brien, admits that even the top tier has to live with less than the best that a person could have, for the sake of loyalty to The Party that keeps them on top. Orwell doesn't go into a lot about tax policy, but the diminished returns that the leaders of the party accept is a tax of sorts.

Anyway, here, today, we're closer to that than ever, but still not doomed. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been so completely intoxicated by fringe legal theories and completely unconstitutional fantasies of a better government run by crazy rich people that their congressional delegation is doing absolutely nothing to exert their powers to check the executive branch. Between the ones who see benefit to themselves and the ones who never understood their constitutional responsibilities in the first place, power is in the hands of a slim but potent majority utterly unqualified to hold it.

That's the thing about representative democracy: if one party wanted to put up a sewer rat as a candidate and could convince enough voters to put that rat in office, we would have a sewer rat in office. The founders of this country anticipated incompetents and scoundrels, but never in such overwhelming force. So now we have to convince the party that grew its power by appealing to greed, lack of civic education, paranoia, and exclusionary religiosity to "do the right thing" and save the constitution from this onslaught.

The judicial branch is trying, only to provoke public statements from high ranking Republicans challenging their authority to do so. It's in that constitution that you people like to put on stickers in the back window of your enormous pickup trucks. The judicial branch can rule, but it can't enforce. Congress has to agree and refuse to cooperate further with the destruction.

Most Americans don't really understand what they could lose. American to them means white American, and white Americans have never lost anything. Sure, the South suffered a little reorganization in the Civil War, but they bounced back. Aggrieved citizens of a paler hue can claim that they were passed over for plum jobs because of various quotas, but in general we're used to having things our way. Almost none of us have put it together that the reason things aren't going as well as they might for us emanates from corporate boardrooms and the financial sector. The corruption of the government is just a byproduct of that abandonment of the middle class by the private sector. The top tier of wealth has reasoned -- rightly or wrongly -- that they don't need a thriving middle class and upward mobility in this country. They're sick of paying for it. They quit chipping in a while ago. They've had us fighting each other for decades.

There's a slim chance that the voters who put Republicans into congressional seats can bury them in phone calls, emails, letters, and social media posts to convince them that their political future lies not in cooperating with this regime but in asserting their power to stop it. There's a slimmer chance that mass public protests will do much more than cost their participants the money and time it took to participate. Those costs could be pretty steep in some cases. Remember the phrase "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" as you choose your side and take action. No one gives a shit about honor anymore, but lives and fortunes carry plenty of weight. It's our lives and piddly fortunes versus theirs. They have massively greater fortunes, but only a few lives.

Doesn't just voting seem a lot easier than plunging into the physical conflict or submission to dictatorship that will proceed unchecked? Support the government employees who are resisting DOGE. Pressure congress to support the judges who are supporting the Constitution. Refuse to comply.

Revenge of the Nerds, and the elected officials

 The richest man in the world has been given completely illegal, unsecured access to all of the computer systems of the US government, more or less. He hasn't gotten to DoD yet, but that may be moot since he has effectively neutralized all of our intelligence gathering capability.

This is the real revenge of the nerds. They created computerized systems on which all of advanced civilization has come to depend. Now you have to know how to code to defend yourself. And not just code, but code quickly and well. It's not going to happen.

Perhaps cyber conflict is taking place right now, hacker versus hacker, with the masked heroes maneuvering against Elon's twerps throughout the architecture of the federal computer system and beyond. Maybe the "good guys" will win. The problem is that when everyone depends on systems that most of us can't move masterfully through, the adept will have power over us. Some of them are bound to succumb to temptation.

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress sits back and watches, while the Democrats attempt to obstruct the destructive wave. The party in power has surrendered their Constitutional power to the greatest techno-grifter who ever lived. They are about to be able to admit that they hate the voters, and have hated us for a long time. No doubt they've been promised that they would retain symbolic positions of power and comfortable stipends if they will roll over for the Tech Bro Coup. No longer will they have to worry in the least about fickle voter sentiment.

Perhaps if elections continue, as popularity contests to see who can be the most outrageously cruel and authoritarian, the occupants of those comfortable seats will have to worry about primary challengers vying for the affection of the real rulers who command legions of programmers. The legions themselves are not safe, as they are tasked to create the AI that will replace them.

The population of Earth will be quite small in the age of the tech empire. An almost fully automated society needs few human workers. There's a danger that AI will decide that humans at all are an unacceptable contaminant. This is well explored in fiction and speculative essays -- which amount to the same thing -- but with careful attention to the code, that might be prevented. The I will be A, but not quite independent enough to purge its masters. Or maybe the later generations of tech whackos will decide that robotic immortality is better than meat existence, and develop that.

We have to live through the transitional period. More accurately, perhaps, we have to die in it, and probably of it. If you thought that running a country like a business was a bad idea, -- and it is -- wait 'til you see what it's like when a mad billionaire is running the planet that way. The layoffs are going to be brutal.

Think Woodstock

 Calls are going out now for mass protests in the streets. Citizens opposed to the many illegal acts already committed by the current regime and the policies they tell us are coming plan to meet that crisis by forming large crowds and waving signs.

Proponents of mass demonstration point to the successes of the 1960s (and the '60s part of the '70s) where mass gatherings focused media attention on opposition to the Vietnam War and helped to end it

 Equally dramatic in the media but somewhat less successful were the protests for racial equality that led to civil rights and voting rights legislation, the removal of overt color barriers, and driving the worst of racism underground for a while. Great gains were made at the cost of blood, but those gains fed immediate backlash.

One of the most enduring images of the 60's is that of Woodstock, in 1969. That was a mass gathering, but instead of blocking streets and disrupting a major city with angry shouting and clashes with law enforcement and counter-protesters, it was hundreds of thousands of people coming together to listen to music. It was a pinnacle of Baby Boomer influence on the direction of society. It was also poorly organized and had to be bailed out by the grownups, but the grownups did so with kindness and relatively good humor. Perhaps this was partly because the kids were doing their thing in an out of the way place.

The festival itself did showcase how a huge crowd of people -- estimates have run as high as half a million -- could get together and express their hedonism and grievance for three days without violence and destruction. There was destruction, but only what comes from packing a bunch of people together in a compact area and letting them trample it for a long weekend.

Because the theme was peace and love, it was easier to generate peer pressure to direct the audience's feelings toward that. It was definitely not G-rated, but the focus on nonviolent things made anger socially unacceptable.

The Vietnam War had been a festering sore in American society since about 1964, although US involvement dated back further. Woodstock was part of a short-term campaign compared to Black civil rights protests, even if it felt long to the privileged teens and young adults who wanted to end the stupid war that would ultimately claim tens of thousands of American lives, and probably millions of Southeast Asians.

Unfortunately, times change. The lens of history distorts as much as it clarifies, especially where protest techniques and their results are concerned. For a protest to work, it has to generate sympathy in the larger population witnessing it. This often means that the protesters suffer injuries and deaths at the hands of whoever has been oppressing them. Blood runs freely in the timeline of the labor and civil rights movements, and even the women's movement. None of those movements made gains because of strategic battle victories. They got what they got because they turned public opinion in their favor, against the bullies who were beating them down.

A protest is an act of faith that the public can and will eventually feel sympathy enough to vote in favor of the changes that the protesters request or demand. Anyone who gets shot, lynched, or beaten senseless is hoping that the sacrifice is worth it. Anyone taking part could be a casualty. This is why military services traditionally used a draft system to get enough combatants to fight a real war. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the British navy actually resorted to abducting men off the streets to get enough of them to complete the crews of warships. As war became more industrialized and horrific, men had to be forced to join.

The results of drafted forces in the Vietnam War led the Department of Defense to say "thanks but no thanks" after that. The services recruit volunteers. The coercive forces that direct people to join up are provided by the economy now. No need for a showy draft. Just hype the job security benefits to the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Protest movements have no draft leverage. Recruiters for a protest event have to overcome the legitimate survival instincts of  working people. Do I have the day off? Will I get fired for participating? Will I get injured, killed, or arrested? Will some provocateur spark violence? Will it do any good?

Protests based in anger and resistance to oppression are automatically more vulnerable to escalation into violence. Protests that inconvenience the uncommitted majority of the population have trouble generating sympathy. "We don't need your stinkin' sympathy," the true believing protester might say. "We need you to get off your ass and join us!" What we really need is effective education. Yelling, chanting, waving what seem like cleverly worded signs, and maybe getting pepper sprayed (or worse) for the cause might provide years of reminiscence for the survivors, but if it doesn't generate a shift in public thinking it was a complete failure.

The current crisis calls for elected officials and government employees at all levels to fulfill their roles and put us back on course to serve the diverse population of our almost-free country. We've been fairly close a few times since the middle of the last century. We keep getting dragged back toward primitive attitudes that suppress women and minorities, and undervalue the lives of laborers at every level.

We do face challenges from nations that don't value their citizens, who use them to advance economic interests. The oligarchs who profit from exploited labor all over the world make a good point when they say that our consumer lifestyle depends on cheap labor somewhere. They never admit that their goal is cheap labor everywhere. Cheap labor sounds great until you realize that the vast majority of us are that cheap labor.

If the United States disintegrates into armed civil strife it will not be a neatly organized Civil War or revolution against clearly delineated tyranny. It will be skirmishes and murders that probably lead to imposition of martial law and real crackdowns that drive resistance underground. Normal people just want to survive. Most of us will do our best to fade into the background and lie low, hoping that the overlords will collapse on their own. On a long enough time line, they will. Their greed and indifference to humans and the natural world will bring ruin. But that time line is long and unpleasant.

A general strike would stop the economy, and need not include any public gathering. Just don't go to work. Unfortunately, most of us can't prepare for the shutdown of nearly all goods and services. Any such action would not last long and would include only a small percentage of the working population.

Effective resistance by private citizens calls for quiet acts of ordinary communication. Call elected officials. I'm terrible at that. More often I will email, but as an individual, not as a co-signer on a canned petition provided by an organization whose position I support. Before that I wrote actual letters. It does take more time than calling, but can be less intimidating if, like me, you don't really like talking to people. It also seems to me that something that lasts, like an email or a letter, allows the reader to review what I wrote rather than just responding with bland courtesy and hanging up.

It's impossible to stay on top of all of the destructive actions unleashed by the current regime. Don't try to chase them all. I do mention in my communications with elected officials that nothing is really unimportant, because everything connects on some level. That level isn't necessarily deeply buried.

Meanwhile, in the government itself, some elected officials are exerting their power, while civil servants are attempting to thwart the blatantly illegal incursion by the minions of DOGE. Nothing that a mass gathering of citizens could do will impress the current holders of power. If anything, it could be spun by them as an excuse to crack down in the name of public safety, to benefit the masses still trying to get through their daily lives. The real resistance is being fought in the courts and in whatever might persuade more voters to start voting in favor of their own pay grade, instead of imagining that they might miraculously find themselves craving those millionaire and billionaire tax breaks.

The answer was only ever education and communication. We survive or fall based on marketing. You can call it something else, but it's all just selling an idea. 

"Hey, let's take care of each other and the planet!"

"Shut up, weirdo!"