protest

What Do You Break Down? What Do You Build?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

A week ago, I came across the call for an economic blackout from September 16-20. Someone made the suggestion that the real impact would be for as many people as possible to stop using social media for the duration because Facebook and Instagram and their ilk are also owned by the big-money folks, so I stepped off social media for the week as well. Yesterday, I talked with my friend and mentor Sarah Preston about boycotts and protest and change. Here are some of my thoughts in response to our conversation and this past week:

  • I’m not sure this particular economic boycott had much effect. Probably the more affective economic protest this week was the Disney+ cancellations in the wake of the Jimmy Kimmel suspension.
  • Sarah pointed out that writing to the company/ies you are boycotting to explain what you are doing ought to be part of the boycott. Write to Disney-ABC Home Entertainment and Television Distribution, 500 S. Buena Vista St., Burbank, CA 91521-3515. Perhaps those of us who can’t really boycott because we don’t have Disney/ABC ties can write letters anyway.
  • What do we want from boycotts? Is it just to force the billionaire bros to notice how they hurt the people by supporting an authoritarian regime? If we want to make lasting change, will a short-term boycott of the soulless corporations do that work? Likely not. They might have some excellent short-term effects, but in the long run, we have to have other tools in our basket.
  • Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Let’s get to thinking outside of the master’s toolbox.
  • The billionaires are definitely part of the problem. Also, their fortunes are made on speculative economies, of stocks and bonds and “imaginary” wealth. That imaginary and speculative wealth is certainly powerful in the world today, but what if we move more and more to economies that work outside their paradigm? That seems to be at least part of the intention of a boycott. But what if we began functioning more completely and permanently within our local economies? What if we did more barter? More gift economy? More sharing? More creating and growing and making? It’s all well and good to refuse to go to Walmart for a week or to temporarily stop ordering from Amazon, but what if we refused, en masse, to ever buy from them again?
  • Ugh. That means I have to find the will and the creativity to republish my books of poetry in some other format, instead of the Amazon-adjacent KDP. (Here’s another reason to join temporary boycotts, even if you don’t think they’re going to do much to actually change anything: they change you. I need to follow up on this.)
  • Also, when there is an economic boycott or a buy nothing week, consider local impacts. Instead of simply refusing to take part in any economy, use times of boycotting the billionaire bros to flood the local economy. Buy from local stores, local farmer’s markets, local businesses. Strategize more permanent change to working within the local economies. Let these experiments in shifting economic power become permanent shifts in your buying habits.
  • That brings me to my title: Yes, a lot of our work in these days is about breaking down. Breaking the power of the billionaire class, breaking the power of the authoritarians and the theocrats and the demagogues, smashing the patriarchy. But what are we creating to replace those structures? What can you and I do right now to begin developing the just and safe community-based world we envision? This has been a time of great network-forming, such marvelous web-building. How can we look to these webs as the basis for the future?
  • I admit, the networking and community-building can often be exhausting for me. I am realizing that I can be a part of creating and supporting and participating in the webs without it feeling like I have to attend every potluck and party and teach-in.
  • The social media fast for the past week has been good for my mental health.
  • Also, I have missed that web of community. I feel like my social media connections have been an important part of building the community webs I have been talking about here. But they’re all on platforms owned by the billionaire bros, and they support those very structures I want to tear down. I’m not sure how to shift this. I know lots of people have abandoned FB for Substack and others. I totally get it. AND–I am also hesitant to make that shift complete. I don’t do social media because of the amount of influence I can build, but because of the particular people I have connected to there. If I leave FB or IG, I may develop connections on another platform, but I lose the particular (and meaningful) connections on those sites.

I’ve been attending Menno Action’s Tuesday evening Zoom meetings called Courage School for the past few weeks. One of the images they keep referring to is the idea that we think of the power structures as a pyramid with a strong, wide base, impossible to break down. In reality, it’s more like an inverted pyramid, propped up by church, community organizations, schools, businesses, corporations. If we can begin to very deliberately pull out the support of those struts, the structure will collapse. So yes, I think boycotts can be at least a temporary part of influencing those props to shift away from supporting the empire. And also, we need to be strategic about pulling out those props, and using them to build the world we envision.

Let’s keep staying grounded, keep breathing, keep loving, keep checking in with each other, keep reaching out, keep building, keep nurturing, keep protesting. . . Breathe, ground, dance, hug, write, sing, hum, hold babies, paint, remember, tell stories–whatever you need to do to stay with the process, to hold onto hope and truth and peace and your sense of your truest self.

Rain and Reflection

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Welcome, rain. Welcome, dawn on this chilly morning. Welcome, work of the day, of the weekend. Welcome, time yet to come when the work is done. Welcome, clean new pages to write my next chapter.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s dawn. It began as we pulled out of the driveway, with pink streaks on the horizon over Spicher’s field. On the way to pick up our car pool, we passed the small paddock where two mountainously fluffy sheep graze, and the sky was beginning to glow gently magenta against the woolly clouds, the grass a green almost glowing. The River, as we crossed, flowed pink beneath the old bridge to the south, and the lamps were still twinkling along its span. By the time we reached school, the sky colors had shifted out of indigos and violets and pinks, to tangerine, and rays of coming sun shot upward through the low-flung clouds.
2. Rain and reflections on a Saturday morning
3. People who stand up for peace
4. People who stand up to bullying behavior
5. Poetry

May we walk in Beauty!

War Is Not the Answer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment
Wage Peace, spelled out in vegetables.

While the saber-rattlers practice their stern faces in mirrors,
we gather our children and see the reflections
of the eyes of mothers on the other side of endless wars,
holding their children to their own hearts.

While the war profiteers add up their numbers,
we count too, numbering our young people,
knowing that somewhere, in that distant land,
other mothers pull sons and daughters
away from that red line in the sand,
other teachers are doing the math
of the beloved scholars ripening
to the age of soldier.

We know, as those others know,
that collateral damage means someone’s child,
someone’s empty arms, someone’s heart torn apart.
We know that the men who make war,
the maestros who orchestrate the grand drama,
are not the ones who do the war,
are not the ones who live it.

We know, as the women of Iran know,
as the war-makers can never seem to understand,
that every casualty has a mother.

Gratitude List:
1. That quiet doe who slipped across the road in yesterday’s headlights, reminding me of shy tenderness, of the need to take great care in all things, to pay attention.
2. The people of Lancaster, standing in the freezing cold, holding up the hope of peace between nations. Young and old, and everyone’s toes like ice, but hearts warm and determined.
3. Doing the last-minute hopeful tweaks on second-semester classes. I love jumping in to second semester, despite the stress of the overlay of first semester’s finish on second semester’s start. Tabula rasa. Anything can be.
4. Last night I heard a story of a former student (before my time here) whose family has recently been reaching out to the school to share how much the school helped to shape–in often quiet and seemingly small respects–the life of their son. I’m grateful for all the ways in which the little things we do for each other open us to deeper connection–in ways we might not always be able to express.
5. The shine of snow-covered landscapes. Winter is not simply dark and drear. Some days, it dazzles!

May we walk in Beauty!

We Do Not Have to Be Slaves to the Machine

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Second post of Two Today:

There’s so much to be angry about–despairing about, frustrated about–in these days. Why not stage your own protest? Begin with Black Friday and the Christmas/Yule holidays that approach.

Protest the Big Corporations and the 1% by buying your gifts from small stores, from Makers and Creators, people who lovingly craft items of beauty and usefulness.

Protest the racists and white nationalists who have been crawling out of the woodwork by buying your gifts from businesses owned and operated by people of color.

Protest the sexism and predation of the patriarchs by buying your gifts from women-run businesses.

Protest the consumerism of the season by taking your loved ones out to eat at local restaurants run by women, or people of color, or immigrants.

Donate to an organization that causes good things to happen in the world by donating to a cause that stands in the face of that which causes you pain. Donate in the names of your loved ones and make that a gift. Sit together at the Thanksgiving tables and talk about what organizations you as a community/family/tribe can contribute to together.

Volunteer, donate your time, take the little ones on a nature walk, or color together. Play games together. Make art. Write stories and poems together.

Share your dreams and your hopes with each other. Read each other your favorite poems. Tell stories. Listen. Make this coming holiday season about connection, about working together to create the future we envision.

In our family, the children have certain expectations of particular gifts, and we will probably fulfill certain of their desires, but I want to do it in the context of open awareness of who and what we support.

We do not have to be slaves to the machine.

Protectors

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

creative-writing

Do you feel it? How this growing resistance is drawing energy from a heart-source as it gains momentum? Oh, the anger and the rage are there, the ranting and the complaining (and I don’t deny my own participate in that), but there’s also the call to love and prayer. People are following the call of our recent First Lady to go high when they go low.

The doors of this movement were opened by the Standing Rock Water Protectors, who stood their ground with prayerfulness and love–who still hold that space today despite continued brutality. As we move into these next weeks and months, with the constant news of some new slap in the face of justice and equality for all people, perhaps we, too, can take the name Protectors. Perhaps the protest of the day is Protection.

With the Standing Rock folks, we protect the waters, protect the earth. We protect the vulnerable displace people who are seeking asylum and new life here. We protect our neighbors of all races when they feel threatened. We protect our Muslim neighbors, our Jewish neighbors, our atheist neighbors, no matter their stance on religion. We protect our LGBTQI neighbors. We protect the children and their hope for education.

I keep getting mired in this not-knowingness–not knowing how to respond, how to protest, how to stand in the gap. Still, it helps to choose a name, an identity for the journey: Protector. Protection will not always mean quiet waiting. Sometimes it will require active resistance. Other times, it will require deep inner work to hold the safe spaces. May we be Protectors.

Gratitude List:
1. Protectors
2. Advocates
3. Contemplatives
4. Activists
5. Artists and Poets and Dreamers

May we walk in Beauty!