Short, short version: Daily Shift the Country amplifying meetings start Wednesday afternoon (today), and run through the 2022 election. We’re intending to “go all out” in October as much as we can.
Register for today's on Eventbrite, or catch the recording on YouTube later.
Big Picture
The stakes up in this country are spectacular. Every day it’s more. Wider, deeper fractures. A threadbare social fabric falling apart at the seams. Threats of political violence. The rule of law dangling out over a canyon; as if perched precariously on the edge of a bridge that collapsed because the country won’t invest in itself.
To take the metaphors further, a friend today said this moment feels like how the water in the ocean gets sucked away from the shore when tsunami is coming; after an earthquake somewhere. You just don’t know when the giant wave will hit, how high it will be, what the tide will be doing when the wall of water comes in, and if you have time to get to high ground in the in-between. Last week’s non-metaphorical Hurricane Ian was so powerful that it reportedly pulled ocean water away from shore areas like Tampa — that’s not frequently seen when hurricanes hit like with a tsunami.
We’re in a huge moment of the unprecedented. It’s everywhere.
The scale and scope of what’s in front of us is daunting. It expands well beyond the catastrophic damage from one of the most damaging hurricanes to hit the US yet.
We don’t seem to be collectively taking on those daunting challenges; in any sort of coordinated way. It’s a problem, in the world’s most powerful superpower.
We’ve stopped solving problems. We haven’t invested in ourselves or our communities for 50 years; despite the wealthy flourishing themselves, and the wealth gap increasing. We’re falling behind in innovation internationally… even though innovation would help us survive more effectively as life on the planet intensifies. How would we expect to pull ahead again; when we’re decimating our schools, brainpower, government, security, and science?
The Time Is Now
Soooooo…. when do we dig in?
When do we decide we’re done waiting for leaders to lead — and do at least some of the job ourselves?
I’ve been saying we’ve been watching the country atrophy; watching small towns and urban areas fill with plywood windows and rotted rooves. I was corrected, though — because it’s not atrophy.
The US is being actively dismantled and pulled apart in many places. The growing authoritarian movement in the US is doing exactly what authoritarian movements always do. It’s further tearing the social fabric that allowed it to take hold in the first place. A growing cadre of demagogues continue to in-artfully fuse decades of resentment with centuries of cultural racism and bigotry.
They keep it steadily activated and spreading. The angry combination is a tool to seize power; by leveraging a hyper-activated audience that drives the culture war, the extremism, and the darker aspects such as threats or actual violence.
That movement is not atrophy. It’s not building, either.
It’s active erosion and disassembly of the institutions that make up our whole society. Schools. Standards for schools and for education. Science. Regulations. Building codes. Safety. Science.
Hell — we’ve even gotten rid of a lot of public health as a functional thing we had previously collectively committed to. We’ve got well over a million COVID-19 deaths to show for it. The deaths continue, too, because we’re under-vaccinated; and we’re not keeping up on shots.
The culture war is a war on huge key pieces of society that we’ve come to rely on. They’re getting dismantled; even as we watch in shock.
Are we going to counter that… or what?
It’s not just that, either. It’s all the things.
Our Fall Approach To Get Going
So here’s the deal. We’ve put a nonprofit together this year with a set of tools designed specifically for all of these challenges — because this threat landscape has been coming for a long time. We’ve listened to history, to science, to sociology, to mass communication, to disinformation analysis, and to homeland security risk analysis…. and come away knowing we have options.
There are things we could do to take on at least some of the threats and daunting challenges facing us. It will go better if we work together and start organizing a bit differently.
So:
Shift the Country is going to go all out to do what we can to get shift going this fall in time to reach and energize more majority coalition voters to vote. Help fund this shift here, or with a paid subscription.
The key ongoing action anchor will be a daily “amplifying” video get-together… where we bring people together to work on a particular thing for the day (here’s today’s). We’ll share ideas and inspiration; and hopefully we’ll help build bigger teams and coalitions too.
We’ll be doing a whole lot of empowering, too. It will be a bit different from other political work as we’ll be talking about how we can be strong and courageous when needed; and how we can anchor to our humanity.
This whole thing anchors there — our humanity. It’s time we go about championing that. We have such amazing potential to do and be; but also to love and to take care. It’s a time when we need to emphasize those values; and put less focus on personal freedom, security, and wealth.
It will be hard to make those shifts if we don’t start figuring out how to talk more about it, how to advocate differently, and how to do the transformation we’ll need to build a different future than the path we’re on.
It’s a huge, audacious idea.
It’s easy to diss it — to say it won’t work.
Yet… where are the national movements leading collective solution-finding and courage in this moment of peril?
I’ll tell you where they are: we have to build them. We have to take everything we’ve built together so far anywhere… do a whole lot more with it. We totally can.
It starts one person at a time. Then two people. Then groups. It’s bringing organizations together. It’s brainstorming. It’s creativity. It’s thinking bigger; and thinking differently.
So we’re taking the leap. Hopefully collectively, to a certain extent.
We think we can help. We think you can, too.
We think we can collectively put a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand of these efforts together by 2024 and beyond… and that we can damn well make shift happen. We’ll do what we can in 2022, so we can build on our successes for 2024.
For this fall, it’s starting with these daily workshops. Hopefully those will catalyze other events, activity, and attention.
The daily amplifying meetings will be announced regularly here on Substack. The full list will be posted on Eventbrite. You have to sign up for each one to join in, or catch most of the recordings later on YouTube.
Be well.
Keep the faith in this democracy, and in the humans that are helping to hold it together. There are a lot, and hopefully it includes you too. We got good people.
We are in for a wild ride these next few weeks and years — all of us. Doesn’t mean we can’t also try to steer the ship as we figure out the journey.