Tag Archives: writing

Two Flags Flying

Future Hope, , , ,

For the last month or so there have been two small flags flying prominently outside the front door my and my wife’s house. One is an American flag, the other the Palestinian flag.

In the 46 years that Jane and I have been married we’ve never done anything like this. We’ve had issue-oriented signs in our front yard, and we’ve had Bernie, renewable energy, peace and other bumper stickers on the back of our car, but we’ve never flown flags where we’ve lived.

We’re flying the Palestinian flag because for over two years, since the terrible October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and, afterwards, the hugely more terrible, genocidal attack on all of Gaza by the Netanyahu government, we have demonstrated almost every week in a nearby town calling for a ceasefire, an end to US military support of Israel and justice for the Palestinian people.

For those who know us, it isn’t a surprise that we’re doing this.

But flying the American flag? For a very long time we’ve not done so largely because, going back to the Vietnam War days, we have seen that it has been right-wingers and conservatives who primarily use that flag to advance often-racist and imperialist agendas. And it’s definitely the case that, historically, when the US has engaged in military campaigns against Indigenous nations or in overseas, imperialist military campaigns going back to 1898, the US flag has been there.

The US flag now flying outside our door was likely given to us by someone at the October 18 No Kings action which we helped to organize in our town, after we came back from our trip this summer to Montana to visit our grandson, son and daughter-in-law. We left home in mid-July and came back eight weeks later, in September.

We got to Montana by driving our all-electric, 2018 Chevrolet Bolt out and back, close to a 5,000 mile round trip. Here is how I described our reasons for doing so and what we learned from it in a past Future Hope column:

“One of the reasons we decided to travel this way was to experience very directly areas of the country we had never been to or not been to for a long time. We hoped all would go well mechanically, as well as our interactions with people along the way as we stopped to charge the car, camp or stay overnight in motels, eat in restaurants, get food and drink during rest stops and then, in southwest Montana, interact with others for the five weeks we were there.

“I returned with a lot more hope about this country than I had before this trip. In the 12 states we went through or spent time in, most of them “red” or “purple,” we saw and heard very few signs of much support for Trump and his authoritarian government. I would estimate that, in all those eight weeks and thousands of miles, we saw no more than a dozen Trump signs and even fewer Trump hats or t-shirts being worn. People overwhelmingly were polite to us, as we were to them. There was virtually no evidence from these very many brief encounters that the USA at the grassroots has become a nasty, brutish, mean place.

“I am sure that if we had gotten into ideological/political discussions with the people we interacted with, most of them of European descent, there would have been some disagreements and tensions, but my sense is that, even when that were true, there would have been some points of agreement to be found.”

It was a hopeful trip. And the election results over the past month in many parts of the country, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, California and elsewhere, all of which showed a definite and significant shift away from the Trumpists, confirmed what we experienced.

Indiana was one of the states we went through, one of the most conservative of the northern US states. 80% of the members of the Indiana state senate are Republicans. But just a few days ago half of those Republicans, 20 out of 50 Senators in total, voted down a Trump-pushed plan to gerrymander US Congressional districts so that all nine of them would end up having Republican US House members after the November elections. Politically, this was huge, the latest sign that more and more Trump supporters are alienated by this would-be dictator and are willing to stand up to him publicly.

There are lots of reasons to believe that, if we all keep working and organizing day after day, increasingly united, 2026 will be a huge year, a clear and powerful repudiation of the Trumpists and their billionaire enablers.

 Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org . More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.

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Pope Francis: Smile, and Tell Jokes

Future Hope, , , ,

(The column below was written by me in 2018 after watching a promotional movie about Pope Francis. Over the years since, his unexpected concluding message in that movie is something I have come to believe in very strongly. The message? A smile and a sense of humor are essential elements for a person who wants to live a positive, impactful life, a life of love.

(Fellow Argentinian Che Guevera had something to say about love: “the true revolutionary is motivated by a great feeling of love.” And accounts by those who knew him indicate that, indeed, Che had a ready smile and a sense of humor. [1])

Oppression Is Not a Laughing Matter – Or Is It?

“Grant me, O Lord, good digestion, and also something to digest.
Grant me a healthy body, and the necessary good humor to maintain it.
Grant me a simple soul that knows to treasure all that is good
and that doesn’t frighten easily at the sight of evil,
but rather finds the means to put things back in their place.
Give me a soul that knows not boredom, grumblings, sighs and laments,
nor excess of stress, because of that obstructing thing called “I.”
Grant me, O Lord, a sense of good humor.
Allow me the grace to be able to take a joke to discover in life a bit of joy,
and to be able to share it with others.”
–Sir Thomas More, “Prayer for Good Humor,” early 1500’s

Last evening my wife and I watched the 2018 movie, “Pope Francis, A Man of His Word.”  It is not a critical look at the Pope, or an objective assessment of his strengths and weaknesses and what he has so far accomplished. It is an unabashed presentation of the Pope as a great man, a moral leader of the world, essentially a saint.

The ending surprised me. After an hour and a half of footage of him speaking and interacting with people all over the world, sharing his thinking and his prayers and his unquestionably genuine concern for “the least of these,” the poor, the final minute finds him talking about two things: the value of a smile and the importance of a sense of humor. Pope Francis tells the camera that just about every day he reads Sir Thomas More’s poem quoted above.

I was struck by the Pope doing this. Is he right that smiling and a sense of humor are so important?

I think there are a lot of people on the political Left who don’t agree with this. I know a whole bunch of them. They are the way I tend to be: very upset with the reality of the world in the grip of a mendacious and maddening, mega-corporation dominated capitalist system that is literally destroying the world’s ecosystems and causing uncountable suffering. How can one make jokes and be concerned about having a sense of humor in such a world?

When I was young I didn’t tell jokes. I didn’t laugh very much. I was very intense, I took myself and my beliefs very seriously. I remember once speaking at Boston College during the time of the Vietnam War and challenging those hearing me to put their lives on the line for change because we needed it so badly. I don’t know if I got through to many people listening to me; my sense at the time was that I hadn’t.

Actually, I still say similar things in my speaking and writing today, 50 years later, but over that time I’ve come to appreciate that this kind of intensity has its limitations. For example, I’ve come to appreciate the value of effective political satire which, by making fun of oppressors, exposes them in a way that can have more of an impact upon the listener than harsh, angry words.

More than that, I’ve learned that, as More points out in the line above -–“Give me a soul that knows not boredom, grumblings, sighs and laments, nor excess of stress, because of that obstructing thing called ‘I,’” — that taking oneself too seriously can lead down a very slippery and self-destructive slope.

A week and a half ago I spoke at a New Jersey activists’ climate conference. I began with one of my favorite inspirational writings, a poem by Chief Yellow Lark, “Let Me Walk in Beauty,” found in the book, “God Makes the Rivers to Flow: Sacred literature of the world,” by Eknath Easwaran. A key line in this poem is similar to More’s (or More’s is similar to his): “”I seek strength not to be greater than my brother or sister but to fight my greatest enemy, myself.”

It’s no joke; it’s a fact: sharing genuine smiles with one another and being able to laugh in the face of oppression and injustice are essential components of building a winning movement.

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist, organizer and writer since 1968. Past writings and other information can be found at https://tedglick.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jtglick.

1–“Having heard so much about Guevara—his bravery, his fierce determination, his radical beliefs, his ferocity in argument, and his dominating, ruthless style of leadership—I was totally unprepared for the man. Not surprisingly, he was wearing faded army fatigues and a big white straw hat, but I was surprised to discover that he was my own age—thirty-five—and that he was charming and gentle of manner. He had soft brown eyes and a shy smile on his bearded face, and as we talked he revealed a delightfully self-deprecatory sense of humor. He looked to me like a twinkly-eyed Clark Gable with a cigar in his mouth.” 
– https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/06/beautiful-revolutionary-che-guevara-remembered/