Take Action
The multiple converging emergencies that threaten to overwhelm our world are not your fault or mine. But if we don’t take responsibility, who will?
Thankfully, more and more people around the world are waking from the trance of “business as usual” and finding ways to speak out and work for change. It turns out that regardless of success or failure, working together in a worthy cause is inspiring, invigorating, and deeply fulfilling. And there are literally millions of ways to plug in, from small groups to large organizations.
In this space I will offer a sampling of options for contributing your time and energy where it is needed most – or at least dipping your toe into the current of change. I concentrate my own efforts on three particular areas (listed below), but I contribute to many others by signing a petition, showing up at a rally, making a donation . . .
Every issue is vitally important, and for each, one or more citizen groups has formed to work for fairness and sanity. Pick the one that calls to you and give what you can. Time, money, energy, creativity – it all counts.
To learn more, read my essay “The Community of Hope” here.
To plunge right in without further ado, check out the suggestions on the right-hand side of this page. Below you’ll find links to my own particular issues of priority concern.
Photo: Lorraine Fontana
Nonprofit of the Month:
The Climate Reality Project
This summer the stakes of climate denial are coming into clear focus: intensifying heat waves, wildfires, flooding and drought, exactly as the computer models predicted, only worse. When Al Gore founded Climate Reality twenty years ago, he chose an apt name – little realizing the organization’s chief foe today would be a president trapped in a climate fantasy. While Donald Trump tilts against windmills he pretends are giants, thousands of trained Climate Reality leaders are working hard to speed up the clean energy transition we desperately need, backed by a global network of over 4.5 million supporters. While other worthy organizations are working beside them, I’m highlighting Climate Reality this month because an anonymous donor is offering to triple your money if you donate before the total reaches $50,000. That buys a lot of tools and resources to tackle the challenge of global warming in an age of epidemic denial! Click here if you can afford to help.
To join the resistance against a totalitarian U.S.A., read these empowering articles:
From New Republic: “Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance“
From Yes! Magazine: “Activists Take Back the Climate“
“7 Ways to Rise Up Against Trumpism 2.0“
From Waging Peace: “Resistance Is Alive and Well in the United States“
HOW YOU CAN HELP
Sweeping the Midterms: It Takes a Million Villages!
Only a massive turnout and indisputable Democratic majorities across the country will overcome the Republican strategy of suppressing the vote and challenging the results. Here is a partial list of progressive nonprofits organizing to register new voters, protect election integrity, and get out the vote. Please pass it around!
If there’s a Democratic candidate out there you find particularly compelling, volunteering in that campaign is another crucial way to help. This is not the time to take the Democratic Party to task for its obvious failings; if we help elect their candidates, it gives us leverage over the future direction of the party.
Perhaps the most important action you can take is to persuade anyone you know who doesn’t vote how imperative it is to register and vote at least this once. If they don’t like what the Trump administration is doing, this may be their one chance to help stop it.
Read and sign these timely petitions:
STOP THE U.S.-ISRAELI MILITARY MERGER! The Israeli Defense Forces have killed over 1,200 Palestinians in Gaza since Donald Trump’s pretend “cease-fire” last October. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a top Israeli minister, wants to add 40 murders to that total every day because he claims, “They are not people.” U.S. support for genocide in Gaza has never faltered, but is now poised to take a fateful leap. The “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would merge our military-industrial complex with Israel’s, and eliminate all public oversight of U.S. complicity in Israeli military operations. Sen. Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition, and recent polling shows that strong majorities oppose the plan. Click here to join them, courtesy of Demand Progress.
STOP THE PARAMOUNT-WARNER BROS. MERGER! The proposed merger of entertainment giants Paramount-Skydance and Warner Brothers would combine CBS, TikTok, CNN, HBO, Comedy Central, TNT, HGTV, and more under the control of Paramount owner David Ellison, the son of Trump megadonor Larry Ellison. Under pressure from thousands of citizen lobbyists and petition-signers, the Attorneys General of twelve states sued to stop it. But the two companies are now attempting to negotiate a settlement that would let the merger go through. Concessions granted in deals like this rarely address the real-world impact of such a massive consolidation, and are often unenforceable anyway; taking the case to trial is the only way to derail this powerful new pro-Trump propaganda machine. Sign a petition from Common Cause to the Attorneys General here if you agree.
SAVE MAIL-IN VOTING – AND U.S. DEMOCRACY. Donald Trump voted by mail for years. Now he claims this long-established method of casting a ballot is somehow a security risk. Naturally the partisan majority on the Supreme Court agrees. The Republicans are plainly desperate to hold on to their majority in Congress – not so they can propose legislation that benefits their constituents, but so they can continue funneling taxpayer money to the billionaires that put them in power. Trump, of course, is panicking over the possibility of a third impeachment. Banning mail-in ballots would effectively disenfranchise elderly voters, rural residents, college students, service members and many more – just one piece of an overarching strategy to keep Republicans in power and cripple democracy in the U.S.A. Sign a petition here from Fields of Change to keep voting-by-mail legal.
PROTECT MAIL-IN VOTER PRIVACY – AND THE CONSTITUTION. Article I of the Constitution puts the states in charge of federal elections, not the president, averting an obvious conflict of interest. But all conflicts of interest are clearly in Donald Trump’s interest. The administration is demanding that every state submit sensitive data on mail-in voters, including names, addresses, and ballot barcode information, through a new federal portal. Postmaster General David Steiner has declared that the Postal Service – an executive branch agency – will not deliver ballots in states that refuse to comply. The Supreme Court has confused matters by lifting a lower court’s injunction against the scheme without bothering to rule on its constitutionality, even though in some states mail-in ballots start going out this week. Click here to customize and/or sign a letter drafted by OnePA asking your Secretary of State to protect voter data and to demand that U.S.P.S. do its Constitutional duty.
DEFEND U.S.F.S. RULES THAT DEFEND OUR FORESTS. The U.S. Forest Service has announced a proposal to end a quarter-century of protection for 45 million acres of National Forests. Erasing these protections from the regulation book would fast-track new road construction, logging, mining and other threats to these wild places and their plant and animal inhabitants – which of course is the whole point of the proposal. Stands of old-growth trees could be clear-cut and hauled away. Streams could be choked with sediment. Whole ecosystems could become wastelands. The profits of stripping our publicly-owned lands of their economic value would be added to private fortunes. Their deeper, truer value to American families and the generations to come would be tossed on the slag heap of history. The birds and bears, chipmunks and wolves are voiceless. Sign a petition from Environmental Action here to raise your own voice in their defense. They are counting on us.
SAVE THE WHALES – AGAIN. The Eastern North Pacific Gray Whale was officially removed from the endangered list in 1994 – one of the Endangered Species Act’s greatest recovery stories. But the Gray Whale population is now dramatically dropping again. At least 187 have washed up dead along the West Coast so far this year, some found mangled by ship strikes or entangled in fishing gear, others emaciated as if starved to death, likely because warming oceans and disappearing sea ice are disrupting the aquatic food chain. Last year conservation groups formally petitioned NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service to restore E.S.A. protections for these majestic and intelligent animals. The agency’s initial finding was due August 24, but it has missed the deadline. Sign a petition here from Animal Commons demanding that Trump’s NOAA end the delay.
And remember, signing petitions is not enough!
Take Action and Learn More
Our political, social, and environmental concerns are all connected at the root. I have concentrated my own efforts on the three areas listed below, Every issue is vitally important, and for each, one or more citizen groups has formed to work for fairness and sanity. Pick the one that calls to you and give what you can. Time, money, energy, creativity – it all counts.
Stephen Wing
Poet, activist and author Stephen Wing lives in Atlanta with his wife Dawn Aura and assorted pets. Read more about him here.