Tag: Democracy

America Collection/General interest
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Light Keeps Overcoming the Darkness

by Fran Johns

WE THE PEOPLE ARE HAPPILY BRIGHTENING THE COUNTRY, WITH CANDLES AND DANCE, SONGS AND JOY. AND A LITTLE LAUGHTER

Artwork by Laura Borealis (Used with permission)

Bring your neighbors. Bring your children. Bring your love for this country and let it shine.


This is my kind of an invitation. It was, actually, an invitation to join a recent event in Atlanta titled Unite in Light. Atlanta chooses light in these dark times for our democracy


Neighbors brought their children, and other neighbors. Children hoisted signs. Ordinary people came out for an extraordinary celebration, a ribbon of light stretching miles across the city from midtown to Stone Mountain.


“With our lights, signs and waves and the supportive honks of passing cars,” wrote one participant, Jane Branscomb, “Atlanta showed up for unity and democracy over division and tyranny.”

Jane Branscomb photo

Across the country in Seattle another group circled Green Lake, holding hands “in a giant embrace of our democracy and community.”


Melinda Branscomb (yes, they’re sisters) has a ukelele protest group, Ukes Uprising, which didn’t play at that one, but I’m told there was a “Dance for Democracy” group who brought music and danced for those encircling the lake. The whole encircling idea was simply to “celebrate the values we stand for with signs, song, and dance.”

Photo courtesy of Melinda Branscomb (far left)

The Ukes Uprising (above) musicians are not a marching band — though who knows? — so they station themselves, instead, at strategic points along protest routes. At the last No Kings Day, for example, they stationed themselves at the light rail station exit nearest to the march starting point. “Literally tens of thousands of arriving protesters walked past us,” Melinda recalls, “and folks smiled and sang along as they passed.” An estimated 70,000 singing, dancing Seattleites took part in that event.


It’ll happen again all across the country on October 18: No Kings Day #2. On the last No Kings Day in San Francisco — where people singing and dancing on the streets can usually be found somewhere if you just look — my new friend Tylor (“with an O, people always get that wrong”) was skipping along with his rainbow cape flowing behind and his Human Rights sign waving on high.

Author photo

Tylor (above) mainly laughs a lot — and it’s hard not to laugh along.


This is what I wish our Narcissist-in-Chief could figure out: laughing and loving, singing and dancing, holding hands — those are the ties that bind. And they will bind this country together again.


Officially, No Kings Day (there’s one near you!) is a peaceful national day of action in support of reproductive freedom, democracy, and accountability. A rally against authoritarianism. Unofficially it’s just a chance to get together with friends and strangers to raise candles, hoist signs, sing and dance and laugh a little. In support of a life-or-death movement.


Unfortunately, N-i-C Trump does not laugh. Oh, he makes unfunny jokes if there’s a barb in them, but his mama apparently never taught him the difference between humor and cruelty.


Cruelty never inspired people to line the streets with candles and song. Laughter overcomes humorlessness. Peaceful protest wins out over masked militias. Sometimes, in these dark days, phrases like these only sound like platitudes. But then the candles come out in Atlanta and the ukeleles tune up in Seattle and laughter ripples across San Francisco.


And democracy wins again.

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About Democracy Dying in Darkness

by Fran Johns

I’M LAMENTING A LOT ABOUT JEFF BEZOS’ WASHINGTON POST

Photo by Luis Cortés on Unsplash

First it was the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate, then came rejection of a great editorial cartoon, then the departures of favorite writers and columnists . . .

Those episodes were followed by the anouncement of Bezos-owned Washington Post’s new slogan, “Riveting Storytelling for all of America.” Reportedly it’s just a new ‘mission statement’ and not meant to replace the old mantra.

Which is, of course, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

I am struggling with all this. To be truthful, I thought that “Democracy dies in darkness” had been the Post mantra forever; only now am I learning it dates back just to the darkness of the pandemic. So it is hardly as archivally significant as the New York Times’ famous slogan,“All the News That’s Fit to Print,” which has been around for more than a century.

Riveting storytelling is great. Newspapers, though, used to be run (and written) by those who, above all else, sought the light of truth. Most of the writers and reporters I know, including some who have been with the Post, the Times and other still-surviving newspapers for years, simply want to find and report the truth. Without it, how does democracy live? 

I’m not canceling my online Post subscription, or the print edition of my beloved New York Times. (Yes, I’m one of that dying breed of readers of old-fashioned newspapers.) But if accountability being thrown to the wind, misinformation going unchecked, lies and crimes going unpunished and oligarchs moving into the White House isn’t darkness, I don’t know what is. 

Here’s to serious, edited and fact-checked journalism wherever light — and truth — can be found; may it live long and prosper. 

And may democracy somehow manage not to die. 

This first appeared on my new Substack page, The Optimistic Eye,  https://franjohns.substack.com/ where I post every Friday, mostly mildly political observations & occasionally reposted here.  

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Political Vibes from Brazil

by Fran Johns
Brazilian flag on blue background

A LOVE STORY, A FILM AND A FEW FEARS ABOUT THE FUTURE

(Warning: Sometimes I just can’t help but talk politics)

Photo by Samuel Costa Melo on Unsplash

A century ago two young people met and fell in love in Brazil, a continent away from their homes — his in Texas, hers in Virginia.

The story was that he’d been standing with a friend on a Porto Alegre hillside, watching the arrival of a ship full of newcomers that included a few fellow educational missionaries like themselves. And that he spotted her, a slender young woman with auburn hair woven in thick braids around her head, and said to his companion, “Saunders, I’m going to marry that girl if it’s the last thing I do.”

We had our own opinions about that story — my three older sisters and I — but we learned to smile politely and just let him tell it. The girl in question, who had come to teach music and folk dance to preschoolers, would answer our derision with her own smile and the response, “Well, that’s what he says . . .” Which may explain their long and happy union.

Remembrances are heart-warming; but reading about Brazil today can be scary.

“I’m Still Here,” the award-winning film by Director Walter Salles, has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film, with leading lady Fernanda Torres, 59, up for best actress and generating talk about the Oscars. All this follows a failed bid, a quarter-century ago, by Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro for the best-actress Oscar that went to Gwyneth Paltrow.

As I’m not much of a movie buff, what I know about I’m Still Here is mostly what I read in the New York Times: “Set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s,” writes reporter Ana Ionova, the film “tells the story of Eunice Paiva and her five children, whose lives are upended when the family patriarch, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman played by Selton Mello, disappears at the hands of the military government.” Ionova quotes director Salles as saying “The personal story of the family is the collective story of a country.” And this is what, to me, is scary.

My family returned to the U.S. for good in the mid-1930s, when I was not yet two (yes, I’m sailing into my 90s now) and the winds of war were stirring around the globe.

Brazil, though, was forever my parents’ happy place, Portuguese the language they spoke to each other all their lives. They had been young enough to believe their schoolrooms were helping make the world better. Porto Alegre featured free opera and symphony in the city center, and they made lifelong friends whom I often met in later years. Though the politics of the country were tumultuous — my parents were friendly with the good-guy/bad-guy leader Getúlio Vargas (whose roots were in Porto Alegre’s state of Rio Grande do Sul) — those were joyful years for my family.

What I remember about my father’s politics — other than his policy disagreements with Ronald Reagan, whom he dismissed as “that cowboy in the White House” — was his ferocious opposition to any electorate that handed too much power to one man. He had watched the worst example of that with the rise of the Third Reich (born the same year as I) and had worked against more than one U.S. politician who had authoritarian inclinations in the last half of the 20thcentury.

The political forces behind the troubled 1970s of Brazilian politics were concentrated in a military junta  (supported by the U.S.) rather than a single person; but I remember my father’s sorrow over what happened to freedom and democracy there, and his joy when the dictatorship fell and democracy was restored. He was then in his mid-eighties; he would go on to live, active and engaged, into his 90th year.

My father did not live to know Jair Bolsonaro, who aspires to be dictator of Brazil, and whose supporters stormed the capitol when he lost his last attempt to reach that goal. But I think I know what he’d have to say about Bolsonaro and friends.

I have beloved friends and family members who voted, in the recent U.S. elections, for the not particularly truthful or generous man who has said he would be dictator “on day one,” who demands absolute loyalty, and has been given extraordinary power in advance by the courts that he put in place. I claim no superior knowledge and do not question the many reasons why they, and a slim majority of my fellow citizens, chose to send him back to the White House.

But still. The spirit of my father is omnipresent these days. I remember the loss of democracy in Brazil that I’m Still Here is bringing to light once again. And I know enough about autocracies not to want to live under one.

America Collection/General interest
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Citizenship Can Be Hard to Do

by Fran Johns

ARE ALL BALLOTS AS EXHAUSTING AS MY BALLOT?

(All photos by kind Passerby)

Whew, it’s done. Dropped in the box at my local library.

But it took forever. In California we have, for instance, ranked choice (probably a good thing) and school board choices (tough for those of us long aged out of public education) etc, etc, etc. And Propositions. Propositions test the limits of fortitude. 

Propositions work like this:

Allow krill fishing off of Pier 72. (Yes or No.) 

If you really want krill fishing you must carefully also vote the right way on the next Proposition:

Ban krill fishing off Pier 71. (Yes or No.) This might keep krill away from Pier 72; you have to figure it out. Tricky, elaborate explanations run to multiple pages. It’s also wise to read who’s funding what. 

Still, we persevere. We rank, we choose, we study, we fill in the circles.

Democracy will survive.

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Robert Reich is Optimistic

by Fran Johns

(A third & final report on the Lisbon End-of-Life conference will be coming around next week; I’m interrupting that sort-of series to write about hearing one of my heroes, Robert Reich.)

Robert Reich 4.24.18Robert Reich, a giant intellect who is slightly shorter than this 5’2” writer, took the stage at a recent sold-out Commonwealth Club event. “You can tell,” he quipped, “that Trump has really worn me down.” When the cheers and laughter subsided a little he added, “Last time I was here, wasn’t I about five foot ten?”

Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration and, among other accomplishments, has written fifteen books. His latest, The Common Good, was published earlier this year. In classic Reichian fashion it argues for a return to “moral imagination” and the common good, and leaves you hopeful. “We have never been a perfect union,” he writes at the end. “Our finest moments have been when we sought to become more perfect than we had been.”

Respect – remember that once-common element of the public discourse? – was Reich’s first talking point at the Commonwealth Club. He spoke of the days when legislators commonly had friends from the other side of the aisle, lamenting the current atmosphere that makes it virtually impossible for, say, a Democratic senator to socialize regularly with a Republican colleague. Reich dates this change to the time when Newt Gingrich, the hyper-partisan, combative Republican became Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1995. He told of entering his office while serving as Secretary of Labor to find a group of people going through his files, saying they had permission to do so. “What are they looking for,” he asked an aide. “They’re looking for anything,” the reply came, “that they can use to get you.”

As a child, Reich was diagnosed with a bone disorder commonly known as Fairbanks disease, which results in short stature. Because this often left him the target of bullies, he sought the protection of older boys – one of whom was Mickey Schwerner. When Schwerner and two others were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 for registering African-American voters,  Reich says he was motivated to “fight the bullies and to protect the powerless.”

Asked to name the one thing he feels is most critical today, Reich says it is “to get the money out of politics. Money distorts the process,” he says – in what might be considered a mild understatement. Reich also told his audience that “the best way of learning is to talk with people who disagree with you. It forces you to sharpen your argument. You listen to other points of view – and just possibly some of them are correct.”

Robert Reich 4.24.18
Author, fan & new book

The anger he saw in places like Toledo and Kansas City when he was Secretary of Labor Reich says is still very much there. “People are working harder and harder, and getting nowhere.” Even as we bailed out Wall Street, he adds, people are saying “the game is rigged, and it’s rigged against us.” When he visited those same cities – and others like them – prior to the 2016 elections, Reich was surprised to hear many people say they planned to vote for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. “How can you even say those two names in the same sentence?” he asked. “And they would reply, ‘Either one will shake things up.’”

But despite being worn down by the present administration, Reich proclaims that he is optimistic.  “It’s when we are losing something,” he says, “that we recognize its value. People are recognizing their responsibility is not just to vote but to be involved. And secondly, I look at my students, and students from Parkland and Stoneman Douglass high schools (which drew audience applause.) They are committed, engaged, idealistic and determined. There are so many people determined to save our democracy.”

“Your engagement and involvement,” he said to a receptive and enthusiastically pro-Robert Reich audience, “is critically important.”

 

 

America Collection/General interest/journalism/Media/Politics & Causes/USA
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The Scary Danger of “Fake News” Talk

by Fran Johns

Fake news? The press is the enemy of the people? I am up to here with that.

newspapersDenigration of the press may be a way to excite some (happily minimal) percentage of Americans, but for all Americans – Democrats, Republicans, geezers, millennials and certainly everyone wanting to preserve our fragile, shared democracy – it is beyond dangerous.

I have been a newspaper/magazine writer for well over a half-century. I have made a lot of mistakes (most recently I omitted one 12-year-old from a list of grandchildren in a feature story; whew!) But I have NEVER knowingly written an untrue sentence. Anything not verifiably correct, furthermore, has been corrected by an editor. (We have now even cleaned up my act about the missing granddaughter with a follow-up story in the same newspaper.)

So, is attacking the free press just playing politics, or is it dangerous? Look at Turkey. At a conference in Budapest just three years ago I sat next to a university professor from Istanbul who said she could face arrest when she returned. “And if I were a journalist,” Demonstrations in Turkeyshe said “I’d be far more afraid.” Looking at the videos of journalists – and others – being led to trials that will most certainly lead to long sentences at best is a sobering view of where Turkey is now, under an autocrat (whom the U.S. theoretically supports.)

PBS News/Hour was recently anchored for one week by science correspondent Miles O’Brien, who has been a part of my family (it’s complicated) for more than a quarter century. I have not always agreed – familial love aside – with the personal choices this distinguished journalist has made. But I’m willing to bet he has NEVER written or spoken a knowingly false word in reporting the news. He is in a list of personal journalistic friends & heroes that include Roger Mudd, Charles McDowell, Belva Davis and a number of contemporary journalists – Michael Fitzgerald (Boston,) Caitlin Kelly (NY,) that list could go on. Not one of these news reporters ever has, or ever would, write or speak a word that was fake.

Here is what the First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free  exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Floyd Abrams
Floyd Abrams

Author Floyd Abrams was in San Francisco recently plugging his new book The Soul of the First Amendment. The talk, moderated by U.C.Berkeley Dean of the School of Journalism Ed Wasserman, involved reviews of cases – and they are legion – Abrams has argued, and wide-ranging talk about the freedoms guaranteed by the first amendment. But one opening remark, almost a throw-away, stuck with me. Abrams mentioned that President Trump’s comments about Mexicans, Muslims and other groups would be criminal in other democracies, citing cases in Canada and Finland that had resulted in criminal convictions for lesser remarks.

That, though, is not what most distresses this longtime reporter. I understand and appreciate the defense of free speech, even terrible speech with which I strongly disagree. (Think Westboro Baptist “Church.”) What makes my all-American heart ache is the speech that seeks to undermine our free press. If enough people can be led to distrust the press, an autocratic leader doesn’t need to bother throwing journalists in jail.

Think about it. Most reporters, commentators, broadcasters are fairly bright men and women who could make a lot more money doing something else. Do they go into the news business because of a passion to follow a story, to find the truth and set it free?

Or are they just in it for the fake?

Democracy is a fragile concept. After all these years, I hope ours doesn’t break.

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Art & the Protection of Democracy

by Fran Johns

Ward show w Fran
Schumaker with the writer

Ward Schumaker and Vivienne Flesher, two San Francisco-based, nationally recognized artists whom this writer is proud to call friends, have been fighting depression – to put it mildly – since last November. It is of course political – everything’s political these days – but for Schumaker and Flesher (who are in fact married to each other,) it’s about much more than politics. It’s about  human rights, the future of the planet their 9-year-old grandson will inherit, and protection of our democracy.

I met Schumaker shortly before the closing of his latest show at San Francisco’s Jack Fischer Gallery, for a brief talk about art and activism. (Sorry if you missed the show. You can still see his work at Fischer’s Potrero Street Gallery.) Does creating art help them deal with depression, I wondered?

Ward show 1“No. It’s just hard. But it’s what we do: get up in the morning, every day, and go to work at 8 AM.” Some extraordinary examples of Schumaker’s work were assembled for the latest show – creating them took about a year and a half, not all of which time was clouded in depression. My personal favorite is a piece titled “The cloud of unknowing.” Schumaker conceived the piece as a meditation, referencing the ancient (late 14th century) work of mysticism which suggests that contemplative prayer might lead to an understanding of the nature of God.

To mitigate their depression, however, Schumaker and Flesher are doing a little more than painting. They have created an assortment of postcards, some with messages on the front and some just featuring their original artwork. After printing out a stack of cards, they also printed out the names and addresses of every member of Congress, both Senate and House. (You can do the same, by following the links.) They keep these, along with a supply of 34-cent stamps, on their breakfast table, where every morning they enjoy coffee and The New York Times. When they find someone in Congress has done something positive, they send a thank-you postcard. Others get a card expressing disapproval.

Ward show 2Postcards take a little more time than a phone call or email, but are a powerful way to make one’s voice heard. Especially if one is worried about human rights, the future of the planet one’s grandchildren will inherit, and the protection of our democracy.

Plus: this is how democracy is protected.