civil rights – Treehouse Writers

It’s going to be Thanksgiving in the United States in a couple of weeks, and that got me to thinking about the people who worked hard and made sacrifices to make sure “we the people” means everybody. Given the way the current regime is trying to destroy those rights, it seems important to remember how we got them and what we need to do to keep them.

I’m thinking about these things in the United States because that’s the history I know best and it’s also where rights are under attack right now. But you can find similar histories in many countries.

Me, I thank the suffragists who made it possible for me to vote and led to many more women in positions of authority. That happened 105 years ago now, which may seem like ancient history if you were born in this century, but doesn’t seem that long ago at all if you’re my age.

I mean, my grandmothers were born before women could vote in the United States. My mother was born just three years afterwards.

I also thank the predecessors of the suffragists, the women who organized for their rights back in the 1800s, often working alongside abolitionists. I looked up the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and discovered that Frederick Douglass – who was the only African American at the convention – argued strongly for the inclusion of women’s right to vote, which was why they included it in their statement.

Douglass’s efforts in this regard are just one reason I think the abolitionist and the later civil rights movement were critical to rights that I have, and that we all share these days.

It’s not really freedom if it’s not freedom for all. The activism that finally implemented some of the rights set out in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments not only expanded the freedom of Black people, but expanded the rights for everyone.

I also thank unions for my freedoms. I’m personally grateful to the News Guild, my union, which enabled me to retire in reasonable comfort, but I’m grateful in general to all those people who fought for workers’ rights over many years, and who are still hanging in the fight right now. Continue reading “Feeling Thankful”…

“Be realistic. Demand the impossible.”

According to Rob Hopkins, whose book How to Fall in Love With the Future is my current morning read, that’s something people said on the barricades in Paris in 1968.

Since he quoted it in English, it must have spread far beyond Paris .(I’m sure even Parisian students in the Sixties would use French for their slogans on account of they are, in fact, French, and French people care about their language, even the radicals.)

It certainly reminds me of my experiences back in those days that we label the Sixties even though they extended into the 1970s. And it’s yet another reminder that much of what underlies progressive work in the United States (and other places, but I know the U.S. stuff) today is built on what we did back in the 1960s.

Part of the reason I’m writing about this is that I’m really, really tired of the “OK Boomer” nonsense on social media, a phenomenon that is inaccurate and ageist and shows a true lack of knowledge about recent history (which makes me worry about the lack of knowledge of history going back more than my lifetime).

But this is not a “kid’s today” post accompanied by headshaking and tut-tutting. From my perspective, the kids of today are great, and I suspect a lot of the generational name-calling is produced by bots and provocateurs.

It’s just that a lot of what the extremists running our country right now condemn as “woke” and “DEI” grew out of work we did toward making the United States a better place, and I’m damned if I want to let them destroy it.

I’m talking about the Civil Rights Movement, which actually started quite a long time before the 1960s (there’s some fascinating history of the legal strategies that led up to Brown v. Board starting in about 1920, just as an example) though a lot of things came to fruition then – some laws on equal opportunity and voting rights with teeth in them, plus some significant activism with groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers.

I’m talking about second wave feminism, which also owed quite a bit to the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I’m talking about Stonewall and the gay rights activism that developed from that.

I’m even talking about hippies and the Summer of Love and Woodstock. Continue reading “Age and Resistance”…