By Dennis Loo, World Can’t Wait Steering Committee
The
main audience for our Declare It Now campaign isn’t the Democratic Party and it
isn’t the mass media. The main audience
for Declare It Now is the people themselves. People taking up orange and
wearing it DAILY is designed to be both a statement against all of the horrid
things that this regime is responsible for AND a statement to the rest of the
people.
It’s designed to provide people a vehicle to express their
too long suppressed sentiments and to bring to life the people’s political
potential. It’s designed to bring home to people the fact that we are the
majority and it will be you and I and the rest of us in our millions who will
make history, not the criminal president and vice-president, not the culpable
and complicit Congress and the Democratic Party leadership, and not the
corporate media who are largely merely the scribes to power.
There is the
dimension of the Declare It Now campaign having as its audience the political
establishment and the mass media. But that’s not our principle target right
now. We have to rely on the people to
take this up in their daily lives and through their networks and drawing upon
their own creativity. We cannot by ourselves (i.e., WCW activists and other
impeachment activists) bring forward the millions that we need. Others out
there in society who are not now active and not active enough must be the
primary carriers of the word to those millions. This isn’t to say that our
actions as consolidated activists aren’t critical. They are. But what our role consists of here is in finding the ways to really win people to taking this up themselves and becoming
in effect organizers themselves.
I am concerned that there is a certain tendency that’s
emerged to see the Orange Fridays as the main part of what we”re doing. This is
evident in some of our publicity and has been evident in some of the ways that
it’s been taken out. At least one person lauding yesterday’s actions
referred to the campaign as “Orange Fridays.”
It’s not. The campaign is Declare It Now: Wear Orange. The initial draft of the
webpage for Declare It Now had a message calling for people to report on their Orange Friday actions. We would like reports on people’s everyday activities and experiences as well as Fridays. The LA Town Hall
meeting when we unveiled the campaign described the campaign in such a way that
provoked one audience member to ask an organizer: “Do we have to do this only
on Fridays? Can we do it on other days too?”
While the weekly gatherings are a very good idea and an
important component of the campaign, it isn’t the heart and soul and it’s not
the main aspect. The day-to-day wearing and decorating with orange among our
own ranks and that of the people is the main aspect of Declare It Now. If we turn
this campaign into a weekly series of demonstrations we will be robbing
ourselves of the main part of the power of this campaign’s concept: that it
penetrates into people’s daily lives with people taking this out in their lives
throughout the week. Already some
individuals have been doing this on a daily basis on their own and they have
been pleased with the results. Whenever I go out wearing my “International
Terrorist” T-shirt with Bush’s face on it and with my orange ribbon or armband
I get many comments from people. (This shirt is very bold and always gets me
responses, by the way.) Yesterday when I was at the deli counter at a grocery
store the working class guy next to me looked at my shirt and said: “It’s not
just Bush. It’s the whole lot of them.” I gave him my card after telling him
about Declare It Now and giving him a ribbon to wear. The cashier when I
checked out told me that she liked my shirt and she asked if I had a button she
could wear when she’s off work. I told her that she could wear a ribbon while
she worked. (Until this campaign becomes better known, by the way, I think we
need to print “Impeach” on the orange ribbons or something like this. A rubber
stamp that we offer on the website might be good that people can use to stamp
“IMPEACH” or some other variants on their orange items. I also think we need an
orange bumper sticker for mass sales.)
If you think about the math of Declare It Now, as the Seattle organizer points
out in her report, it’s just not plausible to think that we could even hand out
millions of bandanas to people. If people are individually (or in small groups)
going out with orange throughout the week, they are going to be talking to and
influencing far more people than we can during a once a week rally/action. Not
only are there many more people out there who can act than we have in our
immediate, organized ranks, the rest of the week is six times longer than the
one day a week of Fridays.
Declare It Now is not a conventional organizing campaign and
we should be careful not to substitute conventional modes of demonstrating and
organizing for it. The Friday gatherings should be seen as an adjunct to the main campaign’s
day-to-day character.
More on the
Competing, Legitimate Authority
Shifting the center of gravity is directly tied to the
matter of bringing forth a competing, legitimate authority. That leadership
will manifest itself in two ways. First, it is materially present in us as
activists. We are contending for the people’s allegiance against the
suasion and influence of the existing establishment. We are trying to bust them
loose from following these bankrupt misleaders who can say with a straight face
disingenuous things like “I haven’t seen any impeachable offenses” or “We just
don’t have the votes.” We are urging people to follow us and to step forward
themselves to become leaders and thereby materially expand the ranks of the
DOBR movement. There isn’t something magical about us as individuals that they
should follow us. It’s the content of our morality, our worldview, and our
motives that we want them to respect, follow, and emulate. Another part of that
leadership will come from among prominent individuals in society – authors,
lawyers, teachers, artists, actors, military officers, politicians, etc. – who
step forward.
Second, the choice all of the people now face is whether we
are going to go along with torture and war crimes and so on, or are we going to
condemn it, speak out against it, and fight it. Taking the moral high ground is itself a form of asserting leadership.
To the extent that the people make the conscious choice to declare themselves
against the horrid things that this regime is responsible for and represents, they are becoming part of that competing
legitimate authority. They are acting as carriers and popularizers of the
very different future that we want and need. Their visible stance on this moral
question is a form of authority and a form of leadership in its own right. That
is another reason why the heart and soul of Declare It Now is the day-to-day
lives of individual people.
We aren’t just making visible the invisible majority
sentiment – although that is a key part of what we”re doing. We are also
throwing into high contrast the gulf between this system’s morality – it’s ok
to invade other countries who pose no threat to us, it’s ok to commit mass
murder, it’s ok to use nukes on innocent countries and people, it’s ok to
torture people, it’s ok to deny science and global warming, it’s ok to elevate
the rights of a fetus over the life of a woman, it’s ok to create a theocracy, it’s
ok to allow the torture and killing to go on if it benefits my political party’s ambitions, and it’s not ok to challenge any of this – and the morality of holding dear the rights of humanity and the planet, equality among peoples of
all nations (for Iraqi and Afghani lives are just as valuable and just as
important as American lives), truth, facts and science. We are the carriers of
a sacred trust (I’m not religious, but I do think sacred is an appropriate word
here) to be this precious, irreplaceable planet’s guardians and not allow it to
be savaged by the people presently in charge.
If we do this work right, we are going to see a
blossoming of this movement because the soil for this to take root is exceedingly rich and deep. There are going to be difficulties and there are
challenges we have to solve. We will have to work hard and with great verve, we
don’t have time to waste contenting ourselves with small improvements and small
advances, and it’s not going to be a linear development, but all of our
experiences tell us so far that this campaign resonates powerfully among the
people and that it can work.