There is an old children’s book about how Booker T. Washington built a school from fifty cents and a dream. I think fifty cents and a dream could be an apt metaphor for a growing stealth army that gains recruits from the disregard for law, ethics, and decency filling the daily 24-hour news cycle. Many feel a sense of helplessness in the face of armed soldiers patrolling peaceful streets and masked gunmen seizing people and sending them to hidden camps for deportation. There is a feeling that our nation’s values and identity are being undermined, yet as individuals we feel powerless and insignificant in the face of state authority.
We may feel alone, but we are not alone. We know others around us who feel the same way. Together we lament. Reeling over repeated assaults, only slowly have we begun to apply our knowledge, experience, and abilities to a new reality. Steadily we are increasing funding to support opposition in the courts, elect new majorities in the national and state legislatures, and sustain the arts and nonprofits that provide services for one and all. With every donation we reinvigorate our sense of self, channel our anger, and show our dedication to protecting each other as a community.
A simple donation is “necessary, but not sufficient.” Every organization we support depends on people as well as money. Early in our history as a nation, Alexis de Tocqueville observed our propensity to form voluntary organizations. Not by “blood” or centuries of living in one place, but by individual choice we organize with like-minded people to make things happen, enjoy ourselves, and support one another. Voluntary workers are the source of ideas and “hands on” participation that turn ideas into reality.
People with similar interests connect in churches, schools, workplaces, sports teams, clubs, and other groups. No two groups are identical. Some demonstrate and some distribute winter clothing, help at food banks, organize study groups, or host public meetings. Rather than acting in rigid unison, these formal and informal groups march alongside each other, multiplying in number and morphing into a broad alliance based on common goals and shared values.
At its simplest these kinds of coalitions amplify individual voices and raise the visibility of
critical issues in the cacophony of public space. In countries like Great Britain and
France, with histories of widespread general strikes, they have toppled governments,
and over the course of the 20 th century in countries like India, Poland, Argentina,
Columbia, and Peru, citizen led coalitions have successfully faced armies.
In the United States, the government has called out soldiers more often than you think. The military repeatedly chased Native Americans off their land. The army cleared the Mall of Coxey’s encampment of veterans demanding their pensions. Soldiers quelled labor strikes into the mid-20th century. It took decades before the Supreme Court vindicated the claims of Japanese Americans who were forcibly and arbitrarily interned under military control during World War II. On the other hand, in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson did not run for a second term in the face of opposition to the Vietnam War, and we peacefully enacted civil rights legislation and ended the fiction of “separate but equal.”
Our successes are more instructive than our failures. Opposition to the Vietnam War expanded from a student movement into a larger coalition. Civil rights became a movement for justice. Possibly, we are at the edge of a new movement. A movement for democracy that is inclusive and accepting of differences. Like Booker T. Washington, we have a dream. He had fifty cents. We have formal and informal networks. We have only to commit ourselves to active participation, and these networks will flame and spread like fire. And Just as Washington made fifty cents into a school, we can topple the government that threatens our rights.
Dr. Marjorie Lightman is a long time resident of Southwest DC.
