Quote for Thought:

“For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food,
For love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Headlines for today:

1. Spain’s Socialists win election - Yep! That’s right. Here’s Al-Jazeera’s article on the subject. You can also check out the article at the Guardian and the article on BBC.

2. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP conservative party is trailing [the socialists] in the first round of French local elections - Damn straight. Sarkozy’s party is getting themselves handed to them. Check it out. Great developments in Western Europe!

3. Colombia: From insults to handshakes - The Real News Network reports: “At Rio Group summit an isolated Colombia backs down and apologizes for military raid into Ecuador.” Country after country in Latin America condemn Colombia’s illegal invasion of Ecuador’s sovereignty. President Uribe stands down and crosses room to shake hands with Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. War is averted in Latin America.

4. Israel may reoccupy Gaza - The Real News Network reports about Israel’s possibl re-invasion and re-occupation of Gaza, after an escalation of Israeli violence in the region which reportedly killed over 120 people in the Gaza region of Palestine.

5. Climate change may spark conflict with Russia, EU told - Anyone up for yelling and screaming in deluded state-capitalist drum circles as the world burns down around us? I haven’t seen an article this ridiculous in a while. The world is falling apart, and the EU is threatening a conflict over materials in a part of the world that should be FROZEN. How about we talk about how to STOP it from MELTING! The wise Cree proverb is adept to describe this article: “Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.”

AND

6. What is Revolutionary Democracy? - by X and Keith from New Brunswick. A great article and introduction into building revolutionary dual power and a popular movement for a new society.

“HOPE is a VERB with its SLEEVES ROLLED UP!” - David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College

If you’ve been following my site for any period of time, you might have started to understand what I’m trying to get at - perhaps I’ve even become too repetitive on certain subjects. If I could sum up my site into a simple “thesis”, it might be something along the lines of: if we want to change the world, we have to move lots of people in lots of little ways. The ways that we move different people are, well, different.

Ronald Reagan was a mastermind of this. Barack Obama has a similar strategy. To move “conservatives” (politically), progressives need to figure out how to move them on issues that they are progressive on. Many evangelicals, for example, care deeply about poverty and employment. We need to take to them in terms of our values and reframe the debate. Conservatives don’t own the moral high ground on religious and spiritual issues, and indeed, the evangelical voting bloc is splintering. We can regain this ground - we have righteousness on our side.

If we work hard enough, if we are strategic, if we are visionary, and if we are effective communicators, all of these efforts - both qualitative and quantitative - will eventually add up and snowball into dramatic and wide-spread institutional changes.

Lots of people and events inform my thinking on this. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” In the book he draws upon many fields, from sociology, to psychology, to marketing, linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. He focused on: the message, the messengers (including people with various types of personalities), and the context of the message.

Folks ranging from George Lakoff to the smartMeme Collective have taught lots of people in the movement that we need to be effective language warriors. Language, effective communicating, framing, messaging, memes (contagious bits of information that spread virally through society via social networks), and the creation of new progressive narratives are all a vitally important part of changing the world.

And then theres history and dozens of revolutionary and radical movements who’ve waged liberatory movements and conducted liberatory experiments in human social organization - all showing the change is indeed possible and that other forms of social organization are possible.

Basically, theres a grand, yet simple and straight-forward, theory of change, and it has supporting evidence in many fields of science, ranging from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. Its how human interact, grow, and transform the space around them. There are no statics in society. The category of “conservative” was as much a constructed and arbitrary one as any other political label. We just have to redefine the debate and we’ll start owning the right! And if we are effective in these tasks, and intentional about how we organize ourselves, then before we know it, we will be marching to freedom…

Progressives need hundreds of videos, charts, and radio spots like this permeating on television channels, radio stations, newspaper pages, and other forms of media. It is a hyper-visual and self-explanatory method of communicating how spending priorities in America are WAY off. We can use content like this to open up space to talk about the needed progressive and democratic shift in American life.

Check it out: Oreos Cookies, U.S. Budget and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream on TrueMajority.com

danah boyd (site and blog) published an paper entitled “Viewing American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace” which talks about the growing class divide between users of Facebook (who tend to come from a more privileged class background) and users of Myspace ( who tend to come from a more working class or lower-income background) - I found her paper based on a tip from Joshua who’d recently read it. She also responds to critiques of her essay and her paper was picked up and covered by Guardian UK. Here’s an except of Viewing American Class Divisions:

“Over the last six months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That’s only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky… probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I’m having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren’t so good at talking about class and I’m definitely feeling that discomfort. It’s sticky, it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it’s also hugely problematic. I don’t have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness and see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.”

Political organizations who use social networking sites should definitely take this into consideration and make sure that they have a holistic online presence which reaches a broad audience. The many social networking and other sites that exist on the net provide us all with tremendous opportunities. Sites like YouTube, Flickr and more are leading the a massive wave of information democratization in ways that none of us can yet fully understand or harness. OpenId will soon provide a way to take your identity with you all across the web. When using all of these new technological and web advances, we should be conscious about how our online identities have real world consequences - including for our political work and social change.

p.s. apparently boyd has received death threats since publishing this paper.

Lionel Neykov is an independent musician in New York City. Really nice mellow sound and a brilliant voice. You can check him out on iTunes, YouTube or Facebook by searching “Lionel Neykov”. He plays every once in a while in New York City.

Next show he has listed:

“March, 26 2008 at Pianos (Upstairs Lounge)
158 Ludlow St, New York, New York 10002
Cost : Free!

Great little room upstairs at Pianos, full bar, cozy armchairs…”

Development after development marks the nature of the 2008 election season. But the left needs to find a term to describe whats really happening in society. A fundamental social realignment is happening - a leftward and progressive shift in political discourse, along with a shift in the objective conditions of society are merging into a powerful force to be reckoned with.

One example of this is the fracturing of the evangelical voting bloc. A constituency that has long voted republican is broadening its focus and applying its spiritual beliefs to other realms in society such as poverty and employment. In an article in this week’s issue of The Nation, Bob Moser writes about what a more complicated evangelical voting bloc is starting to look like, one that is “embracing a broader social gospel”. Moser has been writing a lot about Obama, “purple states”, and Southern politics. He has a new book coming out this summer about the Democratic Party and the South.

His article in this issue of The Nation is called “Who Would Jesus Vote For?: The new evangelicals are rejecting the religious right and embracing a broader social gospel.” If you are interested in how the Left can start relating to broader constituencies and what it will take to win in America - especially in the South - then its definitely worth a look!

Ally Klimkoski wrote an article on WireTap back in August 2007 about the youth evangelical movement called “Young Evangelicals: Is God Now Progressive?” Investing in young evangelical voters means investing in a leftward shift in the evangelical movement!