immigrant rights – Gender Shrapnel

50 Ways Rockbridge: Three’s a Charm

(50 Ways Rockbridge original call for issues groups / December, 2016)

50 Ways-Rockbridge: Year Three’s Big List

I just found in my kitchen drawer a short stack of scrap paper, which included the original 50 Ways Rockbridge announcement to our local community. (*See the photo above.)

This simple, urgent community convocation seems quaint to me now—the result of nine or ten people getting together in the wake of the November, 2016, elections to figure out what could be done to combat what we were certain would be a series of unjust and inhumane statements, actions, and orders. The idea was to create an organization that would encourage the growth and de-growth of issues groups, whose specific work would be supported by all the people who constituted 50 Ways. A month later, we saw the mushrooming of “Indivisible” groups and were approached to sign on as a local Indivisible group. We did so, but maintained that we were actually “divisible,” that we were not seeking absolute agreement and harmony on every issue, but rather a willingness to research the issues, educate ourselves and others on them, and then choose appropriate actions to take at the local, regional, state, and national levels. Activists would choose and run their issues groups and seek support from the larger group for educational events, protests, and rallies.

The first year brought great energy, hundreds of people, and thousands of phone calls, letters, e-mails, and letters to the editor. You can see the Year One summary here. A local women’s rights rally, environmental protests, and fighting off numerous attacks on Obamacare stand out as key moments at which our entire group galvanized to resist inhumane actions and build community.

Year Two, summarized here, brought new challenges. People were tired. There was attrition. The “president” and his web of cronies were even bigger assholes, crooks, felons—indefatigable in their horribleness, criminality, and inhumanity. Some issues groups disappeared, while others become more clearly defined. 50 Ways shrank some, but also grew in its resolve and infrastructure. We worked closely with the local Democratic committees to get out the vote and welcome the blue wave of Midterms, 2018.

In this third year, we have refined our communications through directed e-mails, consistent Facebook posts, and, especially, an overhauled website. We continue to sponsor talks and workshops and to stage and support protests and rallies. Our number of active members is reduced, and so the quick, on-the-fly response to major national issues is at times less nimble. We have paid attention to what other resistance groups do and why, and we have enhanced our connections to groups like VARatifyERA, Everytown for Gun Safety, the NAACP (especially our wonderful local chapter), Al Otro Lado, and CAIR, among many others. We particularly like the Americans of Conscience weekly lists and broadcast those to our members. While we have disagreed on some major issues, we continue to take the time to talk them through and to understand others’ opinions. The gun sanctuary issue from just a few weeks ago pointed to major cultural issues where we live and also to the ways in which the national GOP ethos has permeated even remote areas of our nation. Following the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors vote on the “second amendment sanctuary” issue, some Facebook chatter shone light on divisions among us. “Why fight an unwinnable battle?”, some asked. “Why not always show up to suggest that another possibility exists?”, others replied. We continue to research, educate, and act, and we continue to be “divisible.” To put it in more academic terms, we encourage the dialectics of disagreement because it is in this very articulation of our hard-fought opinions that we show what democracy looks like. May we continue to do so through Year Four, and may we get out the vote for the primary and for the big show in November.

Thank you for the many ways in which you’ve supported 50 Ways through these three years. Here’s the Year Three “Big List.” Many specific events are not listed, but the major ideas are here.

Community

We have:

Brought together many people in person to participate in the group
Brought together over 600 people on Facebook
Sent out hundreds of activist e-mails (I’m looking at you, Sarah and Tinni!)
Collaborated with Indivisible groups across Virginia
Held group meetings, which have included visits by representatives, delegates, candidates, subject experts, and members of community organizations and agencies
Attended townhall meetings and asked tough questions
Supported candidates in our area
Participated in the CARE Parade, Rockbridge Community Festival, Buena Vista Labor Day festivities
Partnered with CARE Rockbridge, Coming To The Table, Lexington Democratic Committee, Rockbridge Democratic Committee, Rockbridge NAACP, Project Horizon, Rockbridge Area Community Services Board, Washington and Lee’s Amnesty International, ESOL, History Department, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program
Rallied for the Environment; Immigration; and protested gun encroachments
Overhauled our website
Collaborated on a broad Community Resources List, now hosted on our new website
Enjoyed getting to know more of our neighbors in a variety of settings

Issues Groups

Tracked our issues and exhorted, rallied, and protested, as necessary
Relied upon the excellent leadership of our issues coordinators
Sponsored 50 Ways meetings, including a gerrymandering update, presentation by the Tijuana/Al Otro Lado group, presentation by Rockbridge Area Health Center, an abortion rights session, an election panel, a mental health workshop, and a panel on past and present Democratic candidates from our area
Sponsored Earth Day Celebration and Walk (Environment), and many Environment Committee panels and series
Encouraged Get Out the Vote, especially through Plus3 work
Sponsored anti-racism workshops, three book discussions, Green Book film, collaboration with NAACP
Fundraised for Tijuana/Al Otro Lado immigrant rights work; Tijuana group talk; Edwin Castellanos Campos’ Tiempo de cambio community talk; Latinx Festival; legal path to citizenship work, fundraising, and follow-up; ICE education; protest; focus group;
ERA resolution in Lex City; Renee Pullen and question of rape kits for our area; Carliss Chatman’s presentation on reproductive rights; PRIDE Festival; non-discrimination; dress code; excellent progress at RCHS (LGBTQ ally week and transgender ally week);
PTSA collaboration; teachers and staff of color; recruited volunteers and experts for YAS Program at MRMS; Students of Color Club at RCHS; advocacy for fourth guidance counselor position; encouraged greater participation in and interaction with the city and county school boards
Work on Prison Reform and drug court

Resistance

Environment; Immigrant rights; ERA, gun lobby, gerrymandering, flipping VA blue!
Written a mission statement and followed it
Updated our website for resources and action
Maintained close to daily communications with 50 Ways members
Learned—a ton
Sent hundreds of postcards to our representatives and to fellow voters
Written dozens of letters to the editor of our area newspapers
Sent many e-mails and made many phone calls to our representatives
Accepted generous donations from community members
Survived, together, so far

We still have work to do for Year Four!:

Support our wonderful issues groups
50 Ways member survey and focus groups
Poverty issues and actions
Gun reform
Revive County Unity
GET OUT THE VOTE
And!!

50 Ways-Rockbridge: Two Years In

Our local resistance group, 50 Ways-Rockbridge, celebrates this Thursday its two-year birthday. We will celebrate with a simple party–food and dancing for any able to join–to remind us of how we continue to build community and why we must continue to resist the acts that take away our rights and attempt to dehumanize us.

A little over a year ago, I wrote this blog post to summarize the work of 50 Ways over the previous year. Today’s post uses last year’s as a launching point to look at 2018. I will make a few observations about this past year and then share the revised “big list” for 2018.

Late 2016 and 2017 brought on a necessary frenzy of activity, including: creating an organization from the ground up; learning to listen to individuals, issues groups, and community groups and sort through needs; communicating priorities; and showing up, time and again, to protest the latest affront to our democracy. The first year was characterized by urgency, novelty, and community presence.

This second year has focused significantly more on Get Out the Vote initiatives, thereby bringing our group closer to those of the Democratic Party. This tighter relationship caused some 50 Ways members to raise issues of partisanship, thus encouraging conversations about the identity of our resistance group, its ability to welcome people of all or no political stripes, and its message. We navigated these fraught issues through face-to-face conversations about which candidates can do the most good for the most people. We also sometimes shared frustrations and dissent through e-mail, remembering to allow for disagreement and to focus on mission. As I write this, I recognize that the 50 Ways Board members, whom I so respect and admire and with whom I’ve worked so closely for two years, might well interpret 2018 in a markedly different way than I’m doing here. Their blog posts would and should read very differently from my own. There is room for this, as long as we continue to resist the dehumanization of ourselves and our neighbors and the deliberate attempts to make our democracy falter.

Right now I have a stack of papers to grade, new courses to prep by January 7, and a long list of 50 Ways chores in front of me. This past year, for me and, I think, for many of my friends in the trenches, has also been about finding some balance between resistance and the day job, resistance and our creative efforts, and resistance and our family lives. I remember the moment at a recent board meeting, two years after our first board meeting, when I realized that we were all declaring ourselves in it for the long haul. That’s a powerful moment for all it acknowledges: that our labor matters; that our labor is many-splendored; that our labor bears fruit; that our labor is shared; that our labor mixes a strange cocktail of joy, frustration, and fatigue.

I am so grateful to all of the board members, issues group coordinators, and hardworking 50 Ways members for these past two years. Happy Birthday!

Here’s the “big list.” Please let me know what I’ve missed or forgotten.

50 Ways-Rockbridge

What We’ve Done So Far

Updated 12/11/18

Community

We have:

Brought together over 200 people in person to participate in the group
Brought together over 600 people on Facebook
Collaborated with Indivisible groups across Virginia
Held monthly meetings, which have included visits by representatives, delegates, candidates, and members of community organizations and agencies
Supported a greater variety of candidates in our area, including big mobilization for Jennifer Lewis’ campaign to flip the 6^th and Christian Worth’s campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates
Supported the revival of the Lexington-Rockbridge NAACP and supported Coming to the Table
Celebrated with the Rockbridge NAACP at the fantastic Freedom Fund Banquet
Welcomed expert speakers on a great variety of issues
Sponsored a community picnic
Sponsored 50 Pints for many Mondays in 2018
Participated in the CARE-MLK Parade and the Rockbridge Community Festival
Enjoyed getting to know more of our neighbors in a variety of settings

Issues Groups

Supported our subcommittees, studied the issues, and created talking points
Relied upon the excellent leadership of our issues coordinators (THANK YOU!)
Sponsored community events on excessive policing and on African-American history of Lexington and Rockbridge (Racial Justice)
Collaborated with the W&L Immigrant Rights Clinic and W&L ESOL to find paths to citizenship for Lex-Rock residents and ran a fundraiser for these efforts (Immigration Committee)
Collaborated with Project Horizon, CARE-Rockbridge, and W&L ESOL to launch the Festival Latino (Immigration Committee)
Supported the Law School trip to Tijuana to provide legal aid at the border (Immigration Committee and all 50 Ways)
Run a series of colloquia on climate change and celebrated Earth Day (Environment Committee)
Worked on The Diversity in the Workplace Jobs Initiative
Sponsored in-person protests and vigils for the Environment and for Women’s Rights, LGBTQIA+ Rights, and Immigrant Rights
Sponsored two “Farm Talk” events, with the second featuring Jennifer Lewis and addressing questions of farmers and tariffs (County Unity)
Supported our local schools through creating expert lists for enrichment, tutoring lists for after-school help, grants for public school programs, and volunteers for additional breakfast service (Mentoring Initiative)
Worked to create greater awareness of Title IX issues and greater protections for public school students (LGBTQIA/Women’s Rights, Racial Justice, and Mentoring Initiative)
Sponsored films (Environment, Gerrymandering, and Women’s Rights), ACLU Rights sessions (First Amendment), informational talks and panels (Environment, Gerrymandering, Healthcare, Immigrant Rights, Racial Justice, Title IX, and Women’s Rights), and workshops (op-ed writing, Twitter, organizing rallies and marches)
Encouraged greater participation in and interaction with the city and county school boards

Resistance

Shown up—to protest the pipeline, immigration injustice, gun violence, a Supreme Court nominee, and corruption surrounding the Mueller investigation
Shown up—at candidate talks, forums, and rallies
Held weekly, biweekly, or monthly issues group meetings and big group meetings
Monitored governmental corruption
Revisited our mission statement and reinforced it, all the while entertaining lively debates about how best to research, educate, and act
Created t-shirts, a banner, magnets and stickers to share the word about 50 Ways
Reformulated our attractive, lively website for resources and action
Maintained a large e-mail database for daily communications with 50 Ways members
Learned—a ton
Sent hundreds of postcards to our representatives and to our neighbors to get out the vote
Knocked on hundreds, probably thousands, of doors to get out the vote
Written dozens of letters to the editor of our area newspapers
Sent thousands of e-mails and made hundreds of phone calls to our representatives
Accepted generous donations from community members
Survived, together, so far

Family Values?

(Poster from a vigil/protest, Lexington, VA, June 14, 2018)

Last week, I was walking our dog past a neighbor’s house. I called a “hello” to the elderly neighbor, who sat in a chair under a tree in his beautifully tended garden, a garden I have watched him plant, water, and weed for over two decades. He said “hello” and then asked if I was a teacher. When I said “yes,” he asked what I taught, and I replied with the simplest answer possible, “Spanish.” “Damn Mexicans,” he said. I walked on, feeling shocked (even though of course I know how many people in this racist country subscribe to such beliefs), hurt (in a representative way, knowing that this comment towards me is nothing compared to comments made against others, which are absolutely nothing when compared to real acts of hatred and violence committed against real people), and angry (why wasn’t my dog pooping in the beautiful garden at that very moment?).

This little comment from a neighbor who I thought for years was a kindly old gardener should give us every bit of evidence we need that the United States has taken a more dramatic turn, almost two years into the Trump regime, towards violent, racist acts and, in particular, significant gaslighting effected daily through the fast-paced, absolutely wacked GOP spin-machine. The New York Times reports (6-15-2018), “’I hate the children being taken away,’ Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday morning in front of the White House. ‘The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law.’ A short time later, he wrote on Twitter, ‘The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda.’” The very next line of the The New York Times piece says, “But Mr. Trump was misrepresenting his own policy.” The GOP spin machine does not even realize how good they have it, when newspapers such as The New York Times continue to soft-pedal the language of Trump’s lies, which, in turn, normalizes his racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and blatantly anti-family platforms and actions. While Trump voters continue to sport bumper stickers that say, “Don’t believe the liberal media” and “NRA. Don’t let them take your guns away,” the so-called liberal media is struggling to keep up with reporting and rebutting the extensive lies told by this dictator and his kleptocratic cronies. (*See this 6-14-18 related piece from Slate.) The lies run so long and deep, and their reach allows the regime’s inhumanity to stretch to every corner of the United States and to many corners of the world.

I probably do not need to remind you that on this day, Fathers’ Day in the United States, the Trump regime is actively separating children from their mothers and fathers at the borders, placing children in privately-owned detention centers, and constructing an actual tent city for these young children left alone in western Texas. We see the news—not fake, completely verified—in every outlet and confirm the stories—that 1,995 children have been separated from their parents over the last six weeks; that a Honduran man committed suicide after being separated from his family; that a Guatemalan woman was picked up by ICE and deported, leaving her young child alone. These stories are heartbreaking in the aggregrate—the staggering numbers of separated families—and in the particular—each and every case of a parent separated from a child for a minute, a day, a week, indefinitely, and often at great and likely insurmountable geographical distances.

In addition, recent news from the Department of “Justice” reveals that the United States will no longer grant asylum to victims of domestic abuse or of gang violence. These policies demonstrate again the entrenched racism and misogyny of the Jeff Sessions DOJ.

The academic realm offers us many lessons about and depictions of the gradual erosion of civil rights and democracy. We do not have to dig too deep to find acute moments of U.S. history at which parents and children have been separated: the institution and business of slavery and separation of African-American parents from children; the creation of “Indian schools” to separate Native children from their parents and force them to assimilate into white culture; United States internment camps of Japanese individuals and families. This 2016 article from Human Rights Advocates (University of San Francisco School of Law) details the steps in denying civil liberties, which lead to the dehumanization, torture, and sometimes death of specific groups of targeted peoples. Chilling subtitles of the article include: “Arbitrary Deprivation of Liberty”; “Structural Violence and Discrimination”; “Degrading Treatment” (health concerns; sexual abuse; immigration workers); “Right to Counsel” (beware the officials who believe that migrant children make good immigrant rights lawyers); “Private Detention Facilities.” Note this warning by the authors in their conclusion: “Accountability for violence against children in these detention centers is difficult to achieve because the actors are private businesses and not the State. The incongruity here is that the government contracts private companies to deal with social and economic issues that are entirely the concern of the State. This unique task blurs private and State responsibilities. This issue should be included in national action plans on business and human rights in efforts to implement the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.”

*Consider the historical context of this 1941 Dr. Seuss piece and relate it to today’s realities.

Add to all of this the multiple reports (including this one) that Trump will withdraw the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council, and you find an even more deliberate and dire picture of the politics of inhumanity in these United States.

The heroic work of the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (CAIR), the thousands of Indivisible groups across the nation, and many other major legal and political resistance groups is not enough to get us away from this regime. We need Republicans—politicians, party leaders, voters, Republican-leaning people just going with this flow—to decide finally that it is time to express vociferously their discontent with the Trump regime. I know many of you. I am your neighbor. I am related to you. I work with you. I cannot accept that you accept this increasing dehumanization and cruelty. When will you decide that enough is enough? This is not just one person (me) moralizing about others’ lack of action, but rather a whole nation watching the corrosion and corruption of its high-level governmental officials, watching the erosion of civil rights and democracy, watching itself implode. This cannot possibly be what good people want for themselves and others, can it? This cannot possibly be what people mean by “family values,” can it?

	mayocke on ¿Quién se puede permitir el lu…
	Lesley Wheeler on ¿Quién se puede permitir el lu…
	mayocke on Systemic Means Everywhere, and…
	Lesley Wheeler on Systemic Means Everywhere, and…
	Systemic Means Every… on Cages, Criminal Justice Reform…

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: