Rivera Sun's Blog: From the Desk of Rivera Sun

US Congress Can Stop Genocide – Why Won’t They?

Image By Ashraf Amra – UNRWA: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, CC BY-SA 4.0

Gaza is being starved – deliberately, with cruel intention and shocking inhumanity.

The photos of skeletal children haunt me. At night when I close my eyes. At dawn when I rise. They should haunt us all – along with the unfathomable suffering the families of Gaza have endured over nearly two years of relentless bombings, forced relocation, war crimes, destruction of hospitals, targeting of doctors, ambulance drivers, and reporters. 

These months of Israeli-caused famine are worsening the nightmare Palestinians have been desperately trying to survive. 

Food and medical supplies are available, plentiful, and poised on the border waiting to go in. Israel, however, has set up a blockade of humanitarian relief and refuses to let more than a small, insufficient amount enter the area. When Israel does allow a few trucks in, Gazans are often corralled into fenced areas, and shot at. Over 1,000 people have been killed at aid centers in the past three months – simply for trying to get food or medical attention. 

It is not just Israelis committing these horrors – US contractors are guilty of this atrocity, too. In addition, our government pays for the bullets, bombs, military equipment, and surveillance technology – we sent more than $17 billion to Israel in 2024. This genocide is our tax dollars at work. 

Our legislators –and our president – have the power to end our complicity in this horror. They are able to pressure Israel into reversing course by introducing a bill tomorrow to end all military – and other – aid to Israel unless the blockade is lifted, humanitarian relief is allowed into Gaza, and the human rights violations and war crimes cease.

We have to ask: if the United States has the power to stop a genocide, why won’t we?

By ending military aid, the United States has stopped a genocide before. In the late 1990s, Indonesia had been engaged in a brutal genocide in East Timor for over two decades. Hundreds of thousands of East Timorese had been killed – nearly one third of the population. As international campaigns protested around the world, a phone banking effort in the United States pressured Congress and the White House to act. In 1997, the Clinton administration cut off all military aid to Indonesia. Five months later, facing a mass movement of Indonesians and no support from the US, the Suharto regime crumbled. The genocide ceased within six months and East Timor won full independence by 2002. 

If it is in our power to act, we must. Our nation’s position on Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza is unconscionable. The track record of inexcusable crimes has been clear for over a year – as has the preceding apartheid, illegal settlements, brutal occupation, and human rights abuses that have gone on for far longer. 

There is no excuse for continuing to send billions of tax dollars to a genocidal regime engaged in forced starvation of two million people. More than 59,000 people have already been killed, 140,000 injured, the entire population displaced, and their homes reduced to rubble. 

How many more must die of forced starvation? 

The ghosts of Gaza will haunt us for centuries to come – unless we act now.

~~~~~~~~~~
Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News, Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence, and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

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Naturalize Or Terrorize? ICE Is a Racket – And It’s Costing Too Much

Image: Trump at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Photo by The White House, Public Domain

After spending months firing federal workers, slashing public services, gutting healthcare, and raising taxes for everyone but the rich, our country just wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a detention center in Florida.

Dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, it’s nothing more than a collection of tents on an old airstrip in a swamp. It has already flooded. It cost $450 million. For reference, that’s what it costs to build a skyscraper in New York City. While the State of Florida paid out for it, they plan to get refunded from FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. In other words: you’re paying for it.

Maybe we should have built a skyscraper full of apartment buildings to house immigrants while their paperwork and legal proceedings unfold. (At least it wouldn’t flood.) Or we could have let them stay in their homes, working their jobs and taking care of their kids. (And paying taxes – because contrary to popular view, most undocumented immigrants pay taxes.)

But I digress. The point is: Alligator Alcatraz is a waste of money. And it’s the tip of the iceberg. The $170 billion in the new budget bill to expand ICE and immigration enforcement is the most wasteful government program ever designed. Around 63 percent of immigrants taken by ICE had no criminal record and 93 percent of them committed no violent crimes. They’re not causing problems to you or anyone else. But now it’s costing us around $245 per day to detain them in terrible conditions.

Why don’t we just let them stay at home? Wouldn’t it be easier to just knock on their doors when our backlogged courts are ready to handle their cases?

Or better yet, why don’t we just have a simpler and more streamlined naturalization process?

But what about the criminals, you say? We already have an entire criminal justice system and around 18,000 police agencies designed to stop crimes committed by people in the United States and deliver them to a court of justice. If found guilty, we also have the largest prison system in the world.

These mass deportations are largely targeting ordinary people – hairdressers, day laborers, farm workers, house cleaners, ice cream cart vendors, students. There’s no evidence that targeting these kinds of immigrants helps to prevent crime. The fastest, most efficient way to resolve the problem of 11 million undocumented people in the United States is to document them. That is: make a clear and simple path to becoming a citizen. Why wouldn’t we want more hardworking, culturally-rich friends and neighbors?

As for the common complaint that undocumented immigrants are being hired at lower wages than US citizens can afford to work at … there’s a solution to that: unionize together and demand living wages from meat packing factories, farms, construction sites, hotels, and landscaping companies. Otherwise, as the Agriculture Secretary recently alluded to, they’ll just replace immigrants with able-bodied American citizens currently on Medicaid. (She forgets that 62 percent of Medicaid recipients already work at least halftime and that if you work fulltime at the average minimum wage of $11/hr – which is often higher than what undocumented immigrants make in field labor or other jobs – you are still likely to qualify for Medicaid in most states.) Wages won’t increase by removing one group of people from this equation. Deportations will only change the faces of who is underpaid.

Naturalization shouldn’t be so hard. Our response to undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be armed agents, militarized vehicles, and snatching them off the street. ICE’s entire job should be done by a bunch of pencil pushers graciously reminding immigrants to file their paperwork on time so they can get their citizenship within a reasonable timeframe.

If it’s that simple, why are we building tents in a swamp?

Mass deportation and detention centers are now a massive industry that benefits only the very few. Who do you think is benefiting from government gravy train that is Alligator Alcatraz? Who do you think will build their mansion from the $245 per day it takes to hold 59,000 people in horrible conditions? Who will buy a private jet from skimming off this situation?

Not me or you.

Our entire immigration policy and system is wasteful and cumbersome. And we’re paying for it. You. Me. Working class people. Because, remember: the entire system of ICE and detention centers is a government program that the rich aren’t paying for – they just got their taxes lowered. This is being paid for by hardworking Americans like us who are already struggling to get by. This handout to the wealthy comes from ballooning the national deficit (which Trump promised he wouldn’t do) and by slashing public services, the National Parks budget, museum funding, cancer research, consumer protections, science and technology advancement, job opportunities for our youth, and much more.

This boondoggle of mass deportations isn’t saving us. Not from crime. Not from wasteful spending. Not from losing our jobs.

It’s costing us. And not just tax dollars. We’re also losing important rights and values as ICE puts armed agents and militarized vehicles into our streets.

We’re losing our Fourth Amendment Rights to privacy. We now know that Palantir is using massive database integrations put in place by Elon Musk and DOGE to trawl through all our data in an effort to find undocumented immigrants. Why are we allowing this?

We’re losing our freedom from military rule. Constitutional law prevents the use of US troops on US soil. When Trump ordered 700 US Marines to deploy to Los Angeles, he violated the constitution and committed an impeachable offense. A president cannot send troops onto US soil without Congress invoking the Insurrection Act. Additionally, is also almost unheard of for a president to send in the National Guard against the will of the mayor and governor. We face a constitutional crisis.

We’re losing our peace of mind. Masked, unidentified, armed agents are crawling through our communities. Some are imposters. Others may have badges, but they’re acting like secret police. This is shockingly un-American. It flies in the face of everything we stand for.

We’re losing our constitutional rights to dissent. Students are having their visas revoked and being arrested for speaking, writing, and protesting. They obeyed all the immigration laws. Their paperwork was all in order. The only thing they did was speak out. The administration has also threatened to revoke the citizenship of even fully naturalized and American-born citizens who disagree with them. This is the behavior of tinpot dictatorships. It is unworthy of the United States of America.

We’re losing our souls. ICE has snatched parents out of cars, leaving children abandoned in them. They have dragged respected community members out of workplaces, schools, and churches. They have beaten and assaulted people. They have smashed in car windows to yank people out. They routinely attempt to circumvent the law. They refuse to show their faces or identify themselves. They frequently misrepresent administrative ‘warrants’ which have no legal authority with judicial warrants (which do). How can we stomach these abuses?

We’re losing our pride, dignity, and national identity. We are Americans. We stand for democracy, rule of law, freedom. We are a nation of immigrants. We stand up for the downtrodden. We rise up to defend liberty and justice for all. But now we’re falling into a police state in which we terrorize instead of naturalize immigrants. We cut funding to beloved services to give handouts to private contractors. We allow them to violate the constitution and our rights as citizens.

Is this immigration policy worth the cost? I don’t think so. Do you? We need to naturalize, not terrorize.

_______

Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News, Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence, on the board of Backbone Campaign, and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

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Portrait Unveiling Celebrated With Art, Music, Theater, Literature and Speeches

Portrait Unveiling Celebrated With Art, Music, Theater, Literature and Speeches

I often speak about the shift to a culture of nonviolence, a society in which artists, teachers, scientists, political leaders, writers, thinkers, and everyone replaces the typical focus on war and violence with a celebration and affirmation of the power of nonviolent alternatives. In this culture, books movies, music, paintings, etc. uplift a different kind of heroism and popularize effective tools for dealing with conflict – like boycotts, strikes, restorative practices, peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and much more.  

On Sunday, May 4th, 125+ people had a remarkable experience of this world. Seventy-five of them gathered in the beautiful, circular hall of the Bay School in Blue Hill for my Portrait Unveiling in Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth series. Another 40-50 people virtually joined the in-person crowd that included my mother, sisters, niece and nephews, college friends, peace colleagues, and even the weaver I apprenticed to as a teenager. 

Rivera Sun speaks about telling the truth. Photo by Leah Cook.

Eight large portraits – just some of the 280+ portraits in the series – lined the walls: Edward Snowden, Kathy Kelly, Jeannette Rankin, Ida B. Wells, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Pauli Murray, and Joanna Macy. Their eyes – and inspiring examples – watched over us, their beautiful paintings honoring how they worked for peace, truth, racial equality, LGBTQ+ acceptance, and social justice. 

The local bookshop, Blue Hill Books, set up a table and sold only novels that affirmed peace and nonviolence. Imagine if this was the case on every bookstore shelf. (If you’re local, the bookstore has my books on its shelves. Go get some!) Nearby, the Americans Who Tell the Truth team offered their books, mugs, posters, and tee-shirts affirming heroes who stood up for change. 

Artist Robert Shetterly spoke about how we met and why he decided to paint my portrait. (And it wasn’t just because red hair is so fun to paint.) My good friend Sherri Mitchell moved us all to tears with her eloquent words about our collaboration on Love and Revolution Radio, the power of changing the narrative, and the gift of being alive to do one’s heart-work. 

Bay School students and Scott Spring perform a skit from The Adventures of Alaren. Photo by Leah Cook.

Bay School teacher Scott Springer introduced five of his students who had adapted one of the short stories in The Adventures of Alaren into a theatrical skit. Swiveling in our seats to view the stage, the students reenacted this tale of mourning war, rehumanizing conflict, and using nonviolent action to stop a king from charging into battle. To see these words come to life – to be given voice – through these young people brought tears to my eyes and sent good shivers down my spine. This is why I write my stories. 

Rob and I pulled the cloth off the portrait (cue my waterworks again). It’s a humbling thing to see yourself through an artist’s eyes, to be immortalized through paint, and to be added to this impressive series full of the most amazing people I know. When I spoke, I felt the weight of what it means to tell the truth – especially in these times. Here’s an excerpt of my speech:

“Look at these portrait subjects … they didn’t just tell the truths that were popular and appealing. They told the truth when everyone hated hearing it … and sometimes literally shot the messenger. Truthtellers are always more popular in hindsight. For our job is not to say the emperor looks so handsome in his new clothes, or even just that the emperor has no clothes. Our job is to ask: why do we have an emperor at all?”

Artist Robert Shetterly and Rivera Sun unveil the portrait. Photo by Leah Cook.

Watch the livestream recording 
or listen to the podcast version by local radio station WERU (best audio quality).  

The gathering concluded with a very moving gift of music. Songwriter Aro Veno traveled all the way from Vermont to get us singing along to her original song, Like the Dandelion, inspired by the novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. Check out Aro Veno’s music on SoundCloud and here’s a live version from the coast on Maine – with a local dandelion. (It did not translate to the livestream well, so be sure to listen to it at one of these other links!)

Aro Veno performs “Like a Dandelion”.

It was an extraordinary day of celebrating in art, music, theater, literature, and speeches. Being included in the Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series is one of the greatest honors of my life – and one that I shall strive to live up to. It’s humbling to stand alongside all of my heroes, both past and present, and deeply inspiring. My profound gratitude goes out to Rob and team, and all the people who made the unveiling so very special. I encourage everyone to explore the portrait series:
 

Here is my portrait and bio.
Check out the portrait gallery of 280+ truthtellers.
Find books, posters, prints, mugs, and more on their store.
 

For an afternoon, we were immersed in what it will feel like to live in a culture that celebrates nonviolence, nonviolent action, and social change in art, music, theater, literature, speeches, even in clothing and coffee mugs. It’s the world I live in … and the world I’m always trying to welcome more and more people to step into. 

May we all live in a culture of nonviolence,
Rivera Sun

Look at this! Some great people in Blue Hill are starting a tiny house co-housing community … and they named their street after my novel! I’m so honored and thrilled. I saw the sign on the way to the Portrait Unveiling and wondered if it was just happenstance. Then the mother and daughter (who performed in the Alaren skit) came up to me at the end and told me the backstory.

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This Is Us – Poster

Created by Rivera Sun, March 15, 2025

You can download, print and use this poster at protests, demonstrations, and other nonviolent actions. Feel free to share it with your friends and networks. Here is a high-resolution version for printing.

Remember the vision. The world that we’re standing up for is worth the struggle.

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Are We Great Yet?

Image by Bruce Emmerling from Pixabay

Originally published by PeaceVoice in journals nationwide on Feb 15, 2025

It takes time. That’s what people keep saying in response to concerns about the Trump Administration. It’ll take time before he can get the good stuff done. They say the promised benefits to this chaos are coming soon.

Don’t hold your breath. The egg prices are still sky-high. How much time will it take for those to come down? 

Trump passed 200 executive orders in his first day in office. Not one of them taxed the rich. Not one of them lowered your taxes. Not one of them stopped price-gouging by giant corporations. Not one of them fixed the price of eggs. And yes, Trump could have used his executive orders to do all of those things on day one. He didn’t.

While claiming that the benefits to you will take some time, President Trump hasn’t wasted any time in causing widespread alarm, confusion, and upheaval. 

It didn’t take him any time at all to:

Put thousands of hardworking Americans out of work, including 1000 people at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, 4,400 public lands workers, forest service workers, firefighters, and park rangers; 388 EPA workers with 1,100 more receiving termination warnings; 1,300 Center For Disease Control workers; 1,500 National Institutes of Health workers; and half the NNSA workers who do safety work on nuclear radioactive waste.Destroy a centuries-long friendship between the United States and Canada, and antagonize Mexico, Panama, Denmark, and Greenland.Threaten the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and to takeover Gaza. Collapse a key market for Kansas grain farmers.Plunge the federal government into a deceptive and misleading censorship of facts, data, and science. Try to dismantle the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that prevents corporations and rich people from fleecing people like us, possibly for the benefit of Elon Musk’s plans for a payment system on X.Order NASA to remove anything about women leadership, including female astronauts.

Look, you’ve got to admit they’re doing something wrong when they piss off the veterans, park rangers, Kansas farmers, and even the Canadians. 

You know what else didn’t take any time at all? 

Lining their pockets, especially Elon Musk’s pockets, who planned a $400 million armored car contract and $38 million in Space X deals.Breaking the law. There are now 68 lawsuits against the Trump Administration over civil rights violations, disclosing the identities of FBI agents, First Amendment violations, labor law, discrimination, unfair firing, and more.Wasting tax dollars on Trump’s $3.4 million trip to the Super Bowl, which he didn’t even stay at until the halftime show. Ignoring the Constitution. From the funding freeze to birthright citizenship to disregarding administrative practices to firing congress-appointed federal agency members to getting rid of inspectors general, constitutional scholars are alarmed at the rate at which Trump is crossing lines. 

This administration hasn’t found time to lower the price of eggs or make it life more affordable for the average American.  

But they have made time to insult Canada, demean half our country, plan human rights violations for migrants, violate the Constitution, give handouts to Elon Musk, and fire people who actually serve the public by researching cancer, keeping our national parks vacations fun, fighting fires, and taking care of veterans. 

Are we great yet?

~~~~~~~~~~

Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News, Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence, and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

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Do Not Obey – Episode 2 of Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times

There are popular social posts going around that read: Do not obey in advance or Don’t self censor or Don’t do the fascists’ work for them. In this session, we’ll look at the chilling effect of knowing a repressive regime is coming into power . . . and how we can resist doing its work for it. 

Author/Activist Rivera Sun shares stories, quotes, and strategic wisdom in these videos on courage, resistance, defiance, love, humor, solidarity, and soul force. This project was made possible in partnership with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

Quotes: 

“The tap root of power lies below the surface. It is obedience, cooperation, collusion; the social glue that ensures that each day proceeds much like the last. Every single one of us has the power to give or withhold our willing participation. To ‘reproduce’ or reshape society.”
— Alex Begg, Empowering Earth, 2000“Lesson 1: Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017.“Stories of resistance have been taken from us, the books burned, the songs stifled or forbidden, the troubadours sent wandering in the wilderness . . . but even if we forget, even if the stories are taken away, something in us will remember when the time comes. It’s a mystery but it’s true.”
— Pam McAllister, You Can’t Kill The Spirit

Explore the Stories Further:

Czechoslovakia’s 10 Commandments of Nonviolent resistance to the Soviet Invasion of 1968Denmark’s Resistance to Nazi Occupation in 1940-45Arne Serj’s “10 Commandments of a Good Dane”Explore the creative resource and study guide on the Rescue of Danish Jews in our Nonviolent History Coloring Page SeriesWatch the Denmark segment of A Force More Powerful200,000 Washington Post subscribers cancel their subscriptions (Note: In the video, Rivera Sun says it was 30,000, but the number is actually much higher.)X users move to BlueSkyAbout the Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times Series

It’s easy to feel hopeless or powerless. But all throughout history, in the worst situations, people have turned to the tools of nonviolent action to build “a way out of no way.” They’ve ousted dictators. They’ve ended authoritarian regimes. They’ve stopped wars. They’ve won rights, freedoms, democracy, justice, and liberation. In Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times, we’ll explore stories from around the world that offer shining examples that can inspire us today. 

Author/Activist Rivera Sun shares stories, quotes, and strategic wisdom in these videos on courage, resistance, defiance, love, humor, solidarity, and soul force. 

Pace e Bene is a 34-year old nonviolence organization that seeks to foster a culture of active nonviolence in our world. https://paceebene.org/

Transcript

Hello, welcome back to Candlelight Nonviolence in the Dark Times. Today we’re going to talk about a concept called “Do not obey in advance,” or as I like to think of it, “Don’t do your oppressor’s job for them.”

We’re going to start, as always, with a quote, for reflection, for centering. This comes from Alex Begg in Empowering Earth, which came out in the year 2000. Incredible to think of this wisdom coming to us over 24 years. “The tap root of power lies below the surface. It is obedience, cooperation, collusion; the social glue that ensures that each day proceeds much like the last. Every single one of us has the power to give or withhold our willing participation. In so doing, to ‘reproduce’ or reshape society.”

Think about that. But the social glue that holds things and the status quo of how they are is either that we participate, or we don’t. That we ensure that today was the same as yesterday, or that today is wildly different than the day that came before. And we notice how this happens in negative ways, right? We notice how things seem to be getting worse and worse and worse.

But we need to be aware of our power to disrupt the pattern of either things staying the same or sliding worse and worse and worse with our decisions, whether or not to go along with life for business as usual. This is true anytime. It’s true in the best of times, and it’s certainly true in the worst of times. We either go along with injustice, we participate in it, or we allow it to continue by standing aside or doing nothing or remaining passive.

Or the third option there is that we throw our lives into the cogs of those wheels and grind them to a screeching halt. That’s the kind of power that I’m interested in. 

When it comes to authoritarian regimes coming to power or people who espouse the politics of hate taking public office in the halls of power, this is even more true and even more important to understand and speak out against. From the very tippy top of a dictator’s office or an abusive president’s office all the way down through the ladder of people who carry out his or her orders, whether or not we obey or we continue things on their devastating path can make the difference between success or failure of a movement or the toppling or the enshrining of a dictator.

To know that we have this power is both empowering and a slightly fearsome responsibility. If we can choose to stop dictatorship in its tracks, why don’t we? If we are somewhere in the vast machinations of the entire system of politics and government and society that we are bound up in have an opportunity to halt injustice in its tracks, are we brave enough to take that opportunity?

When authoritarian regimes come to power, one of the things that happens very quickly is that people self-center. They stop speaking out. We’ve already been seeing this. We see people obey in advance and try to get themselves in a safer position, or a position that is aligned with the oppressive regime coming to power. We need to have the courage to not obey in advance and to put the burden of enforcement onto our opposition, to have this as our default setting rather than, “We’re going to comply and just go along to get along.”

We have seen this play out in numerous places around the world. Last time, we talked a little bit about the Danish rescue of the Jews and the Danish resistance to Nazi occupation in the World War II era. When Denmark was invaded, they did some things very quickly that helped them build a really robust resistance, even though they put up only six hours of military resistance. One of the things was a pamphlet that was circulated by a teenager, Arne Serj, who made a flyer called “The Ten Commandments for Danes.” He originally printed only like 25 copies of this for influential citizens in his smaller town, but very rapidly, the document started getting copied and passed hand to hand across the country, and then was soon considered a revered roadmap for resistance.

So these Ten Commandments were: You must not go to work in Germany and Norway. Don’t go do your job. Stay at home. Go on strike. Okay, if you have to go to work, number two: do a bad job for the Germans. Don’t do a good job. Lose the paperwork, slow things down, have a fifth cup of coffee that day. Make mistakes, file the permits in the wrong place. 

You shall work slowly for the Germans. Right? That was number three. And we talked about a few weeks ago the idea that The Nazis really wanted the Danish to build them warships in their factories. And the Danish shipyard workers were so effective at doing things like screwing in bolts, and then when the Nazis weren’t looking, unscrewing those bolts, that by the end of years of occupation and the war they hadn’t built a single warship for the Nazis. And that has to have had an impact on the Nazi’s ability to win or, in this case, lose the war. So think about that. Think about all the ways that you can bog down injustice, slow it down. simply by doing your job poorly. 

The fourth commandment was: You shall destroy important machines and tools. The fifth was: You shall destroy everything that might have been a benefit to the Germans. The sixth was: You shall delay all transport. Number seven was: You shall boycott all German and Italian films and papers. What that might look like for us today is turning out the propagandistic news that reinforces the politics of hate. Sometimes we get stuck in doom scrolling and just obsessing over every little horrible thing that they’re saying. We need to turn that off, especially if it’s only serving our oppressors in terms of either distracting us from the tangible actions we could be doing or if it’s immobilizing us through fear. Both of these situations is a detriment to our movement activity and a benefit to those who are causing harm and destruction.

Number eight on the Danish commandments was: You shall not shop at Nazi stores. We have so many opportunities to resist in this way. We saw this During the election, when the Washington Post caved to Jeff Bezos, the new owner, saying, “You’re not going to endorse a candidate.” 30,000 people canceled their subscriptions. We’re seeing this in people leaving Twitter for Bluesky or leaving Facebook for Bluesky. So where can you stop sending money to the very people whose politics and policies we are resisting? Go through your Rolodex. Go through your bank statements—don’t put a single penny into their hands.

Number nine on the Danish Ten Commandments was: You shall treat traitors for what they are worth. So, you know, when people change sides and decide to align with the politics of hate, we don’t need to pretend like everything’s okay. I think we can find ways to be truthful and honest that are not wounding and harmful and violent. I think we can certainly express our displeasure with them in clear ways, and we can make it socially uncomfortable or uneasy for them to continue to align with hate.

And number 10 says: You shall protect anyone chased by the Germans. How powerful is that? You shall protect anyone chased by the Germans. This could be whistleblowers. This could be even people within certain political parties who are speaking out against the tyranny or the abuses of their party. This certainly applies to migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants who are currently being persecuted. This certainly applies if you see an LGBTQ person being harassed in the street. Or if someone shouts at someone, Go back to your own country.” How can you protect these people who are being persecuted?

These commandments were incredibly powerful for the Danes. But they aren’t the only Ten Commandments. I think the Danish list actually inspired a later campaign in the 1960s, late 1960s, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia with the intention of making it part of the Soviet Union again. The Ten Commandments for the Czechoslovakians was, “If a Soviet soldier comes to you, you don’t know, don’t care, don’t tell, don’t have, don’t know how to, don’t give, can’t do, don’t sell, don’t show, do nothing.”

Would you like those again? When someone who is part of the politics of hate comes to you wanting you to do anything, you don’t know, don’t care, don’t tell, don’t have, don’t know how to, don’t give, can’t do, don’t sell, don’t show, do nothing. This is a list of ways we can non-cooperate with injustice, how we can not obey the authoritarian regimes. We can refuse to comply with the politics of hate. We can resist doing its work for it.

Now, as you saw between these, we can do this in really bold and public and visible ways. We can also do this, if risk is high, in quiet, in hidden, in covert ways. Ways that will slow down the machinery of the politics of discrimination and hate, but at the same time might allow us to continue to stay in our jobs continuing to slow down the politics of hate and discrimination. As with anything in civil resistance, these ideas are useful on an individual level, but they are far more useful the wider spread they are.

So if you know someone who works in the halls of power, who has choices to make about whether they’re going to go along with a policy rollout, or whether they’re going to help file paperwork for a certain political belief or political stance, even if it’s enshrined into law, if you know people like this, share this with them. Send them this episode, or make a short list version of it. They may need to hear these stories. This series, Candlelight: Nonviolence in Dark Times, is all about sharing the stories making sure that the stories of resistance are widely known and shared and circulated. 

In You Can’t Kill the Spirit, author and activist Pam McAllister wrote, “Stories of resistance have been taken from us, the books burned, the songs stifled or forbidden, the troubadours sent wandering in the wilderness … but even if we forget, even if the stories are taken away, something in us will remember when the time comes. It’s a mystery but it’s true.”

Our time together today is this way of remembering the stories we need, because the time that we need them in is now. The time has come. We must resist, we must refuse to comply, we must refuse to obey or to work for the policies of hate and the tyrants of injustice.

If you have gained something from this episode, pass it on. Share it. Because like lights in the dark, when we light up enough of us, it all starts shining together.

The post Do Not Obey – Episode 2 of Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times appeared first on Rivera Sun.

Rivera Sun Honored In Americans Who Tell The Truth Portrait Series

The Greatest Honor of My Life: Joining the Americans Who Tell The Truth

The Americans Who Tell The Truth portrait series by Robert Shetterly is a collection of 275 paintings of the most incredible people in our history. These are the ones who rose up for justice, who spoke out against wrongs, who revealed the truth and held firm for the vision of a nation that respected all people at home and around the world. 
 

Mother Jones. Sojourner Truth. Alice Paul. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I will be portrait #276. It is the greatest honor of my life. 

On May 4, at an in-person Portrait Unveiling in Blue Hill, ME, artist Robert Shetterly will pull a cloth off a 3×6′ painting of yours truly. Inscribed on it will be a quote from one of my novels. I will not have seen the portrait yet. My first reaction will undoubtedly be to burst into tears of deep emotion that make my nose turn red and turn my face into a quivering mess. 
 

Frederick Douglass. Grace Lee Boggs. Cesar Chavez. Daniel Ellsberg.

To be honored alongside these heroes means more to me than any other award or prize. For 43 years of my life, I’ve looked up to them and aspired to live up to the examples they embodied. They’ve been a strand of US history that we can take pride in and anchor our sense of collective self-respect. 
 

Bayard Rustin. Pete Seeger. Mark Twain. Howard Zinn. 

At a time when lies spill out in every sentence of our president, when climate denialism is state policy, when erasure of women, trans, people of color, science, fact, and truth is taking place throughout our nation; this series is especially important. To be added to this series in this exact moment is not just an honor for my work thus far … it’s a rallying cry for the times. We must all be Americans Who Tell The Truth. 
 

Edward Snowden. Medea Benjamin. Bree Newsome. Tim DeChristopher.

The portrait unveiling will take place in-person at the Bay School in Blue Hill, Maine. It is a school where my novels have been read by the young students and where several unveilings have taken place. Artist Robert Shetterly will explain why he was inspired to paint my portrait. If we’re lucky, schoolchildren will perform a skit from The Adventures of Alaren. My mother and family will attend. My friend and colleague Sherri Mitchell (who is also in the portrait series) will speak.

RSVP here for the zoom link.
Not in Maine? We will attempt to livestream.

I will also say a few words. You can expect them to be well-crafted. To be an American Who Tells The Truth in these times demands that we speak out against the violence, injustice, lies, and abuses that we see. It also requires that we speak with vision, hope, and passion. 
 

Fannie Lee Hamer. Ida B. Wells. Eugene V. Debs. Helen Keller.

These are the people who never gave up on the vision of a more just, respectful, compassionate, and peaceful nation. In the belly of the beast, in the dark nights of this country’s soul, in the bleak hours long before the dawn of change, these are the people who stood up and started marching toward the gleaming sunlight of justice. Like Dr. King, they took their times toward the mountaintop on the conviction and faith that we would get there. Many of them did not live to see these changes, but they lived in such a way that those who followed – all of us – would. It is our task now to honor their lives with our own. 
 

Samantha Smith. Jeannette Rankin. Paul K. Chappell. Julia Butterfly Hill.

Let us all live our lives as if our paintings already hang within this beautiful series. We stand in this lineage of people and the countless others who came before us. These are the laborers in the mills, the African-Americans at the lunch counters, all those who opposed war, the Silent Sentinels outside the White House, the artists and writers, the whistleblowers and truthtellers. Their eyes are watching us now … and Robert Shetterly has immortalized not only their courage, but their immeasurable compassion, too. They look at us with kindness and understanding in their eyes. Come, they seem to say, the journey has been long and the promised land is still far off. But we are marching with you … and we will get there, together.
 

In solidarity,
Rivera Sun

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Do Not Obey. In Advance or Otherwise.

Do Not Obey. In Advance or Otherwise.
Dandelions are everywhere.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to live in “the time that looms around the corner of today” where The Dandelion Insurrection begins … well, this is the closest parallel I have ever seen. At the start of the book, a fist thumps down upon the table and Valier shouts, “That’s it! They’ve gone too far.” He and his family are upset over closed borders, military presence, climate disasters, economic hardship, and media propaganda feeding them nothing but lies. In our case, the militarized border is along Mexico and the round-ups are targeting migrants, but many other aspects of the speculative fiction novel are eerily familiar. I share the sentiment, “That’s it! They’ve gone too far.”

In his first week in office, Trump fired (or is trying to fire – they’re resisting) federal investigators who attempted to hold him accountable for his crimes. He’s purging people from federal offices and implementing a hiring freeze. On Jan 28, he attempted to halt (and was blocked by a federal judge) all grant and funding indefinitely for any federal office involved in “foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” In translation: for helping and respecting other people, and ensuring a liveable future for humanity on our only planet. 

Choose Democracy writes, “Our summary is this: It’s an administrative coup. Trump has ordered tens of billions (maybe up to $3 trillion) of budget halted indefinitely in a blatantly illegal move. He’s claiming power to halt and potentially redirect funding that’s already been authorized by Congress — a classic authoritarian move.”

Trump wants power – absolute power – to do whatever he wants. He doesn’t want legal accountability, lawyers, or judges to stop him. He doesn’t want federal employees to resist his cruel agenda. He’s purging workers and freezing hiring processes. But people are resisting. AltNatPark Service’s network of federal employees in resistance surged from 2,500 to 10,000. Federal workers were so insulted by Musk’s buyout memo that many of those thinking of quitting are now planning to stay and make trouble for the administration. The DEIA snitch line was flooded with tens of thousands of false reports. People are thwarting ICE raids to such a degree that the “Border Czar” is complaining about us. The outcry from federal workers, legislators, lawyers, and citizens over the funding freeze forced Trump to rescind his federal freeze memo only a day later. 

The rapid shift from despair to spirited resistance is a hopeful sign. Authoritarians are stopped by mass movements who refuse to obey unjust orders. I’ve seen people circulating the important message to “Do Not Obey In Advance” and to not do the work of the authoritarians for them by self-censoring yourself or complying with them. This is critically important. In Episode 2 of Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times, I talk about how nonviolent resistance has been used to disobey unjust or immoral orders and resist the politics of hate. I share stories of the 10 Commandments of Resistance from the Danish resistance to Nazi occupation in the 1940s and Czechoslovakia’s resistance to Soviet Invasion in 1968.

 Like others facing heartless and cruel regimes, we can noncooperate with injustice, refuse to comply with cruelty, and disobey orders that violate moral principle. For example, here were the rules the Czechs shared with each other:

When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU:
1. Don’t know
2. Don’t care
3. Don’t tell
4. Don’t have
5. Don’t know how to
6. Don’t give
7. Can’t do
8. Don’t sell
9. Don’t show
10. Do nothing

So, don’t give up. We have more power than we think. Resistance is not futile. As we know from the Dandelion Trilogy … resistance is fertile and spreads its seeds everywhere. Remember, whenever you take action, be sure to immediately invite 10 friends to do the same. With social media (Meta and X) and corporate media pandering to this administration, you can’t rely on them to deliver stories of resistance. We have to spread the word, dandelion-style. 

I also encourage you to get on the email lists of the organizations you like (not just follow them on social media). I especially recommend Choose Democracy’s email list for good analysis, great resources, and ways to connect to resistance groups. If you can, make a donation to cover the cost of sending you emails. (It can be expensive to maintain a big list, especially as sign-ups surge.) 

If we’re living at the start of The Dandelion Insurrection, let’s make sure the story of our times is full of spirited, nonviolent resistance to injustice. Our actions now determine how the next page of this story unfolds.

Be like the dandelions,
Rivera Sun

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Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times

Nonviolence was forged in the crucible of dark times—and its lessons can help us powerfully today. From systemic injustices to global crises, we find ourselves facing challenges that call for courage, creativity, and solidarity. It’s easy to feel hopeless or powerless. But all throughout history, in the worst situations, people have turned to the tools of nonviolent action to build “a way out of no way.” They’ve ousted dictators. They’ve ended authoritarian regimes. They’ve stopped wars. They’ve won rights, freedoms, democracy, justice, and liberation. 

This deep, long history of powerful nonviolence reminds us that even in the darkest moments, ordinary people have the tools to rise up for meaningful change.

In Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times, we’ll explore stories from around the world that offer shining examples that can inspire us today. From Chile ousting the Pinochet dictatorship to the Women of Liberia stopping a civil war to the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, we can learn from their hard-won experiences.

Author/Activist Rivera Sun shares stories, quotes, and strategic wisdom in these videos on courage, resistance, defiance, love, humor, solidarity, and soul force. This project was made possible in partnership with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

Episode 1: Forged In the Crucible

In this first episode of an 8-part series, Rivera Sun speaks about how nonviolence was forged in the crucible of dark times. It emerged under dictatorships, occupations, and extreme danger. Hear how Liberian women stopped a civil war, how Chilean mothers ended a dictatorship, and how Danish citizens resisted the Nazis. Find a spark of inspiration in these examples of how people just like us have broken through fear, connected to one another, and risen up for justice. 

Quotes: 

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it—always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi“One of the best antidotes to despair is reading about the lives of people who never gave up, visionaries who believed in the impossible despite the overwhelming obstacles they faced; visionaries who never resorted to violence despite the violence unleashed against them; visionaries who turned the impossible into the inevitable.”
― Medea Benjamin in the foreword to Nonviolent Lives “Stories of resistance have been taken from us, the books burned, the songs stifled or forbidden, the troubadours sent wandering in the wilderness . . . but even if we forget, even if the stories are taken away, something in us will remember when the time comes. It’s a mystery but it’s true.”
― Pam McAllister, You Can’t Kill The Spirit

Explore the Stories Further:

Denmark – Watch the Denmark segment of A Force More Powerful Denmark – Explore the creative resource and study guide on the Rescue of Danish Jews in our Nonviolent History Coloring Page Series Liberia – Watch the documentary Pray The Devil Back To Hell Liberia – Explore the creative resource and study guide on the Women of Liberia Mass Action For Peace in our Nonviolent History Coloring Page Series Chile – Watch the Chile segment of A Force More Powerful Read George Lakey’s article: Nonviolent action has stopped coups and ousted dictators in 40 countries

See more episodes here.

Author/Activist Rivera Sun has written numerous books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Her articles are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds of journals nationwide. Rivera Sun serves on the board of Backbone Campaign and the advisory board of World BEYOND War. www.riverasun.com

Transcript

My name is Rivera Sun. I’m an author and an activist, and this is a series called Candlelight, Nonviolence in Dark Times.

I’m going to start with a quote from M.K. Gandhi. It’s one of my favorites. And I think it has a lot of relevance for the times that we find ourselves in today. Gandhi said, “When I despair. I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible. But, in the end, they always fall. Think of it. Always.”

We live in a moment in human history where we’re very concerned about the political dangers, the ecological dangers, the social dangers, we see violence of all kinds is on the rise. And confronted with such times. it’s easy to feel very bleak and unhopeful that anything could change. But what Gandhi’s quote reminds me is that we are not alone, that all throughout history, just as there have been tyrants and dictators who have risen to power, so too have there been people like us, in countries all over the world, who have found the courage and the connection to pick up the tools of nonviolent action and resist and rise and topple those dictators and tyrants from power, not just once but over and over and over again. 

I’m going to talk in a minute about some of those examples. But first, I want to just say that sometimes I think people operate under this illusion that in order for nonviolence to work, things like boycotts, protests, strikes, sit-ins, civil disobedience, non-cooperation, refusals to comply with orders, marches, rallies, protests—in order for all these things to work, we have to live in a very functional, benevolent social-political situation where the rulers in power won’t crack down on us or where our political situation looks very favorably or tolerably on people rallying in the streets, for example. 

And I understand how we can sometimes have this misperception of nonviolence. But the truth is historically, in the case studies, that nonviolence is born in the crucible of tough times, of dark times, when dictators are in power, when authoritarian regimes are arresting everyone, when the people rising up for change have no legal rights, they don’t have social standing, they don’t come from places of privilege. 

Nonviolence is the tools that people have turned to when they feel outgunned by the forces of violence. That they feel if they rose up with those tools, they would simply be crushed as a movement. So they’re looking for a whole toolbox at which their people can excel, more so than the people causing the injustices or harm. 

So nonviolence is what they turn to in Chile under the Pinochet regime to get that dictator out of power. Nonviolence is what they turn to in Liberia when the second Liberian Civil War was breaking out and hundreds of thousands of people had already been killed. Nonviolence is what they turn to in Denmark when the Nazis invaded and occupied during World War II. 

In all of these studies and so many more, nonviolence is born in the crucible of dark times. It rises up as the way out of no way. It gives us a way to resist and to push through until freedoms, rights, and justice are won.

When we think about our times, and we think about how dark and bleak they may be, I think we need to remember what it must have felt like to be in Chile in the 1980s, to be in Liberia in the early 2000s to be in Denmark in 1940s, when success was not a guarantee, they didn’t have the benefit of the hindsight of history, which is always 20/20. They had to think they had to think to themselves in these bleakest of moments, “Who am I and what will I do for justice today? Even though it looks impossible to beat Hitler. It looks impossible to get the two warring sides of our nation and Liberia to put down their guns. Even though it might look impossible to get rid of this dictator in Chile who had disappeared tens of thousands of people.”

Imagine what it must have felt like to be standing in the shoes of a mother in Chile who’s son or daughter had been flown out over the ocean and dropped out of a plane, perhaps because nobody had ever reported whether or not that had happened. You only knew that these things were happening and that thousands of people were disappearing.”

Imagine what it must have felt like in Liberia, that eerie sense of deja vu, of dread—something we can very much resonate with and relate to in these particular political times—as they had just ended one horrifically brutal civil war and were now entering into another one. Everyone knew just how bad it was going to be. And women, most of all. 

Imagine what it felt like in the 1940s when the Nazis rolled into Denmark, took over your country in six hours, installed themselves into the highest offices in the land, were patrolling your streets, who threatened the annihilation of thousands of your people. 

Unfortunately, each of these scenarios are not unrealistic things for us to be concerned about or worried about in these times. That’s why we need to know the stories of what’s happened in the past so that we can learn from them. And hopefully learn faster and better.

As I say, rather than inventing wheels, we need to borrow wheels from our brothers and sisters around the world who have used nonviolent struggle to overcome these great adversities, and we need to put those wheels to work and ride them to someplace new.

In Chile, the mothers of the disappeared gathered in the plaza and demanded one simple question: “Where are our sons and daughters?” Their courage sparked the courage of their fellow citizens and led to the movement that eventually threw the dictator Pinochet out of power.

In Liberia, it was again the women—mothers, daughters, sisters, people who had suffered brutal things during the previous war and were already losing family members to this civil war—who gathered in one place along the side of the road where the dictator Charles Taylor would drive his motorcade down the road and they prayed for peace, the Muslims and the Christians. And they kept praying for peace, with protests, with rallies, with demonstrations, with sit-ins in the halls of power until they force the dictator and the rebels get in a room together and hammer out a peace accord.

In Denmark in the 1940s—of course we know all about World War II, we learn it in school, we learn how the armies worked—but in Denmark, under occupation, some of the worst conditions for organizing, people came together to resist anything the Nazis wanted to do. They rescued nearly 7,000 Jewish people from certain death. They refused to build warships for the Nazi occupiers. And by the end of the war, after years of occupation, they had not completed one single warship for their oppressors. 

If all of these people can resist, and in the darkest of times, so can we. We need to catch courage from one another and from their stories. We need to remember that the fear, the anxiety, the worry, the concern, the love, the heartbreak, the grief, the sorrow, the anger, the outrage that we feel today was felt by them too, in their situations. And the one thing that changed everything was they decided to take nonviolent action.

These are the stories that change everything. These are the stories that we must know and share with one another. We know that nonviolent action has stopped coups and ousted dictators and ended authoritarian regimes and Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Belgium, Colombia, South Korea, Pakistan, Sudan, Thailand, Bolivia, Czechoslovakia, Benin, Nepal, East Germany, Mali, the Soviet Union, Malawi, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Serbia, Mongolia, Peru, Georgia, the Philippines, Lebanon, Tunisia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and more. 

If that list alone blows your mind, keep listening to this series on Candlelight: Nonviolence in Dark Times. We’ll be sharing some of these stories. As Medea Benjamin wrote in the book Nonviolent Lives, for the foreword, “One of the best antidotes to despair is reading about the lives of people who never gave up, visionaries who believed in the impossible despite the overwhelming obstacles they faced; visionaries who never resorted to violence despite the violence unleashed against them; visionaries who turned the impossible into the inevitable.” We too can turn what seems impossible into what now seems inevitable.

Learn these stories, take these stories to heart, and let them like a candle illuminate the dark night, pass on their spark to other people, and keep us going until we arrive in the dawn.

Thank you all. I’m Rivera Sun, and this is Candlelight: Nonviolence in Dark Times.

The post Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times appeared first on Rivera Sun.

Flooding Snitch Lines, Blocking Wi-Fi To Fossil Fuel Insurers & Resisting the Politics of Hate

Remix of a protest against nuclear power plant, South Korea, 2015. Image by Daeyong Wee on Pixabay.

The inauguration of Donald Trump to a second term as president of the United States unleashed a new chapter in resistance. The politics of hate was given the keys to some of the highest positions of power in the world. The situation seems bleak … but the history of nonviolent struggle shows that we have more power than we think. People have ousted dictators, ended occupations, and overthrown authoritarian regimes over and over again. In the past few months, Bangladesh successfully rose up against its corrupt and repressive regime, and South Korea halted an attempted power grab under martial law. Their stories should remind all of us that dramatic change is possible even under difficult conditions.

Resistance to Trump and his policies is already underway. Across the US, tens of thousands of people marched in protest, though the crowds were far smaller than during the Women’s March in 2017. However, this may not reflect the scope of resistance, as many have shifted from acts of symbolic protest to organizing strategies of noncooperation. Numerous groups are circulating resistance guides that remind people of how they can refuse to cooperate or obey unjust laws or policies. Some are specifically tailored to federal workers. Others focus on lessons from global struggles against dictators and authoritarians.

Concerned about ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids in targeted cities nationwide (Los Angeles, Chicago, Bakersfield, etc.), local groups have been preparing to thwart mass deportations for months. Many migrant rights groups are circulating “know your rights” fliers and preparing plans to protect and support migrants (and their children). Chicago rallied against immigration raids, saying, “we’re ready to resist”. Grand Rapids, MI, provided education and training to their community on resistance tactics. Sanctuary Churches are refusing to be intimidated. Labor unions have been combining direct action, political action, and negotiated protections to resist the immigration crackdown.

In California, migrant workers stayed out of the fields; in some locations as many as 77% of workers did not show up to their jobs due to threats of ICE raids. Most media narratives framed this as “vulnerable migrants were afraid to come to work”. But that narrative denies migrants the agency and power of their nonviolent action. Were they simply staying away because of fear? Or could this be viewed as coordinated resistance – similar to a strike – against ICE? If we see this action as a form of resistance, it reveals a source of power in immigrants’ hands right now. Imagine if they held a nationwide strike and put the pressure on their employers to demand that the Trump Administration back off …

Shifting from narratives of fear and powerlessness into narratives of intentional, coordinated resistance can unleash our potential for effective action. It helps break through the sense of frozen immobility that many people feel when faced with an authoritarian regime. And courage is contagious. An Episcopal minister stood up at the inauguration and bravely prayed for the president to remember his compassion for LGBTQ+, migrants, and others that he has targeted with his policies. Her speech stunned listeners; some with impressed respect for the minister’s courage, others (including the president) with scowls of disapproval. In the aftermath of backlash against her for speaking out, supportive citizens are writing her thank-you letters to counter the hate mail.

Resistance isn’t limited to the United States either. The rise of right-wing governments has people worldwide on alert; Germany and Austria turned out tens of thousands of people to oppose the far-right. Amidst this context, Trump and his supporters’ offensive words and policies are setting off outraged protests across the globe. After Elon Musk flashed what looked like a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, German activists projected a giant image of the gesture and #HeilTesla onto the side of the billionaire’s car factory. Hundreds of Canadians joined People’s Marches in several cities and hats with the slogan “Canada Is Not For Sale” are going viral. Panamanians are similarly insulted by Trump’s threats to takeover the Panama Canal, rallying in protest. As for Greenland, after the inauguration was moved indoors, a satirical post circulated social media saying, “If Trump can’t handle one polar vortex, he can’t handle Greenland.”

Though largely symbolic, these actions serve an important role in countering authoritarian regimes: they catalyze people’s feisty willingness to defy tyrants. In the United States, we can see that same effect unfolding around the tactic of flooding “snitch lines”. As right-wing government officials set up websites for reporting resistance to right-wing agendas, people are submitting large volumes of false reports, protest comments, or just random text to render the snitch lines inoperable. For example, queer activists and allies overloaded a Missouri government website for reporting gender-affirming care with fanfiction, rambling anecdotes, and the Bee Movie script. An email snitch line for reporting federal employees refusing to comply with Trump’s DEIA-banning executive order is being flooded with fake reports. (I sent in this one: A man named Donald Trump is doing affirmative action for billionaires and oligarchs against the mandate to stop hiring minority groups. Here’s the email, in case you need it: DEIAtruth@opm.gov)

Trump is not unstoppable. There are at least 5 popular checks on Trump’s power, including labor unions, a revived peace movement, and support for immigrant neighbors. Even Trump’s abject climate denialism is countered by the growing momentum of climate wins. A cascade of changes – from divestments from fossil fuels to stopped oil and gas projects to renewable energy conversions – may propel us toward a climate transition whether Trump wants it or not. You can read about many of these in our recent report on 366+ Success Stories In 2024.

This week’s Nonviolence News highlights even more climate victories: China broke its own record for rapidly expanding solar and wind energy sources. Uzbekistan launched a tree-planting and herb garden program that hires low-income families. A nature reserve in California finally kicked out cattle ranchers to allow elk more habitat. The US microgrid movement is growing, decentralizing renewable power. Wind farms powered one third of Ireland’s energy needs this year. Kazakhstan has led a 16-year effort to restore water levels in the Aral Sea, which is now 50% higher than in 2008. Barcelona’s Superblocks are demonstrating how car-free zones in cities lead to healthier, happier human beings. Ecuador’s marine ecosystems now have legal rights, along the nation’s forests, mangrove swamps, and animals.

Environmental activists aren’t resting on any laurels, however. The scale of the climate crisis – and the short timeline – mean that the changes we need have to vastly outstrip all the successes we’ve had so far. Some climate activists are escalating the intensity of direct actions, finding ways to deny fossil fuel supporters access to the things they need to operate. In London, activists ‘blockaded’ wi-fi access to fossil fuel insurance agents and offices by cutting their fiber optic cables.

In more Nonviolence News, the Russian anti-war movement continues to persist in holding “small actions against a huge and angry machine”. President Biden released imprisoned Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier. Iraqi women, children, and human rights groups reacted in horror to the new laws legalizing child marriages as young as 9 years old. New York University (NYU) students who organized nonviolent actions opposing Israeli genocide received 1-year suspensions. The sudden influx of TikTok users to RedNote has some peace activists excited about the rare, uncensored cultural exchanges and the peacebuilding potential between US and Chinese citizens.

Curious what else has been happening this week? Check out the 85 stories we gathered in preparation for writing this article. You can find them in our Nonviolence News Research Archive. Many of them will make you think about nonviolence differently, including the stories about a mutual aid wildfire relief effort by teen girls for teen girls, an Indigenous celebration of a baby orca, and how public transit and participatory budgeting can dismantle police and police brutality.

Helping us recognize nonviolence in action is part of what Nonviolence News does best. For example, last week we shared a piece about Pirate Care, acts of civil disobedience to provide care and services to groups and individuals denied care by the state or society. This week, that story gives us a new framework through which to think about the doctors who set up an unsanctioned overdose treatment site in a tent outside their hospital. It’s not just an isolated act of protest, or a random form of noncooperation or defiance. It’s part of Pirate Care and is connected to a field of other actions rejecting state-sanctioned callousness, discrimination, and cruelty with creative noncooperation, alternative institutions, and civil disobedience.

Gathering the stories of nonviolence together helps us construct a picture of what’s happening. Nonviolent movements are often improvised, emergent, asynchronous, and multi-stranded. By observing the seemingly disparate stories in a larger context, we get to re-envision current events in a way that is illuminating and empowering. It offers us hope in hard times. It gives us ideas for action. It helps us make sense of a world engulfed in vast changes … and our role in the story of these times.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun has written numerous books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Her articles are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds of journals nationwide. Rivera Sun serves on the board of Backbone Campaign and the advisory board of World BEYOND War. www.riverasun.com

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