Why are people in the US not engaged in a massive uprising? – Part I

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Steve Biko – South African Anti-Apartheid organizer

Right now the majority of people in the US are faced with increased cost of basic necessities like food, gas, health care and utilities.

Beyond basic necessities we are faced with the ongoing brutality of policing, the cruelty of ICE, the scourge of gun violence in our communities, the structural violence of poverty and the widening gap between the millionaire/billionaire class and everyone else.

The US government continues to practice a foreign policy that is rooted in imperialism, with unconditional support for Israel’s genocide, for the current war against Iran, for global arms trafficking, for maintaining roughly 170 US military bases around the world and for choosing to spend nearly a trillion dollars on militarism while millions of people in this country are just trying to survive.

We continue to avoid dealing with structural racism, the catastrophic climate crisis, a legal system that protects the rich and punishes the poor, and a political system that is controlled by the oligarchy and is designed to ignore the needs of the vast majority of the public.

So, why the hell are we not engaged in a massive uprising? In a recent article about the student protests in France it states:

“How did we get here? Courageous high school students have been protesting for weeks against abominable conditions in schools, the rise of the extreme right, and the bleak prospects they face in a world dominated by technocrats and tech barons. Alongside growing anti-government protests from Albania, Italy, Spain, and beyond in recent days, the French student rebellions may herald the emergence of a new wave of global struggle.”

Why are so many Americans opposed to these kinds of actions and yet so tolerant of the conditions we live in? Is it because we are too comfortable or could it be that we are too afraid of the consequences of rising up? The US certainly has a history of people rising up and confronting the oppressors, like the abolitionist movement, the early labor movement,  and the Civil Rights movement, just to name a few. Look what happened all around the US, hell all around the world, with the George Floyd uprisings. (see the excellent book entitled, The George Floyd Uprising)

Unfortunately, the energy of the 2020 uprisings was not sustained, mostly because of the many factors that people are constantly confronted with by systems of power and oppression. I want to look at some of these factors that not only make it hard for movements to sustain themselves, but make it difficult for people to see themselves as agents of radical change.

Internalizing the values of the system – For most of us who have gone through our educational system and especially for those of us who carry lots of privilege, we have been subjected to embracing a narrative about the US and it’s history. We have been told from a very young age that America is the greatest country on the planet or that the US is the land of the free and the home of the brave. We were never taught about how the US was founded on the genocide of indigenous people and the theft of their land. We were never really taught about how the US system of Capitalism was based on the enslavement of Black people or that the system of white supremacy permeates every institution in this country.

We are told that if you work hard and apply yourself you can do anything…..but that was and is a lie. We were told that people are innocent until proven guilty, yet the US leads the world in mass incarceration. We are told that we are a nation of immigrants, yet the history of US immigration policy is rooted in xenophobia, especially for people coming from the Global South.

Too many people have internalized these values, values of the system, the system of power and oppression. This is exactly why Doug DeVos and other people who control the system in Grand Rapids were in charge of the 250th anniversary of the US committee in this city, known as GR250. These people don’t want us to learn or know about any sort of people’s history, since that history does not embrace the dominant narratives about the US or Grand Rapids.

Media and the carpet bombing of our minds – There is so much media content that is produced, with 99.9% of it being produced to sell us products, a way of life, or ideas that prevent us from thinking for ourselves. How much time do we all spend consuming media – news, entertainment media, social media, along with the amount of time we spend texting and checking messages? Our minds are literally being carpet bombed. Even if there is some important messages or relevant news, it is overwhelmed in less than a day because we are now talking about some fucking celebrity or a political candidates that we treat likely celebrities. Media, especially social media alienates us from ourselves and from each other. Plus we spend so much time arguing with people on social media, rather than learning new skills, engaging in care work or actually resisting the systems of power that have created the conditions we live in.

Individualism, alienation and Capitalism – We live in a society that tells us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and to simply get our shit together. We’ll join a fantasy football league, but we won’t join a labor union. We all want to be part of some kind of community and make connections with people, but under a system of Capitalism we are taught that competition is king. We sell our labor for shitty wages, so shitting that we can’t afford rent or we have to chose between paying rent and not having enough to pay the electricity bill. Many people work two jobs and have side hustles, simply because we are just trying not to fall deeper into debt. The wealth gap continues to widen, so much so that a handful for billionaires control a large percentage of the wealth, while working class people are dying from hypertension, stress, depression and work. I retired last year, but can’t live off of my social security, so I am now working part time with goats that eat invasive species just so I have make ends meet. How can we expect people to be involved in social movement work when they have no little or energy because they are literally working to stay alive?

The belief that Elections will save us – We are constantly told that this is the most important election of our lives and that if you want to make things better you need to vote. Voting is a tactic and it is only one tactic, a tactic that historically has not brought about the kind of changes needed to improve people’s lives. We can’t vote ourselves out of this mess. Donald Trump is not the problem, he is the result of a political system that was designed to represent the interests of those with economic, political and social power.

Now, I’m not saying don’t vote, I’m say that regardless of who wins most people will be in the same predicament as before this election. When the Democrats control Congress, the White House or state governments the systems of power and oppression are still in place. Sure there might be some mild relief or mild reforms, but overall the realities of poverty, the wealth gap, mass incarceration, white supremacy, militarism, police brutality, xenophobia, transphobia, the climate crisis will remain. If you think that life is so much better with Democratic Administrations then you just aren’t paying attention.

Over the past 45 years of community organizing I have seen movements come and go and you can almost always bet that when the Democrats control the White House that most white liberals will say we are good and can get back to having Bruch. Ask yourself, where were the Indivisible groups during the Biden Administration? Why weren’t they challenging Democratic Party administration around the ongoing climate crisis, the arrest, detention of deportation of millions of immigrants between 2021-2025, the $900 billion US military budgets, the massive wealth gap, the prison industrial complex, the US funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the militarization of the US/Mexican border, then increased funding of cops, gentrification, the housing crisis, etc., etc.

We really need to learn from some of our own history about mass movements an mass uprisings. In addition, we need to learn from uprising that are happening all around the world, where people are disrupting business as usual and shutting things down. Those uprisings are using direct action tactics and strategies, they are not standing on street corners holding signs and calling it resistance. It’s embarrassing. I have spent enough time in Latin America to see how people organize, rise up and take risks in ways we can’t even imagine. Plus, people in those countries face more severe forms of government repression than we are likely to experience, and yet they take the necessary risks to fight for collective liberation.

In Part II, I will look at some examples of real resistance and how people have organized in ways to bring about collective liberation, which is a constant struggle.