2017: Toward a Year of Resistance and Rising Up! DUMP the TRUMP!!!
I’ve been on book tour for months, and it’s not done yet. Going to Cuba this week, then Washington DC, Ohio, Boston, NOLA, and more. I call it the “DEMAND the IMPOSSIBLE Rainbow Queer Insurgent Road Trip Toward a Future Worth Having.” Onward!!!
It’s been heartening these last months to gather together with people in city after city across the country, folks who came out in large numbers—not so much for the book, but driven by the felt-need to assemble in an available public space, to face one another without masks, and to consider the fundamental questions once again—and with accelerating urgency: who are we? Where are we going? What time is it on the clock of the world? What is to be done? There’s a common and compelling feeling from north to south, from east and west that we must somehow muster and unite the disparate forces for peace and justice and liberation into an unstoppable mass force—a love army. Uprising!
There’s a wonderful bumper sticker I see now and then, sometimes in the form of a banner or a poster: “If you’re not pissed off,” it reads, “you’re not paying attention.”
It’s true. Opening our eyes, paying attention, staying alert—when we see the horrors and the injustices, it ignites indignation; when we notice the unnecessary suffering in all directions, it stirs a sense of outrage and urgency. That emotion is essential—but it’s also insufficient. Anger alone cannot create the society we need and deserve; fury by itself will not take us to the place we need to be.
So there needs to be another bumper sticker, right next to that first one: “If you’re only pissed off—if you’re not guided by deep feelings of love and empathy—you’ll be lost in the wilderness.”
Anger and love. Rage and generosity. Fury and tenderness.
Humanity—and the possibility of a humane future—asks us to get it right.
It’s our duty to fight; it’s our responsibility to win.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ~~~Charles Dickens
The US empire is in steady and irreversible decline, but it’s unlikely to exit the world stage, or to relinquish its self-designated role as the “world’s only superpower” easily or painlessly—this is where we begin to name this political moment, honestly and unsparingly, a moment unique in 2017: Toward a Year of Resistance and Rising Up! DUMP the TRUMP!!! | Bill Ayers:
