![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Black-brown-puzzle-orig-644x464.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Like many of my friends, I\u2019m still struggling to find my place in the political, economic, and social circumstances of our world today. What do I have to offer in building a \u201ccountervailing force\u201d?1<\/sup><\/p>\n During the\u00a0week-long pause after the 2016 election, I and many others in my very blue part of the country, simply wandered around stunned, caught our breath, and wondered how the results would change our lives and our priorities. But then the energy began to build. We needed to get out, talk with others, and figure out what to do. More people have been stepping up to become active than I\u2019ve seen in decades. It didn\u2019t take long before a deluge of news reports, alerts for critical causes, and entreaties to join this or that action started appearing in our email boxes and Facebook pages, on printed notices delivered by “snail mail”\u00a0or stapled to telephone poles, and in conversations with friends over coffee or the telephone. There are marches to join, news reports to read, letters to send, meetings to attend or organize, and occasionally thoughtful talks and essays that help give perspective and context.<\/p>\n Back in fall 2015, when I created my website I added a\u00a0subtitle to remind me of a basic fact that I keep forgetting, \u201cYou can\u2019t do everything . . . at least not all at once.\u201d That\u2019s been hard to remember lately. And I thought by now I\u2019d be clearer about how to narrow\u00a0my focus, how to best use my skills and knowledge, short of trying to do it all.<\/p>\n Conversations often help me\u00a0start figuring out\u00a0something\u00a0going on in my life. In this case,\u00a0I need help finding\u00a0the shape of my particular piece of the much bigger puzzle. One thing I’ve done is\u00a0join with four or five other people who are interested in how we talk about the task facing us\u2014about language and reframing the conversation (with a nod to\u00a0George Lakoff)2<\/sup>\u00a0and John Boylan\u2019s call for a\u00a0new narrative.3<\/sup>\u00a0Our conversation has taken place in person and through lots of exchanged stories and articles. Just recently, I took time to write down and send some of my thoughts to them before an upcoming meeting. What started as a simple email message got to feeling more ponderous than an email message should be, it was more like an essay. So in addition to sending it to them, I fussed with it, made it a little more like an essay, and have included it here.<\/p>\n February 22, 2017<\/p>\n Greetings all,<\/p>\n By now, I think I\u2019ve read everything you\u2019ve sent, along with other things that have come my way. I\u2019ve been trying to figure out how to get my arms around it all and what I want to do with it. What questions am I trying to answer? What do I have to offer? I definitely haven\u2019t sorted it out yet, and I’m familiar with the tendency to think the latest thing I read or hear is the most important or the most urgent. I fully expect to keep learning and adjusting. Our conversation prompted me to write, to make some of the ideas in pieces you’ve sent hold still long enough for me to really see them. Here goes . . .<\/p>\n \u201cResistance” is crucial, but not enough. Unlike a couple of the writers I cite, I certainly believe resistance and protest are\u00a0needed and make a difference.\u00a0I\u2019m so glad there are other people who are more active in the streets and on the phone than I am.<\/p>\n David Frum, “What effective protest could look like,”4<\/sup>\u00a0put forward his thoughts about why demonstrations won’t stop Trump, about the difference between self-expression and persuasion, and about our need for a large goal, like \u201cprotecting our democracy from authoritarianism.\u201d I especially liked his observation that \u201cit is the steady and often tedious work of organization that sustains democracy.\u201d (I closely identify with the often invisible, behind-the-scenes work of organizing . . . organizing anything, for that matter). Frum wants us to “be motivated by hope, not outrage.” But beyond protest, he says little about what we should be striving for with our hope and organizing.<\/p>\n Here are a few snapshots of Mishra’s thinking: he was quoted in a\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0review8<\/sup>\u00a0of his new book,\u00a0The Age of Anger: A history of the present (<\/em>published 2017),\u00a0saying, \u201cNow with the victory of Donald Trump, it has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm.\u2009.\u2009.between an elite that seizes modernity\u2019s choicest fruits while\u00a0disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.\u201d In the opening paragraph of his piece in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, he stresses that, \u201cIt is not an accident that demagoguery appears to be rising around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Toward the end of the Guardian<\/em> piece, after detailing the long history of this chasm and times it has widened in the past, he considers where we go from here. Some reviews of his book hold him accountable for not offering\u00a0any solutions. Not having read the book, I can’t counter this. But in the Guardian<\/em> essay, while he doesn\u2019t offer answers, but he does suggest places to begin:<\/p>\n We need a more sophisticated analysis of how today\u2019s landscape of hyperrational power has coerced a new and increasingly potent irrationalism into existence.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And later . . .<\/p>\n Even to get our basic bearings we need, above all, greater precision in matters of the soul. The stunning events of our age of anger, and our perplexity before them, make it imperative that we anchor thought in the sphere of emotions; these upheavals demand nothing less than a radically enlarged understanding of what it means for human beings to pursue the contradictory ideals of freedom, equality, and prosperity.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Pankaj Mishra, in his book\u00a0Age of Anger<\/em>, explains the current crises as new manifestations of one long disruption that has been ripping up society for 200 years or more. Our sanitised histories of Europe and America allow us to forget that bedlam and carnage, civil and international war,\u00a0colonialism and overseas slaughter, racism and genocide, were the norms of this period, not exceptions.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I was encouraged, though, that Monbiot continued by saying that in the face of convincing evidence for despair, \u201cThis column will try to champion new approaches to politics, economics, and social change. There is no going back, no comfort in old certainties. We must rethink the world from first principles.\u201d And on top of that, given the keen\u00a0interest\u00a0I have in the commons (no surprise to many who know me), I was especially heartened by what came next:<\/p>\n There are many points at which I could begin, but it seems to me that an obvious one is this. The market alone cannot meet our needs; nor can the state. Both, by rooting out attachment, help fuel the alienation, rage and anomie that breed extremism. One element has been conspicuously absent from the dominant ideologies, something that is neither market nor state: the commons.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He spends most of the rest of the column expanding on what the commons are and why they have great potential now, a discussion that he ends by saying: \u201cIn other words,\u00a0reviving the commons can act as a counterweight to the atomizing, alienating forces now generating a thousand forms of toxic reaction.”<\/p>\n Then to close the column, he gives himself what seemed like an\u00a0audacious goal: to explore a wide range of potential solutions and \u201cstart to develop a synthesis: a new political, economic and social story that might be matched to the demands of the 21st century.\u201d I like that he plans to do this \u201cwith the help of your comments and suggestions,\u201d though I\u2019m not yet sure how we readers can contribute. I\u2019ve gone to his website, <monbiot.com<\/a>>, and found that interspersed among other writings, he pursues his large goal in a series of three pieces so far: this one, retitled, \u201cThe Fortifying Commons,\u201d as well as \u201cAll Together Now\u201d and \u201cAll about that Base.\u201d I plan to follow along.<\/p>\n It would be a good idea to look at every issue and every program through this lens: Is this a program that benefits us as a community, regardless of who specifically benefits more or less under it? Is the common good substantial enough to tolerate the redistribution? Can the redistribution be managed in a reasonably fair way? How can we talk compellingly about the common good?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And, a second might be a little more of a stretch: you made an appeal for a narrative that can be seen as everyday \u201ccommon sense,\u201d that isn\u2019t oppositional, and that includes \u201cplural stories,\u201d all of which reflect values that I associate with the commons. Both the “common good\u201c and \u201ccommon sense\u201d seem closely related to the commons.<\/p>\n Carry on! \u00a0I\u2019m so grateful to be in this conversation with you.<\/p>\n Anne<\/p>\n Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n Like many of my friends, I\u2019m still struggling to find my place in the political, economic, and social circumstances of our world today. What do I have to offer in building a \u201ccountervailing force\u201d?1 During the\u00a0week-long pause after the 2016 election, I and many others in my very blue part of the country, simply wandered…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-after-the-2016-election","category-the-commons-civil-society"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7pXN0-sV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1793"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4575,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions\/4575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Screen-Shot-2017-02-24-at-9.56.17-AM-crop.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Black-brown-puzzle-crop-3.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Black-brown-puzzle-crop-4.png\")
David Brooks, \u201cAfter the women\u2019s march,\u201d5<\/sup>\u00a0also made a case that \u201dmarches can never be effective opposition to Trump.\u201d Their focus is wrong, he says, and grass roots movements only rarely lead to change, the civil rights movement being an exception; most change is made through the Democratic and Republican parties.\u00a0He also says that the central challenge today \u201cis to rebind a functioning polity and to modernize a binding American idea\u201d\u2014a coherent vision. That resonates with the\u00a0discussion we’ve had of the need for reframing and for a new narrative, but his call for \u201ca better nationalism\u201d and one that balances “the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality\u201d doesn\u2019t work for all of us.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Black-brown-puzzle-crop-5.png\")
Even finding new language isn\u2019t enough by itself. New language\u00a0also needs to help us get ahead of the moment and take a deeper look at how we understand and talk about what we hope to see happen. In a piece in The New York Times Magazine<\/em> a few weeks ago, \u201cNegative Energy\u201d,6<\/sup>\u00a0the author, Beverly Gage, gives a brief overview of the history of resistance, and says that, today, we certainly have plenty to push against<\/em>. But what are we aiming for<\/em> with our resistance? She asks it this way, \u201cIf \u2018yes\u2019 seems impossible and \u2018no\u2019 seems insufficient, what fills the space in between?\u201d And toward the end, she suggests that we need to think about \u201cwhere we want history to go.\u201d I thought, right. Where do we want it to go? This actually lies behind much of my concern. And going back to our discussion . . . the language, the new narrative, the reframing needs to reflect it, the \u201cwhere.”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Black-brown-puzzle-crop-6.png\")
Then, in a recent Guardian Weekly<\/em>,\u00a0I found this: \u201cWelcome to the Age of Anger,7<\/sup>\u201d by Pankaj Mishra, with the subtitle: “The seismic events of 2016 have revealed a world in chaos\u2014and one that old ideas of liberal rationalism can no longer explain.\u201d One thing I like about his perspective is that it goes way beyond Trump and this election. It reaches 200 years back in time and outside the boundaries of this country to other parts of the world. Reading it helped me know that, If I’m to have any idea of how to move forward,\u00a0I needed a better understanding of how we got here and what we\u2019re actually facing. Mishra\u2019s piece gives me a helpful, new place to start. Although, as the Guardian<\/em>\u00a0says, it\u2019s a\u00a0\u201clong read,” it\u2019s definitely worth it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Black-brown-puzzle-crop-7.png\")
Finally, to throw just one more (much shorter) piece your way, I was glad to find a fairly recent column, again in the Guardian Weekly<\/em>, by George Monbiot,\u00a0\u201cThe case for despair is made. Now let\u2019s start to get out of the mess we\u2019re in.\u201d9<\/sup> His piece starts to give me a more solid place to begin. He caught my attention when he referred to Mishra\u2014for example, writing:<\/p>\nThe commons are so much on my mind that you won\u2019t be surprised to know that comments by two of you jump out at me. One of you ended an email saying:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Black-brown-puzzle-crop-2.png\")
<\/p>\n
\n\n
\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/cropped-9099-Logo-red_D-nick-squared-150x150-e1482614888138.jpg\"){kind=logo}
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"