At a moment when Trump’s new administration looks like a threatening new totalizing power holding sway over the whole country, what if instead that territory started to become a mosaic of local spaces of non-cooperation at scales ranging from renegade states and cities, to neighborhood spaces we walk through everyday?
The disbelief, shock, and anguish that Donald Trump is now president-elect is giving way to waves of protests. Tens of thousands are hitting the streets in cities large and small, blocking roads, and rejecting Trump’s blatant racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.
Source: The Intercept
The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
On Monday, October 10, Alder of Madison, Wisconsin and Toward Freedom board member Rebecca Kemble was arrested at the Standing Rock Reservation where protests are ongoing against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Charged with four misdemeanors, Kemble spent the night in an overcrowded jail. As the situation on the reservation escalates, TF reached out to Kemble to share her experience and get her take on the significance of the Standing Rock protests.
Source: The Nation
Leer, South Sudan—There it is again. That sickening smell. I’m standing on the threshold of a ghost of a home. Its footprint is all that’s left. In the ruins sits a bulbous little silver teakettle—metal, softly rounded, charred but otherwise perfect, save for two punctures. Something tore through it and ruined it, just as something tore through this home and ruined it, just as something tore through this town and left it a dusty, wasted ruin.
This, truth be told, is no longer a town, not even a razed one. It’s a killing field, a place where human remains lie unburied, whose residents have long since fled, while its few remaining inhabitants are mostly refugees from similarly ravaged villages.
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
What if the United States went to war and nobody here even noticed? The question is absurd, isn’t it? And yet, this almost perfectly describes what actually happened this past week.
While many Americans, myself included, were all hypnotized by the bizarre spectacle of the Republican nominee for president, a US navy destroyer fired a barrage of cruise missiles at three radar sites controlled by the rebel Houthi movement in Yemen. This attack marked the first time the US has fought the rebels directly in Yemen’s devastating civil war.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019