People Are Revolting
/I have a daily podcast called People Are Revolting.
I started People Are Revolting to amplify the hundreds of stories of everyday people who stand up for or against what is happening in their neighborhood, their town, their ecology, their nation and their world.
The podcast reflects my own opinions only in the curation of what I include and what I exclude. Why are people revolting? The Why matters. The goals matter. The underlying beliefs of the people revolting matter.
I intentionally chose the title People are Revolting for its double meaning. It is a fun phrase because it tweaks the language in a way that makes you think. It is not my original thought. It came from the title of a Jim Hightower album from 1995: The People are Revolting (In the Very Best Sense of That Word). Like the title, the content of the podcast is not original. The words are seldom ever mine, I rarely even comment beyond the news story I am sharing on each episode. But the twist in the title is important. Are good people revolting? Are good people opposing revolting people. Are revolting people revolting?
It is not only good people that are standing up and fighting back against the harms to their life or the lives of others. But it is those stories that I seek out and retell.
Often, Revolting people Revolt. I don’t tell those stories. The opinions of the protesters that fight to uphold and extend White Supremacy should not be amplified. They are among those lighting the world on fire and stoking the inferno. They are making the world a more hostile and unlivable place for others. Ensuring that some people and communities do not have the opportunity to be successful and live fulfilled lives.
While I find that one useful tactic for resisting those that choose to spread division and hatred is to ignore them, to deny them an audience, to suppress the spread of their ideas, that is only one of many tactics that need to be employed and by itself it will fail. Another important tactic is to counter their message with both a direct refutation of their positions and policies and an amplification of alternatives. I hope People Are Revolting serves to amplify the alternatives through the stories and words of people taking action
Our Social, Economic and Political structures have been designed to resist our efforts to change them for the better, to reshape them into structures that support all individuals or to replace them with ones that do. Our challenge is to devise the right plan to disarm the oppressive elements of these structures and the groups and individuals that support them, and to effectively deploy the right tactics and methods to fulfill that plan.
Ultimately, we need to deprive the individuals and groups who want to uphold unfair and harmful systems of support, of audience, of trust.
Often, those fighting to uphold oppression have identified real issues in peoples lives but have chosen harmful solutions and resistance to change as their coping mechanism. As such they are supporting the status quo and are reinforcing the systems already resistant to improvement. This is a great advantage they have on their side.
We need to make it clear to the widest audience possible that their solutions are harmful and that better solutions are available. This is an enormous task. One that we must dedicate our lives to if we hope to shift the momentum.
Our broad goals must be
To expose oppressive systems
To propose, build, and promote better alternatives
To discredit and oppose harmful changes that claim to offer solutions
Our tactics must be open and flexible and considered carefully for each fight. We need to make sure the tactics used do not compromise the goals of the change we seek. It is not enough to replace one oppressive system of control with another. There are no benevolent dictators. Violence has the greatest potential of disrupting a transition to a better, more equitable world. In almost all cases it should be avoided as it will decrease the chances of a better outcome. In very narrow circumstances in which people are faced with violence every day, violence may be a necessary part of the resistance.
Our goal on this planet is not to arm the defenseless but to disarm the violent, through strategy, not force.