Tag: resistance

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Creativity

IMPORTANT: Report from the Senate Floor

Report from the Senate Floor, written by US Senator Chris Murphy (D – CT).

“Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is. 

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted. In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that. 

Now, we knew that Republicans would largely unanimously oppose them, but we had two objectives here. One, Republicans were forced to put their opinion on record — many for the first time — on the most corrupt parts of Trump and Musk’s agenda. Two, as I’ve been saying, I am going to make every process and procedure as slow and painful as possible for as long as my colleagues choose to ignore the constitutional crisis happening before our eyes. 

So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here. 

The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice. 

Thanks to your pressure and support, many of my Democratic colleagues have joined my effort to do everything we can to make sure they cannot destroy democracy and steal your money in the dark of the night. We are being loud about what is happening. I’m going to continue to grind the gears of Congress down as much as possible to make it that much harder and slower to get away with this corruption. That’s why the votes lasted until nearly 5 AM. 

This is a five-alarm fire. I don’t think we have two years to plan and fight back. I think we have months. It’s still in our power to stop the destruction of our democracy with mass mobilization and effective opposition from elected officials. So we can’t miss any opportunity to take advantage of opportunities to put Republicans on the record and shine a light on what is happening. 

And you have a role to play in this as well. I need you to amplify what’s happening, support the leaders who are fighting for you to make sure they can continue speaking truth to power against Musk and Trump’s billionaire cronies, and show up at rallies and town halls. Use every tool at your disposal to send a message loud and clear about how you expect my colleagues to lead and fight in this moment.

Every best wish, US Senator Chris Murphy (D – CT)”

Categories
Creativity

What’s Your Resilience Plan?

BY JEN PAYNE

These days, I wake up with a thin veil of hope. Before the All of it sets in. Again. Then I breathe and stretch. Light incense. Beseech saints and gods. And settle into the morning routine of cat feeding and coffee making — this is the Grounding.

When I am fortified enough, I glance at the headlines and subject lines. Read Jessica Craven’s latest Chop Wood, Carry Water to talk me off the ledge. Remind myself about Chaos Theory, and This Too Shall Pass. Recite the Serenity Prayer: serenity, courage, wisdom. Breathe.

I relay inspiring quotes about Resistance and Creativity and Hope on social media. Call and email my Senators and Representatives. Take small actions of Revolution before I settle into my day, which, for now, is same and sane and familiar.

Familiar enough that at some point, I shake off the Big World things and muck about in my own for a while. The usual: the house repairs, the bills, the client rubbing me the wrong way, that one thing that one person said that irritated the piss out of me, my mother’s caregiving, the impending knee surgery, on and on…

And on…while the world fucking burns outside my window. Literally. Figuratively. Absolutely.

Every time I find myself marinating about my Small World things, I hear Julia Roberts/Liz Gilbert in the opening monologue of the movie Eat, Pray, Love:

“l have a friend, Deborah, a psychologist, who was asked if she could offer psychological counseling to Cambodian refugees — boat people, who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah was daunted by the task. These Cambodians had suffered genocide, starvation, relatives murdered before their eyes, years in refugee camps, harrowing boat trips to the West. How could she relate to their suffering? How could she help these people? So guess what all these people wanted to talk about with my friend Deborah, the psychologist. lt was all, “l met this guy in the refugee camp. I thought he really loved me, but when we got separated, he took up with my cousin. Now he says he loves me, and keeps calling me. They’re married now. What should l do?” This is how we are.”

This is how we are, in part, because we are susceptible to what is called “Crisis Fatigue” — that feeling of overwhelm, lack of control, or the urgency of the next crisis.

And goodness knows, we’re like a Russian doll of crises these days! Everywhere you look, it’s crisis stacked upon crisis upon crisis.

So where is the fulcrum? How do we find a balance between staying informed and hiding under covers? Between revolutioning and resting?

Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to make time to drink water, slow down a little, pace yourself.

In her article “When tragedy becomes banal: Why news consumers experience crisis fatigue,” Rebecca Rozelle-Stone , Professor of Philosophy, University of North Dakota asks, “How might we recover a capacity for meaningful attention and responses amid incessant, disjointed and overwhelming news?” and suggests, beyond reining in digital device usage, that we consider:

“Limiting the daily intake of news can help people become more attentive to particular issues of concern without feeling overwhelmed. Cultural theorist Yves Citton, in his book The Ecology of Attention, urges readers to “extract” themselves “from the hold of the alertness media regime.” According to him, the current media creates a state of “permanent alertness” through “crisis discourses, images of catastrophes, political scandals, and violent news items.” At the same time, reading long-form articles and essays can actually be a practice that helps with cultivating attentiveness.”

She also recommends a focus on “more solutions-based stories that capture the possibility of change. Avenues for action can be offered to readers to counteract paralysis in the face of tragedy. Amanda Ripley, a former Time magazine journalist, notes that “stories that offer hope, agency, and dignity feel like breaking news right now, because we are so overwhelmed with the opposite.”

So do that.

But remember…it’s OK to take a day off — from work, from social media, from headlines, from the Resistance.

It’s OK to eat ice cream or take a nap or laugh out loud. It’s OK to make plans, to look forward to things.

Do the things that keep you sane and keep you grounded. Revolution requires Resilience.

In Eat, Pray, Love, the medicine man Ketut suggests to Julia Roberts/Liz Gilbert:

Keep grounded so it’s like
you have four legs.
That way, you can stay in this world.
Also, no looking at world
through your head.
Look through your heart instead.
That way, you will know God.

That way, you will know Good.

Categories
Creativity

Braiding Pieces of Thought from January 20, 2025

“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending the 40th annual MLK Breakfast, presented by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Heritage Foundation. It was a beautiful community event that included readings, music, and a presentation by Pulitzer Prize winning author Dr. Jeffrey C. Stewart who spoke about the history and importance of non-violence.

I went at the invitation of my friend Laura Noe, who has her finger on the pulse of activism in truly inspiring ways. She reads voraciously, volunteers liberally throughout town, and knows how to make good connections for others. She’s currently working towards her second Master’s Degree, in Public Health (her first was in Gender Studies), and she’s teaching two courses at Southern Connecticut State University this semester, Psychology of Women and Adolescent Development.

For several years, Laura has recommended I read the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the reciprocal relationships between humans and the land, with a focus on the role of plants and botany in both Native American and Western European traditions.

So yesterday afternoon, while the world around us marched to a seemingly different beat, I picked up my beautiful hardcover copy of Braiding Sweetgrass and began to read.

I suspect this was a divinely inspired moment — something somewhere knew it was exactly what I was supposed to be reading yesterday, the odd ironic day in 2025 when we simultaneously honored a great leader like Martin Luther King Jr. and inaugurated a demon and his minions.

I wanted to share with you this gorgeous passage from the new Introduction in the 2020 edition…it delivers, I think, beautiful blades of hope.

I began writing Braiding Sweetgrass in what seems, from this moment in the midst of a global pandemic and the upheavals it has generated, a more innocent time, when climate catastrophe was a hot glow on the horizon. We could smell smoke but our home was not yet engulfed in flames. There was guarded optimism for leadership on climate change and justice for land and people, human and otherwise.

A lot has happened since in climate urgency, with the political pain of vile Windigos come to office and all the wounds they have inflicted. I don’t need to say more. This evidence might suggest that the medicine of plant stories has not worked very well to heal our relationships with land and each other. The powerful purveyors of destruction are still in power, the skies darkening. But as always, I take my guidance from the forests, who teach us something about change. The forces of creation and destruction are so tightly linked that sometimes we can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off. A long-lived overstory can dominate the forest for generations, setting the ecological conditions for its own thriving while suppressing others by exploiting all the resources with a self-serving dominance. But, all the while it sets the stage for what happens next and something always happens that is more powerful than that overstory: a fire, a windstorm, a disease. Eventually, the old forest is disrupted and replaced by the understory, by the buried seedbank that has been readying itself for this moment of transformation and renewal. A whole new ecosystem rises to replace that which no longer works in a changed world. Braiding Sweetgrass, I hope, is part of that understory, seeded by many thinkers and doers, filling the seedbank with diverse species, so that when the canopy falls, as it surely will, a new world is already rising. “New” and ancient, with its origins in the Indigenous worldview of right relation between land and people. What the “overstory” of colonialism tried to suppress is surging. It is the prophesied time of the Seventh Fire, a sacred time when the collective remembering transforms the world. A dark time and a time filled with light. We remember the oft-used words of resistance, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. United States: Milkweed Editions, 2020.

Categories
Creativity

A Door or a Hole

Text from Pressenza: an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence

This moment that humanity is experiencing can be seen as a door or a hole. It is up to you to decide whether you fall into the hole or go through the door. If you consume the news 24/7, with negative energy, constantly on edge, with pessimism, then you fall into that hole. But if you take the opportunity to look at yourself, to consider life and death, to take care of yourself and others, then you will go through the portal.

Take care of your home, take care of your body. Connect with your spiritual home. When you take care of yourself, you are also taking care of everyone else.

Do not underestimate the spiritual dimension of this crisis. Take the perspective of an eagle that sees everything from above – with an expanded view. This crisis involves a social issue, but also a spiritual issue. Both go hand in hand.

Without the social dimension, we fall into fanaticism. Without the spiritual dimension, we fall into pessimism and meaninglessness.

Are you ready to face this crisis? Take your toolbox and use all the tools at your disposal.

Learn resistance from the example of the Indian and African peoples: they have been and are still being exterminated, but they have never stopped singing, dancing, lighting a fire and rejoicing.

Don’t feel guilty for feeling blessed in these troubled times. Being sad or angry does not help in any way. Resistance is resistance through joy!

You have a right to be strong and positive. And there is no other way to do that than to maintain a positive, happy and light-filled attitude. This has nothing to do with alienation (ignorance of the world). It is a strategy of resistance.

When we cross the threshold, we have a new world view because we have faced our fears and difficulties. That is all you can do now:

  • Keep calm in the storm
  • Keep calm, pray daily
  • Make it a habit to encounter the sacred every day.
  • Show resistance through art, joy, trust and love.