To be completely truthful, part of the reason I’ve held off on this post about our family’s political activism is that I’m not sure how to assess what we’ve done. There have definitely been several positives. I took our son to a protest organized around a hearing about opening a new fossil fuel energy plant in Kalama, Washington. The plant would dirty the river and increase emissions significantly. Further, it’d be used primarily to supply the Chinese with energy. I’ve also attended several rallies on my own, including one outside a federal courthouse in Portland, where judges were hearing an appeal of Juliana v. U.S. As I’ve described before, the case essentially argues that the U.S. Government has violated the Constitutional rights of young people, in particular their right to life, liberty and property. .
Our family has also made donations to several activist groups and political parties. We now make monthly contributions to the Sunrise Movement (young people instigating for the Green New Deal, and the closest I can find to a climate version of the NRA) and the Sierra Club’s climate wing. My wife and I also made small donations to Jay Insley’s campaign—even though he might not be our top choice for the presidential nomination, we nonetheless wanted to ensure he had a place on the Democratic debate stage.
As a final note on the positives, we’ve also been trying to make change in our local communities. Beyond the op-ed in the Oregonian, we’ve helped our church engage in dialog about its role as a moral authority in preventing climate disaster, and I advocated that the nonprofit I work for buy carbon offsets for employee’s business flights (unsuccessfully, I might add).
However, I also feel like everything we’ve done essentially amounts to window dressing. I tried attending meetings of local chapters of several groups, including the Sierra Club, the Climate Reality Project, and 530. But I’ve largely been paralyzed by the options and haven’t settled on which one to join, in part because they are all taking on relatively small and generally different issues. They don’t seem well coordinated at all, from what I can tell. I hope I’m wrong. Plus, the groups were comprised almost entirely of young millennials and baby boomers—practically no parents with young children. And, while I won’t call out specific organizations, there were instances in which I had to call or e-mail people several times just to find out when and where meetings were happening. If this is the resistance, I’m not left hopeful.
The one exception is the Sunrise Movement. As I mentioned, they are young, energized, and brash. While I don’t always feel like I fit in given the general youth of the participants, their unflinching dedication to making the Green New Deal a reality is a welcome change in contrast to what appears a scattershot approach elsewhere. Going forward, I may put all my support behind them, including shifting all monthly contributions to them. As I write this, they are holding a sit in at the DNC’s debate to try to pressure the organizers into holding a climate-specific debate.
And then there’s the real reason I haven’t wanted to think too hard on this topic: maybe all these excuses are convenient reasons to remain involved in name only. After long days at the office, grabbing dinner downtown then heading to a chapter meeting rather than see the kids is very hard, especially knowing the work my wife is doing to manage our affairs at home (and vice-versa when she attends).
I’ll try to spend the next six months being involved with more regularity, and trying to divine my real motivation. Right now, I’m simply lost in a sea of organizations that all have the same goals, but different and seemingly unobtrusive approaches (again, excluding Sunrise). Right now, I’m getting about 10 emails from the various organizations a day with suggestions for how to get involved, but it’s not clear which requests are good (read high-leverage) uses of my time.
If nothing else, 2020 is around the corner. We plan to put all our energy into supporting whomever the Democratic nominee is when the time comes. That election–and all the down-ballot elections in between–are an unambiguous priority.
One Response
Sonja G Miller
Progress is progress. I have recycled since the first Earth Day with a hiatus in my 20’s. However, I have only convinced one of my 3 children to recycle what is possible in their locale. One bought a fuel efficient car when given the opportunity to buy a car, he briefly considered a Tesla but to many$$$. Politically, I was focused on the 2018 campaign and now 2020. I worked hard on a senate campaign in AZ even though I lived in Oregon. They used a texting program to get out the vote and the democratic candidate prevailed. I am about to start donations again targeted to states to shift the balance in the Senate and will volunteer for texting contact again. Every effort is important. In my lifetime we changed the quality of the rivers and the air in this country. That is my basis of hope, that we can again make an impact for the good.