Was just reading No Is Not Enough, by Naomi Klein
She describes the feelings most of us had in the days after the election and how much more difficult it seemed even than now to find common ground and to listen, and how this was playing out among, in this case, people who had joined the encampment at Standing Rock:
Amidst the tears and the sage smoke, we felt the touch of history. And something else, too: a way to deal with the rage and grief that went beyond venting. So soon after such a divisive, crude election, it came as a tremendous relief. For weeks, the screens that occupy too much of my life had been engulfed in that unrelenting rage, and in angry circular debates about who, or what, was the one and only true cause of the mess we were now in. Trump won because of the racism of America-end of the discussion some said. No, he didn’t, it was the elitism of the corporate Dems-Bernie would have fixed everything, others roared. No, he won because of capitalism, the issue above all others-racism and white supremacy are a sideshow. No, it was the fossil fuel industry, determined to suck out their last mega-profits, regardless of how much they destabilized the earth. Plenty of good points were made, but it was striking that the goal was rarely to change minds or to find common ground. The goal was to win the argument.
She follows this with a huge collective breakthrough everyone there had(boldface added):
And then, within minutes, all that venom dried up. Those battles suddenly made as little sense as putting an oil pipeline under this community’s drinking water source-a pipeline that was originally supposed to pass though the majority-white city of Bismarck, where it was widely rejected over concerns about safety. In the camps, surrounded by people who had been fighting the most powerful industries on earth, the idea that there was any competition between these issues just dropped away. In Standing Rock, it was just so clear that it was all of it, a single system. It was ecocidal capitalism that was determined to ram that pipeline through the Missouri River-consent and climate change be damned. It was searing racism that made it possible to do in Standing Rock what was deemed impossible in Bismarck, and to treat water protectors as pests to be blasted away with water cannons in frigid weather. Modern capitalism, white supremacy and fossil fuels were strands of the same braid, inseparable. And they were all woven together here, on this patch of frozen land.
I think there is something in what Klein writes about here that is of use to us, as we try to move forward and win the future.
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