The Power of Texas Social Movements to Heal Fear, Inspire Hope, and Build Islands of Sanity in Troubled Times, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Power of Texas Social Movements to Heal Fear, Inspire Hope, and Build Islands of Sanity in Troubled Times

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Nov. 1, 2025

I know there is a lot of anxiety right now in this moment of institutional unraveling. It’s hard not to be afraid or uncertain about what comes next. But I want to suggest a different way of holding this moment. I hope you take a few deep breaths, listen to my vlog, and get inspired 

In times of fear and uncertainty, social movements remind us that hope is a collective act. Across Texas, communities are rising—teachers, students, parents, organizers, and Indigenous leaders—refusing to surrender to despair. Their courage shows that democracy is not a spectator sport but a living practice of solidarity and imagination.

When we stand together, fear loses its grip and anxiety gives way to purpose. Social movements transform pain into possibility, reminding us that power does not reside in institutions alone but in people who dare to believe that another Texas—and another world—are still possible. From the halls of education and policy to the sacred work of land and water protectors, these intertwined movements embody a deep remembering: that care for people and care for the Earth are inseparable acts of justice.

These are the truths we live and build through the Texas Association for Bilingual Education educators movement, the Texas Legislative Education Equity Coalition, the Ethnic Studies Movement, the Mariachi Music in the schools movement, the Texan Genealogical Society movements, the For the Love of Texas Higher Education Coalition, the impressive youth movement of those involved in legislative battles, and the growing Indigenous and Native American movement—and many other spaces where imagination meets action and where love, courage, and community become the most enduring forms of resistance and transcendence. 

Transcendence. 

Isn't that what we all want?

Each and every one of us is entitled to a life triumphant—a life of dignity, joy, and purpose. And no one has the right to deny us of it.

As the writer and systems thinker Margaret Wheatley (2017) reminds us, our charge in these turbulent times is to create “islands of sanity” in the midst of chaos—places where truth, compassion, and shared purpose can still flourish. In nurturing these islands together, we reclaim our power to heal, to organize, and to dream the future into being. Si se puede! Yes we can!

Reference

Wheatley, M. J. (2017). Who do we choose to be? Facing reality, claiming leadership, restoring sanity. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

The Education Revolution and Our Global Future | David Baker | TEDxFulbright

This is a provocative presentation by Dr. David Baker Professor of Education and Sociology at Penn State University. Education worldwide has indeed taken place with many people now having access to it at an unprecedented level. This is good. Very good.

His goal in this TED Talk he delivered in 2014 is to underscore the positive, growing influence of educational access worldwide, particularly in light of all the "negative" portrayals of education. My main criticism is that he confuses "negative" with the idea of being critical of education. When we are critical of education, as I very often am in this blog, the idea is always to name and analyze the problem with the idea of improving it. This is clearly the same for pretty much everyone I know in my corner of the universe in academia.

That said, it's clear that education changes us and very frequently empowers. This last point he makes is the strongest. Countries improve access to education and while they appreciate expanding the knowledge and skills base of their denizens, they do not always appreciate that empowered people—and organizations and communities to which they belong, I might add—assert themselves in ways that challenge local, state, and federal governments. That is, they act politically, forming social movements and making demands. For Gen Z youth, they are digital natives and masterful with getting their messages across in social media. We are witnessing this in the Harris-Walz campaign as we speak.

A skillful youth population as a consequence of education and literacy is of particular concern to totalitarian governments. This then gives rise to such things as "Arab Spring" and youth organizing and uprisings.

What Baker fails to address is how the tamping down on these social movements takes different forms, including harmful legislation like book bans, school district takeovers, privatizing education, attacks on voting rights, and outright political oppression. 

To his credit, Baker does say that education is this two-edged sword. 

However, my concern is that Baker can most definitely stay in the positive zone as long as he ignores how the failure of lower-class Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth gets organized within our educational systems, albeit with important exceptions. Outright political repression when youth and their allies advocate for a more just world is also hard to ignore.

Baker seems to suggest that we should all simply be content with what we have. While I believe in living with gratitude, it's important to recognize that policy and politics play an inescapably powerful role in shaping education. Sorry, there is no way that we can all be happy when so much is at stake both for individuals and society.

I'm posting because I really do appreciate my global audience and think that Baker's presentation is a good launchpad for discussion on the meaning of education in your corner of the universe. Oh yes, and let's indeed be critical as we think this through.

-Angela Valenzuela

 

Taking stock of a youth movement’s gains, losses

I found this to be a really helpful piece, particularly in light of what very often feels like the slow pace of change in our social policies and in our practices, as a whole.  I myself find that public policy requires an enormous amount of patience coupled with continuing hard work.  I do like the view expressed herein that the pursuit of social change is an investment in our communities and in our future.  

What merits mention is that the very process of pursuing positive social change is actually never without an equally positive impact of, in this case, educating our communities on the combined issues of gun violence, policy, politics, and the role of individual, organizational, and collective agency and power in a democracy.  

So individually, we may not harvest the victory we seek even if collectively, we ultimately do.  After all, the seeds of change that these youth activists represent are the essential building blocks to victory.  It matters, for example, that the students successfully framed gun-control legislation as a "school safety issue," rather than a Second Amendment one.  To decouple these is an advance.

Social movements matter.  They always do.  Things will change.  They already are.  

In the meantime, we educate and sow peace and healing in our troubled world.

Sí se puede!  Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela
#SurvivorsEmpowered #NotOneMore

Demonstrators, many of them high school students, fill Pennsylvania Avenue during the March for Our Lives rally in support of gun control in Washington last March.

—Alex Brandon/AP

Taking stock of a youth movement’s 

gains, losses

By Stephen Sawchuk

February 12, 2019

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For Philly native Rachel Steinig, a core March for Our Lives activist, returning to the University of Pennsylvania for her sophomore year highlighted a stark contrast between her life on the protest frontlines and the orderly campus. There just weren't many supports there for student organizing or activism, said Steinig.

So in January, nine months after student walkouts rippled through American schools, the 19-year-old and a handful of her classmates decided to fill the void themselves, and launched the UPenn chapter of March for Our Lives.

In a few weeks, the chapter had amassed an email list of some 250 students, visited the Philadelphia office of Sen. Pat Toomey to lobby for a federal proposal to close gun background-check loopholes, and contacted long-established Philadelphia gun-violence groups, to ask how it can help.

As the anniversary of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School arrives, the efforts of groups like this one represent one of several possible answers to this question: What is the future of the extraordinary youth activism #neveragain unleashed in 2018?

Continue reading here.

Time for a New Civil Rights Movement by Dr. Gary Orfield

MAY 24 2018

Time for a New Civil Rights Movement

Author 

Gary Orfield

This blog [from the Learning Policy Institute] is part of the series, 

Education and the Path to Equity, examining 

issues of education and equity 5 decades after the Kerner Commission 

issued its seminal report on racial division and disparities in the United 

States.

Fifty years ago, a presidential commission warned that the country was coming apart, predicting that it could become two separate and profoundly unequal societies. However, the Kerner Commission’s powerful report had little impact. Its warning came as Republicans made a historic decision to embrace the Southern segregationists and create a new national coalition based on fear of social change. They won, and 1968 was a turning point.

President Richard Nixon was sworn in on a law-and-order platform, exploiting fear of Black violence, and quickly turned the Supreme Court around with four appointments. No Democratic president would name a justice for almost a quarter-century. The court that had helped spark the Southern civil rights revolution soon became the place where civil rights were interpreted away.

The War on Poverty and other policies in the 1960s to make education, health care, and housing accessible and affordable to lower income families and people of color were dismantled by conservatives. Efforts to expand desegregation from the South to the North and West became critically limited in 1974 by a changed Supreme Court. Reagan ended a proven program supporting successful interracial schools and asked the courts to end other desegregation plans.

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A half-century ago, it was already obvious to civil rights groups and the courts that simply forbidding discrimination could not change deeply rooted social practices. A conscious plan to improve opportunities and measure the results was needed. In school desegregation court orders, this meant actually assigning both students and teachers to populate and sustain substantially integrated schools—a policy that produced decades of progress. Plans for military integration, carried out very seriously after severe racial problems in the Vietnam War, were among the most comprehensive and successful. Affirmative action practices improved opportunities for people of color in education and in business, and Title IX opened doors for women.

The conservative movement fostered a belief that social policy efforts to change race relations were unnecessary and unfair, and reinforced stereotypes blaming minority communities for their own problems. In the 1970s and 1980s, a huge wave of tax cutting at the state and federal levels greatly reduced money for social supports. Aid to colleges was slashed and costs transferred to students and their families.

The American myth is that there were severe racial problems before the 1960s but the great civil rights laws solved them. In truth, while there was historic progress in dismantling the official segregation of the South, profound racial separation and inequality continued in the great cities that were transformed by the Black exodus from the South and, later, by the even larger Latino migration. Both groups faced severe discrimination and segregation. Warnings from Martin Luther King before his assassination and from the authors of the Kerner report about the steps needed to create equal opportunities for urban Blacks were ignored. A large drop in the White birth rate and a huge non-White immigration changed society, even as the tools of civil rights reform were abandoned.

This blog is part of the series, Education and the Path to Equity, examining issues of education and equity. More from the series >

Over the past four decades, we have seen steady conservative pressure to dismantle civil rights in spite of evidence that those policies open doors to opportunity and help build bridges across racial difference. Opponents argue that race-conscious plans are unnecessary or illegal because systemic racial unfairness no longer exists and that the appropriate policy for fighting segregation is to put pressure on institutions and individuals of color to change. Since 1991, the federal courts have dismantled systemic integration policies. Nine states have prohibited affirmative action. Compensatory social and educational policies have also been cut. As inequality deepens because of these policies, the idea that we are a colorblind society in the time of Trump and Black Lives Matter is absurd.

Because there has not been a presidential commission, a major new Supreme Court decision, or a major law expanding racial integration in generations, there has been almost no coherent response to the radical transformation of the nation’s population. We have failed to address the educational needs of the changed society and great financial need among the nation’s young.

Now we have two very large and seriously excluded groups, most living in families too poor to pay for school lunches, in a society with a massive increase in economic inequality. Now we live with a level of incarceration among minorities that is hugely disproportionate and destructive. The ambitious housing, education, urban policy, and antipoverty efforts of the 1960s have been long since abandoned. We are now dealing with head-on attacks on what remains of civil rights policy under a president who rose to power on racial demagoguery.

“ We are now, in key ways, in the worst situation for racial justice in more than a half-century.”

We are now, in key ways, in the worst situation for racial justice in more than a half-century. Almost all the school integration progress of the past half-century has been lost, and the gaps in college access have actually increased. Our president has reinforced racial fears and stereotypes, and we see many state legislatures undermining voting rights, school integration, and college affirmative action. The Trump administration is gutting civil rights agencies and suspending policies intended to protect equality, including those addressing housing and education. The administration has fostered hatred of immigrants and devastated Latino communities and schools with deportation raids.

The cohesion of our society is at risk. Much was accomplished by the civil rights revolution and we have good evidence about policies that would advance equal opportunity. Much more explicit and sustained efforts are needed. Serious work in the 1960s created a powerful agenda for that time. We need a new agenda now for a much more complex society, more segregated and unequal in some critical ways, and a new vision of integration in a century where we will all soon be minorities and have to depend on each other.

Gary Orfield is a Distinguished Research Professor of Education, Law, Political Science and Urban Planning and Co-Director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

An Awesomely New Beginning in AISD by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

			Today represents an awesomely new beginning for our district with our leadership making the wise decision to pilot an Ethnic Studies course in the Austin Independent School District (AISD) at six high schools beginning in the 2017-18 year as follows:  Anderson, Akins, Austin, LBJ Early College, Reagan Early College, and Travis High Schools. By Fall 2018, the district plans to implement it at all high school campuses district-wide.  Here's how the district officially describes it: The course will be a weighted credit under Special Topics in Social Studies. The course is divided into parts 1A and 1B. Students can earn 0.5 credit for each part. Students must take course 1A to take course 1B. An Ethnic Studies course uses critical historical inquiry to examine the languages, family structures, spiritual traditions, economic and social issues, political aspirations, and values of diverse groups within the United States. The course has the potential to reduce drop-out rates and provide a more inclusive and engaging academic experience for students, especially those who are at-risk.  An Ethnic Studies course can also influence college enrollment as increasing numbers of students experience academic success derived from an authentic connection to the curriculum.  You can read more about yesterday's December 12, 2016 AISD Board Session item on Ethnic Studies here.

Front, Brenda Rubio & Anita Quintanilla; Second row: Modesta Treviño, Alejandra Garza, Martha P. Cotera, Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Dr. Lisa Goodnow, AISD Trustee Paul Saldaña, Back row: María Hammack, AAABE President Patricia Nuñez, Dr. Emilio Zamora, Education Austin Vice-President Montserrat Garibay & Texas State Board of Education District 1 Member Georgina Cecilia Pérez.

There is, of course, voluminous scholarship in Ethnic Studies that easily tracks back to the Civil Rights Movement and the establishment in the late 1960s and early 1970s of centers and departments in African American studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, and Mexican American Studies, together with significant support from the Ford Foundation.  That said, I'm happy to share a few recent published, peer-reviewed articles that I recommend that you read:

 

Cabrera, N. L., Milem, J. F., Jaquette, O., & Marx, R. W. (2014). Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson. American Educational Research Journal, 51(6), 1084-1118.

Dee, T. & Penner, E. (2016). The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an Ethnic Studies curriculum. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21865.  http://www.nber.org/papers/w21865

López, F. (2016). Teacher reports of culturally responsive teaching and Latino students’ reading achievement in Arizona. Teachers College Record, 118(5)

López, G. E. (2004). Interethnic contact, curriculum, and attitudes in the first year of college. Journal of Social Issues, 40(1), 75–94.

Sleeter, C. E. (2011). The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies: A Research Review. National Education Association Research Department.   Retrieved on February 19, 2016 http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/NBI-2010-3-value-of-ethnic-studies.pdf

A few of us made presentations in this work session.  My fellow co-presenters did an outstanding job.  These were Edmund R. Oropez, Chief Officer for Teaching and Learning, James Maxfield, Austin High School Teacher, and Dr. Lisa Goodnow, Executive Director for Academics & Social Emotional Learning.

I was able to provide an initial layout, as well, on our nascent and evolving community-based initiative to grow our own educators and was pleased to see that it was well received.  There are lots of reasons why we should grow our own teachers and I've posted on this several times on this blog [keyword search: GYO], but what comes into real focus at the moment is that in light of the extant groundswell for Ethnic Studies across the U.S.—particularly in such states as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—we need to simultaneously address the capacity in the educator workforce to meet the demand.  I’ll share more details on this later as the framework matures.  In any case, it is very exciting and encouraging to think that we can couple Ethnic Studies (that already includes bilingual/dual language education) with growing our own critically conscious teachers to actually teach and expand the curriculum that we are devising.

Another possible merger that comes to mind is with the movement opposing high-stakes testing of which I have not only been and continue to be a part but which actually also led to the establishment of this blog back in 2004.   

All of our movements—Ethnic Studies, bilingual education, growing our own educators, and the high-stakes/opt-out movements—share a deep concern with the de-contextualized fragmentation of curriculum and instruction that has resulted in increased, rather than decreased, inequalities due to a test-driven curriculum that marginalizes both knowledge and children. 

Stated differently, we will never test our way to equity.  So now is our opportune moment to join the movements and re-make ourselves from within, beginning with an Ethnic Studies curriculum to which no high-stakes tests are—or will ever be— attached if our communities and movements continue to have a say on this.

Better yet, these efforts can work in tandem so that we can eliminate high-stakes testing altogether.  Please note that I am not calling for an end to standardized testing, but rather to position them as useful, albeit limited, tools when used appropriately.  Look no further than the testing companies themselves that say as much.  (As have many others, I’ve blogged on this ad nauseam so do avail yourself therein.)

There are always unsung heroes in initiatives like these.  I would like to do a shout out here to Jessica Jollife, AISD Social Studies Supervisor, who masterfully convened us with an actionable blueprint for the development of curriculum. 

Other wonderful members of our team are retired AISD World Geography teacher and Curriculum Supervisor Joe Ramirez, UT Professor and Curriculum and Instruction Department Chair Dr. Cinthia Salinas, Associate High School Superintendent Miguel Garcia, Texas State University Associate Professor of Social Work Dr. Raphael Travis, Jr., Anderson High School Ethnic Studies teacher Elizabeth Close, Cultural Proficiency & Inclusiveness Director Angela Ward (mi tocaya/my namesake), and Austin High School African American Studies teacher James Maxfield, and me.

Special thanks, as well, to Trustee Paul Saldaña for his leadership, as well as Superintendent Paul Cruz, Trustee Ted Gordon, Associate Superintendent Edmund Oropez, as well as the entire board of trustees of the Austin Independent School District for leading and expressing their support for this.

A final word of thanks to our community for a great showing yesterday evening.  Being present matters.  These included members of Academia Cuauhtli/Nuestro Grupo, undergraduate and graduate students from both the Center for Mexican American Studies and the Education Policy and Planning Program at UT, the Austin Area Association for Bilingual Education, Education Austin, and members of the Raza Roundtable for their presence yesterday evening.  It was also a special treat having Texas State Board of Education District 1 Member Georgina Cecilia Pérez in the audience.

I hope that like me, you woke up this morning pinching yourselves wondering whether all of this had really happened or whether it was just a dream.  We owe much indeed to our ancestors, elders, and intellectual forbears for keeping hope alive. 

I am confident that everybody’s love, passion, and commitment to a more just and caring world will continue to nourish this seed of a humble beginning into a force of good will that continues to motivate and inspire.

Sí se puede!  Yes we can!

Angela Valenzuela

c/s

#AISDproud

#MASforTexas

#MASTejas

#LibroTraficante  

@NACCSTejasFoco 

#EthnicStudiesNow 

#TxTABE

#ELL 

#criticalpedagogy

#AcademiaCuauhtli

#NuestraEducacionEsNuestraLucha

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

AlterNet
8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet

Posted on July 31, 2011, Printed on August 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back%3A_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.

Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”

Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.

The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”

The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?

7. Television. In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).

Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.

These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”


Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/
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How To Build a People's Movement

How To Build a People's Movement
By Seth Borgos
The United States is entering the fourth year of its deepest downturn since the Great Depression. The official unemployment rate is rising again, and labor force participation among many groups has plummeted to historic lows. A stillborn economic "recovery" has distributed 88 percent of its benefits to corporate profits and one percent to wages and salaries. The financial press is full of warnings that we have forgotten the causes of the collapse and are doomed to repeat it. Ordinary Americans, pollsters tell us, have little faith that the economy will improve, and attribute hard times to the misdeeds of capitalists.
If ever there was a time to challenge economic orthodoxy, this would be it. Yet there has been no effective movement in the United States to ease the suffering of millions, shift patterns of growth and investment, and make job creation a priority. Handed opportunity on a silver platter, progressives have failed to seize it. Understanding that failure is the key to reversing it.
Why no jobs movement?
The most immediate explanation is that there has been no mass protest by the jobless. Since the beginning of the recession, none of the pillars of the progressive community-organized labor, community organizations, civil rights groups, youth and student groups-have invested deeply in organizing the unemployed. Some online jobless networks have emerged, particularly around the extension of unemployment benefits, but they've acquired little focus, mass, or momentum.
Three decades of conservative politics have legitimated a radically individualistic ethos and eroded the once widespread belief that unemployment is a collective problem that society is responsible for fixing.
To be fair, the challenges of organizing the jobless are formidable. In contrast to past recessions, today's unemployed are widely dispersed rather than concentrated in particular industries, constituencies, or communities. They often hold themselves responsible for their condition and feel a strong sense of shame and powerlessness. Three decades of conservative politics have legitimated a radically individualistic ethos and eroded the once widespread belief that unemployment is a collective problem that society is responsible for fixing.
Moreover, the solutions to large-scale unemployment aren't obvious. There is no shortage of thoughtful and creative ideas for job creation: infrastructure banks, work-sharing, community jobs, "on-bill" financing of energy projects, worker-owned businesses, lowering (not raising) the normal retirement age. But none of these has captured the imagination of progressives, much less the public at large. Without a compelling solution to point to, it is difficult to sustain protest.
Behind this policy conundrum is a more fundamental political obstacle. Progressives generally assume that public concern about unemployment translates into support for aggressive government intervention. But the majority of Americans believe that only business -not the public sector - can create "real" jobs. A fundamental skepticism about government has led many to conclude that cutting public spending is the best way to create jobs, or to accept high unemployment as "the new normal." Winning policy change in this climate requires more than good ideas; it requires mass political education.
Without the reality of people in motion, it is hard to generate a sense of hope and potential for collective action.
All of these problems are mutually reinforcing. In the absence of a mass movement, ideas for change have little weight. In the absence of strong, compelling ideas, people lack the confidence to challenge ideological orthodoxy. Without the reality of people in motion, it is hard to generate a sense of hope and potential for collective action.
In sum, progressive efforts to promote job creation face a classic threshold problem. Incremental strategies-whether in the form of policy analysis, public education, community organizing, or local economic development projects-have a hard time getting lift off. The issue is simply too big, too baked into our economic and political structure. Only something on the order of a social movement can achieve the scale and intensity required to shake up the status quo and create space for a serious effort at job creation.
Pre-conditions
Social movements, by nature, cannot be programmed, but neither are they entirely spontaneous. As the right has demonstrated in recent years, certain activities and investments can foster the conditions from which movements emerge. These activities include:
Relentless outreach and recruitment: The current base of progressive activists is simply not large enough or broad enough to support an effective movement for jobs. We need to bring in lots of new people-hundreds of thousands if not millions-who are jobless themselves or passionately concerned about the impact of unemployment on their communities.
Americans have an intense hunger for authentic conversation about what is happening to their country, and a strong desire to work with others in their community to create jobs and renew the economy.
Creating space for authentic conversations: Movement-building requires opportunities for people to make sense of their personal experience, in reflection and conversation with others. Some of this must be in person, in small groups that offer diverse perspectives with sufficient intimacy to build trust. Online and social media are great tools for exchange of ideas and mobilization of people, but they do not substitute for face-to-face conversation.
Identifying and nurturing grassroots leadership: Social movements rely on a deep stratum of leaders with the capacity for autonomous action and close alignment on values, principles, and goals. These leaders often seem to appear out of nowhere, but they are usually the product of an active cultivation process that includes information, training, and political education. Like authentic conversations, leadership can be facilitated through online tools but almost always requires some "face time" and one-on-one relationships to thrive.
Developing a clear story: Ask a progressive why so many Americans are unemployed, and the answers one might get include Wall Street, free trade, corporate criminality, lack of public investment, structural inequality, bad schools, a flawed growth model, and much more. There is truth to all of these explanations, but they don't add up to a cogent story. Creating a coherent economic narrative means choosing some elements to highlight and subordinating others. The same goes for policy solutions-if the list is too long, no one will remember it, much less fight for it.
Building strategic alliances: Movement-building is not well served by a progressive ecosystem dominated by short-term, transactional relationships. Even when progressive organizations play well together at the tactical level there is too little strategic coordination to take on really big, ambitious projects-like full employment. We need to create deep institutional partnerships that build on the complementary strengths of organizations and focus talent and resources on the hardest challenges.
Putting it into practice
These are the guiding aims of a new project on jobs and the economy by the Center for Community Change and its affiliate, Change Nation. Through conscious experimentation, we seek to build a robust network of community-led "action pods" that can simultaneously pursue local job creation strategies and unite around a common national agenda.
At present, for example, we are using a movement-building model originally developed by the National Organizing Institute to train thousands of grassroots leaders in how to connect their own personal story to a broader economic narrative. We are collaborating with Van Jones and a host of national groups to develop a working message on the economy and a short list of demands for change. And in partnership with MoveOn.org and other groups, we conducted more than 1,000 house meetings on July 16-17 where Americans could meet with their neighbors to make sense of their experience with the economy.
It is too early to predict what will come of these experiments. What we have learned for certain is that Americans have an intense hunger for authentic conversation about what is happening to their country, and a strong desire to work with others in their community to create jobs and renew the economy.
Portia Bougler was amazed when 21 neighbors-ranging from age 16 to 85-showed up at her house meeting in Chillicothe, Ohio. "We had to keep grabbing chairs, but I was thrilled by what people said, their passion and commitment for change. Everyone signed up to volunteer." Similar reports came from meetings in living rooms, urban cafes, suburban diners, homeless shelters, and hundreds of other venues across the country. If this energy can be captured and sustained, we can create a national jobs movement, a movement of scale with soul.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/how-build-peoples-movement-1313718105. All rights are reserved.