Rivera Sun's Blog: From the Desk of Rivera Sun, page 8

Hurricane Eve – Winds of Change

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy. You can find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

A high wind smacked the water, kicking up waves that glinted grey as the overcast sky. Barrie eyed the river warily as he slurped his coffee. He set the mug down and tied a second bowline to the copse of trees in the eddying inlet. The first smatter of raindrops hit the half-bare branches and withered leaves of the trees. Barrie flipped on the radio. He fiddled with the knob, adjusting the signal. A crackled report came through. Amidst the garble, Barrie picked out the words: gulf, hurricane, superstorm.

“Won’t be moving today,” he murmured. The Gulf storms had ratcheted up in intensity year after year as climate denialism flourished under the corporate-controlled government. Every year of delay and inaction destabilized the climate further. The high tides crashed further into coastal cities, surging up through storm drains, flooding whole neighborhoods. The centers of continents crisped with 110° degree heat bombs. The droughts were trouble enough, but it was the weirding of the weather in extreme oscillations that spelled doom for humanity. Over the Great Lakes, polar vortex blizzards crashed miles of power lines down. Snow in the Midwest in late June killed thousands of acres of crops. Tornadoes tripled in size and ferocity, hurling towns across the prairie like gods in a temper tantrum.

But it was the hurricane season superstorms that terrified Barrie. This far inland, they’d be plastered with monsoon-worthy rain, but the brunt of the one hundred and twenty miles per hour winds would be slowed. The winds would trip over New Orleans, drag their feet into Louisiana’s swamps, and stagger through Mississippi. By the time they got here, they’d be strong enough to strip the branches bare, but not to flip the Twain over. As the rivers flooded, the currents would surge, unpredictable and treacherous.

“We’ll be hunkering down here for a few days,” he informed Charlie and Zadie.

They nodded, eyes wide and worried over the weather report. From its coffee can prison, his cellphone jangled. He opened it and scowled as he stabbed at the touchscreen trying to turn it on. Managing it at last, he answered.

“Hello? Yeah, was just about to call you. Hmm. No, sorry to say she’s running high and wide. Newbury’s looking like Venice. The wetlands are full up? Ah. I see. Well, I’ll come down right after the storm passes and lend a hand. Sounds like you’ll need boats.”

He hung up and closed his eyes for a long moment.

“What’s happening?” Zadie asked, a clench of worry seizing her.

“The Sisters of St. Joseph in New Orleans called to check on the Miss. These floodwaters are hurtling downstream and will collide with the storm surge. The Maribeau Wetlands are already brimming. The city’ll flood.”

“What are the Mirabeau Wetlands?” Charlie asked.

They were a miracle borne from the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina. The twenty-five acre grounds had once housed a Catholic convent. The buildings had been completely flattened by the storm. The Sisters, praying for guidance, spent years contemplating how best to rebuild and serve their ministry . . . and the planet. For theirs was a double mission: shepherding the people and stewarding the Earth. Twenty-five acres in the heart of New Orleans had reckless developers salivating over the potential, but God interceded and sent the nuns a vision: make the area into the nation’s largest urban wetlands. Using a natural design, the area mitigated the heavy rains and frequent floods that hit the region. The wetlands could offer recreation space in dry times and water catchment in wet weather. With the rebuilt levee system of the Army Corps of Engineers already sinking beneath tidal surges, the Mirabeau Wetlands offered to serve an entire city of four hundred thousand people and nature.

But even that beautiful garden couldn’t stop the mighty collision of river water and hurricane. Hurricane Eve would hit land with all the vengeance of a woman scorned. She was coming. There was no stopping her.

Charlie, Zadie, and Barrie waited out the storm north of Jackson, Mississippi. Even this far inland, the trees whipped and the rain lashed and the Twain rocked and sloshed on its moorings. Barrie offered to take them to a hotel, but they declined. Hundreds of thousands of families had evacuated the mouth of the Mississippi. Charlie and Zadie stayed on the Twain and organized disaster relief among the Dandelions. They crowd-funded to make entire regional hotel chains available for poor families. They connected local insurrectionists with evacuees to provide shelter. They pressured inland town officials to open their gymnasiums and community centers to those fleeing the brunt of the hurricane.

It is time, Charlie wrote, to once again live up to our motto: be kind, be connected, be unafraid.

Be kind . . . let your compassion lead you into action.

Be connected . . . be the indivisible nation that we aspire to be.

Be unafraid . . . and show up to take care of each other.

From the makeshift office of his Twain shack, Barrie helped them mobilize shelter for Hurricane Eve asylum seekers. He lined the tin roof with blankets to muffle the din of the downpour. He charged the battery packs for their phones, first off the solar charger, then with the diesel converter rigged up to the outboard motor. He brewed coffee at midnight and brought an extra blanket for Zadie when her teeth started chattering. Perhaps, he grudgingly conceded as they worked, there was a time and place for technology. He had planned to sail into New Orleans as the storm receded and rescue those who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave, but even as he sat here waiting, Charlie and Zadie and the Dandelions had assisted millions.

Charlie’s grandfather called, both of them hollering over the deluge of rain. Valier rattled on in French for several minutes before Charlie understood the gist of the old man’s message.

“Wait – you raised how much?” he blurted, shocked.

“Deux millions!” Valier answered proudly. “Two million, Charlie!”

He had called every single French Acadian family in the St. John Valley, invoking their cultural connection to the Cajuns to gather relief funds for the city. During Le Grand Dérangement in 1755-1764, the British had expelled most of the Acadians from Northern Maine and New Brunswick, sending many of them south to Louisiana. Thousands died along the way. Years later, some returned to the northern lands, reclaiming homes and farms, but the Acadians who remained in the south became the Cajuns.

“They are our brothers and sisters, my grandson Charlie’s distant relatives!” Valier had declared, pestering his neighbors nonstop until they turned out their pockets to contribute to the relief effort.

“That’s amazing, grand-père,” Charlie shouted, plugging his other ear so he could hear above the howl of the storm. “I didn’t think our valley had two dimes to rub together.”

“Bah, voyons,” Valier exclaimed. “They don’t. We only raised a thousand, but I got the churches involved and les Canadiens. They started calling the French on the continent, and voila! Deux millions.“

The old man was fit to burst with pride. Charlie hung up, deeply moved, and relayed the news to Barrie and Zadie.

“Disasters like this will be the making or breaking of America,” Barrie remarked. “Hearing this gives me hope that the best of us will show up to redefine patriotism from love of one’s country to love of one another. We can build our identity not on corporate brands or short-sighted nationalism, but on how well we rally to take care of each other.”

Charlie glanced up from the screen. The bluish light reflected in his eyes.

“May I quote you on that?” he paused as he choked up. “That was . . . beautiful.”

“Just get my name right: H. L. Barrie, i and e, no reason y.”

As the hurricane slammed the coast and dropped continent-sized armloads of water inland, the Mississippi spilled her banks. She hit historic high-water marks, hundred year flood lines, all-time records . . . and then she kept on flooding. She swallowed farm towns and cut off cities. She turned roads into canals and fields into lakes. Still, the clouds kept raining, the river continued rising, and there was nowhere for the water to go except into the thousand mile-long river valley basin.

Whole cargo containers were dragged off train side rails. The waters tore out dikes and shoved up into industrial areas. Box stores and warehouses turned into island archipelagos. The water table rose beneath the ground, bubbling up in old basements far above the river. Foul water seethed out from drains carrying the stench of sewage. Old diseases from medieval times resurfaced as sanitation systems broke down. Bloated corpses from hog farms washed downstream in nightmarish scenes. Green algae-filled sewage and sludge ponds overflowed and poured their toxic soup into the brown and angry floodwaters. The factories along Cancer Alley oozed with leaking containment ponds. The military was recalled from overseas bases to help with the rescue operations. Dramatic footage of helicopters and ocean vessels collecting people from rooftops of homes, hospitals, even clinging to a church steeple, deluged the media.

As soon as the brunt of the storm passed, Barrie’s boat sped southward. New Orleans drew closer on the horizon. On either bank, the damage and destruction increased by the mile. They closed in on the city. The devastation around New Orleans shocked them. There was no river edge, only a sea of flooded streets. As they approached, a second boat motored into sight. The captain lifted her hand to Barrie. A third boat came up behind them, then another and another, until a veritable fleet sailed down the Mississippi to help with disaster relief. Some bore supplies; others brought volunteers. One carried a deck full of white-robed doctors and nurses in green scrubs.

The flooded neighborhoods teemed with activity, much of it odd and startling, tinged with a sense of surrealism. In the streets-turned-canals, a group of men, waist deep and shirtless, hauled a floating house against the pooling currents. A bantam rooster perched on a roof next to a supremely aloof tabby cat. On a church ridgepole, a row of people sat in resignation, waiting for deliverance in the form of a boat. The debris of a bouncy ball hut bobbed colorfully against the grey walls of the cemetery crypts. On the next street, a pack of kids poled an inflatable mattress down the streets, salvaging and scavenging.

The strangeness grew as they got closer to the coast. One hundred and twenty miles per hour winds had ripped roofs off houses and left walls splayed like half-opened boxes. The entire contents of a superstore had washed out the broken sliding doors into the submerged parking lot; plastic toys knocked against the windshields of abandoned cars. There was a line of people pushing seniors in wheelchairs up a turnpike bridge, rescuing the residents of a nearby retirement village. Houses had been blown off foundations, crushing cars underneath them like metallic wicked witches of Oz. Much of the devastation was marked by loss, the absence of the ordinary. It was an invisible wreckage that only the locals could see: the lake with a neighborhood hidden beneath, the place where a store should have stood; the absence of landmarks, the water-surged relocation of an anguished Virgin Mary statue who opened her arms on the front step of a demolished school.

They motored in near silence until they reached a Spanish-style convent. The pink plastered walls darkened at the waterline. A bustle of activity teemed near the covered porch that encircled the building. Boats congregated around as black-robed nuns coordinated supply, delivery, and rescue operations. They cheered at Barrie’s hollered greetings and without a moment’s fanfare, he and his guests were drafted into helping. The Sisters were repackaging donated food goods into smaller boxes to deliver all over the city. Charlie teamed up with Barrie, grabbing crates and lending his young back to loading and unloading. Zadie joined the nuns – specifically, a tiny bird of a sister who worked indefatigably and spoke with boisterous French and Spanish-accented enthusiasm. Her habit was scandalously tucked up into her belt, revealing no-nonsense jeans underneath. She refused to wear a wimple, and the rising heat made her dark brown hair curl in a furious wrestling match with the humid air. They spoke in snatches between hauling boxes.

“Sister Theodesia is my name, just call me Theo,” she insisted.

The nun’s compact strength belied the weathering of five decades. She bent at the knees and hefted a cardboard box that clinked with jars of peanut butter. Zadie stacked packages of crackers into her arms and followed her into the other room. The day passed in a blur. Zadie remembered only a whirl of faces. At dusk, her back ached with the recollection of innumerable box loads moved from hall to kitchen to porch to boat. She saw Charlie only twice amidst the fleet of small dories and larger skiffs that moored against the old convent to load and then departed to deliver sustenance to water-trapped families. The next day was the same. And the next. They slept on the Twain. Barrie docked each night alongside the convent’s porch rails. In between hauling boxes and handing out relief packages, Zadie and Charlie made sure the nation poured their hearts into helping out their fellow citizens.

They called millions of Dandelions into the relief effort in an historic appeal:

“We are a continent of a country, larger than our fears, bigger than our petty greed. We must rise to care for one another, to help our fellow citizens in the wake of disaster. Let us open our schools and churches, auditoriums and gymnasiums to take in those displaced from their homes. Let us give from our pantries and gardens. Let us volunteer to deliver supplies. Let us staff emergency shelters. Let us help clean up the debris and offer our help when the time to rebuild arrives.”

In the crisis, the best and the worst of the nation were revealed.

“If we cannot find common cause in caring for ourselves as one country, indivisible, regardless of background or political beliefs, then we have no right to think of ourselves as a nation. If we will not care for each other in times of need, if we will not bend our collective strength to this task, calling upon our citizens, businesses, institutions, government, and whole society to take care of each and every one of us . . . then who are we truly? Are we the people we aspire to be? Or are we merely three hundred and twenty million miserable crooks and criminals robbing each other for our own comforts and pleasures?”

To say it was a watershed moment was an understatement. As the floodwaters began to recede and the worst of the damage was revealed, Charlie and Zadie called upon Congress to pass a Relief Bill and a New Deal-style work program to provide jobs for the people as they helped their nation in its hour of need. Charlie rang up Brad Andersen and corralled him into helping.

“You’ll owe me for this,” the DC fixer told him.

“Maybe you owe me for putting your heart in the right place,” Charlie countered, “and for saving your soul from its usual state of perdition.”

He hung up with a disgusted sigh and turned his attention to other things.

Zadie, always outspoken about greed and inequality, called upon Dandelion Insurrectionists to disrupt all the luxury affairs of the rich, demanding that they put the suffering of their fellow citizens ahead of their social pleasures. Starling and Sparrow mobilized murmurations in ten major cities. Fifteen thousand people participated. Tens of millions of private dollars poured into citizen-led relief funds and mutual aid networks.

We cannot accept the highway robbery of business-as-usual in times like this, Charlie wrote. We cannot be a country that continues to selfishly profit from the wreckage and upheaval that greed has wrought.

“And why stop there?” Zadie asked as she worked with Charlie on their latest appeal. They were huddled in the head nun’s office, using the spotty wifi running off the generator. “Shouldn’t the richest country in the world also be the most generous? Not just in philanthropy and in donations, but in mutual aid networks and fair wages, affordable housing, healthcare, and free college education?”

“But Zadie,” Charlie argued, fingers poised over the keypad, “if we did all those things, those fair and ethical things, we wouldn’t be the richest country in the world anymore.”

She tossed him a contemptuous lip curl.

“Of course we would,” she countered, “but we wouldn’t measure wealth by adding up rich people’s hoards and private stockpiles. We’d measure it in collective wellbeing, health, quality of existence, access to opportunity, and happiness indexes.”

She had a point. Charlie wrote it down.

We can forge a new spirit for our country based on how deeply we care for one another. In our hour of need, we can judge patriotism not by our willingness to wage endless war, but by endlessly expanding our capacity to care.

A sense of national pride could be found, not in narrow lines of race or class, but in the deep upswell of care shown by ordinary people to their fellow citizens. The generosity pouring into relief funds and mutual aid networks, volunteering and sheltering evacuees, revealed that the citizens had cast their vote for compassion. Patriotism had to include taking care of one’s fellow citizens, indeed, all of humanity. Charlie made sure the memo reached the desks of politicians, demanding that they open the public coffers as generously to the people as they had for the corporations. He insisted that the government raise the taxes on the wealthy and put those funds to work for the wellbeing of country. A poor person who donated their last dollar was as generous as a millionaire who gave away their entire fortune, he reminded them. The rich should aspire to be as radically generous as the working class and the poor.

The message was loud and clear: we, the People, love our people. And if you do not . . . then what exactly do you mean when you claim to love this country?

___________________________

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy. You can find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

Turning Up The Heat – Winds of Change

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third part of the Dandelion Trilogy. You can get the novel by supporting the Community Publishing Campaign here>>

Heat flattened the city. Asphalt gleamed, shiny and malevolent. Concrete endured in washed-out weariness. Anything green wilted and crisped at the edges in the inferno of the record-breaking summer temperatures. Heat waves curled off the concrete, steel, tar, glass, and brick. As he navigated traffic, Charlie battled the sense of doom pressing down on his perspiring brow. These scorchers plastered the country earlier and longer each year. It was the inevitable effect of corporatists lying about climate change, refusing to act, stalling all attempts to transition away from fossil fuels and factory farms and the carbon emitters that turned up the planet’s heat like a gas oven.

Boston evoked images of rowers on the Charles River, minutemen mobilizing against redcoats, Harvard crimson and masses of college students, a harbor port and a tangled sea of serpentine roads and highways. When Tansy told them they’d find Elisha Adams at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon, their minds leapt to the small, historic steeple-and-column brick building that was now a museum. Instead, they pulled up in the parking structure of a hulking concrete monster that seemed to be auditioning for the Star Wars franchise.

“Wasn’t expecting that,” Charlie confessed.

Instead of evoking a sense of revolutionary times, the beige top-heavy building carried itself with an air of Big Brother and the weight of bureaucracy. It was a place where revolutions died under mounds of paperwork. With a sense of foreboding, they checked-in with the clerk, passed through the metal detectors, and strode through the dimly lit, low-ceilinged corridors until they reached the city council chambers. The semi-circle of councilors’ chairs was flanked on either side by citizen seating. It was oddly reminiscent of bleachers at a high school basketball court. The meeting was well underway so they slid in quietly.

In the center, bearing up under the scowls of the officials, a young Black teen in a fuchsia T-shirt and blue jeans testified to the city council members. She held her chin high, arguing with precision and passion. Beside her, a girl with jet-black hair and chicory-toned skin clutched a stack of documents. Charlie squinted, but couldn’t read the titles on the folders. Next to her, a pale Goth of a teen with a shocking blue-dyed, half-shaved haircut whispered to the others. The trio huddled shoulder-to-shoulder as they addressed the impassive faces of the council.

“Running that gas pipeline – an explosion waiting to happen – through our neighborhood is environmental racism,” the Black teen argued. “Our area already has the worst rates of asthma and lung disease from the city incinerator, the industrial park, and the smog patterns. Now, you want to put in a leaky pipeline to a natural gas export terminal that will do nothing but kill us and the planet? Uh-uh. I don’t think so.”

“Ms. Adams, your time is up.”

“Fine. Meera, you’re up next.”

She handed the mic off to the petite East Indian girl as the mayor tried to interrupt. Elisha ignored him, brown eyes fierce. She had petitioned for months to put this issue on the city agenda. She’d called them directly. She and her friends had organized sit-ins at the councilors’ offices only to be told the same line over and over: it was a done deal and they should have spoken up sooner.

Elisha didn’t buy it. Wrong was wrong. Slavery wasn’t acceptable just because the enslaved hadn’t filed a petition on time. It wasn’t right to steal the Indigenous Peoples’ lands because they didn’t send in enough public comments in opposition. Just because a group of money-grubbing corporatists had shoved this deal through didn’t mean her community was going to roll over and die.

“Last weekend,” Meera told the irate mayor in a quiet but clear voice, “a bunch of us blockaded the pipeline’s construction route in two places. One was uptown in an affluent neighborhood. The other was on our block. Both groups were arrested, but if you look at these photos . . . “

She nudged the third youth to hold up poster-sized prints and swivel to make sure everyone saw the images. In one, a pair of white-haired, white-skinned grandmothers were being politely escorted into a police van. In the other, Elisha was pouring milk into the eyes of her tear-gassed twelve-year-old cousin. In the next photo, Meera’s Puerto Rican neighbor was face down on the asphalt, bleeding as police hogtied him. In the third, a crowd of protesters threw their hands over their ears in agony as the police used eardrum-splitting sound cannons to force them to disperse.

“We’re here today not just because this gas export project is deadly to all of humanity, not just because it is extracted from under the feet of outraged communities in Western Massachusetts, not just because this pipeline was rejected in a wealthier area and dumped on the poor; not just because the increased toxins in the air are yet another act of environmental racism, not just because the city police violently cracked down on lower income and people of color residents for doing the exact same thing as white and affluent residents uptown, and not just because the whole approval of this plan was sneaky and underhanded,” Meera paused for breath. “I’m here because the entire system of so-called democracy has completely failed ninety-nine percent of your constituents in the short term, and all of us in the long term.”

If they built this terminal, it would be terminal for people and planet.

“You are out of line, Ms. Sundaran, and your time is up. Please sit down, the three of you,” the mayor ordered.

“No,” Elisha refused.

None of them moved. Meera passed the mic to the third youth.

“For the record, I’m Frankie Mirelli. My family runs Mirelli’s Bakery in the North End,” the teen said, scratching the back of their skinny jeans with their sneaker. They’d been born Frances Mirelli, but they hadn’t gone by that name since kindergarten. In middle school, they’d declared themselves non-binary – a fact that Frankie’s Italian-American father still refused to acknowledge, even though their grandmother had explained gender neutral pronouns in two languages to him.

What do I care if Frankie’s a boy or a girl or something special? Nonna had declared. What’s so hard about they/them pronouns? They’re my grandkid, no matter what.

 Frankie adored Nonna. But they’d been crashing at Elisha’s after the last shouting match with their dad – which was how they knew how bad the air was in that part of town.

“It stinks,” Frankie told the officials. “And you won’t do nothing about it. You won’t talk about the pipeline or the export terminal. You won’t hold hearings. You won’t listen to us when we call. You won’t put it on the agenda.”

“We don’t have time for everything,” the mayor cut in.

“You have time!” Elisha shot back.

On the docket of today’s council meeting were budget items that paid for scooters for Ivy League college students, city funds for yet another public-private development partnership for constructing high-end condos, and a stimulus program for large rock concerts in the privately-owned sports stadium. Today, millions of dollars would be approved for the already rich and privileged.

Elisha and her friends had had enough.

“We’re not giving up the floor until you give up on this pipeline,” Elisha shouted.

“Yeah,” Frankie added, speaking into the mic. “We’re shutting you down until you shut it down!”

The mayor cleared his throat impatiently. The teens had long surpassed their three-minute public comment allocation.

“You are violating others’ right to be heard,” the mayor tried to say.

“Bullshit.”

The room flinched at Elisha cussing. The teen scowled back. She and her friends had asked this city council a hundred times to hold metropolis-wide discussions on climate adaptation plans. That would be honoring people’s right to be heard. Elisha knew that the officials tracked how many times she, Meera, and Frankie had sent texts and emails about this. The city clerk could pull up their dossier in thirty seconds flat. The police officer assigned to the city council meetings was fidgeting, just waiting for the signal to throw them out . . . again. Last time, they’d been warned that they’d be arrested if they continued to disrupt the proceedings.

“We are in a global emergency,” Meera spoke up again, earnest and impassioned. “Instead of building an export terminal, you should be listening to the people. They have solutions. They have plans and ideas. They should be empowered to be part of the process – no, scratch that, they should be at the heart of this process.”

“I’m sorry, your time is up – “

“Maybe your time is up, Mr. Mayor,” she rebutted. “You’ve had years to deal with these issues and all you’ve done is make the crisis worse. We don’t have another decade to do nothing. We need change now.”

Zadie’s grin split her face at the teens’ boldness. Tansy had grumblingly described Elisha Adams as a rabble-rousing, young troublemaker, but Zadie took that wording as a form of praise. She knew their lawyer had a soft spot for instigators. When pressed, Tansy had pursed her lips and said Elisha got into more trouble than anyone she knew – barring Charlie and Zadie, of course – and had gained local notoriety for both activism and pranks of a historical nature.

“Like a Boston Commons pop-up store and impromptu makers market, for example,” Tansy told them, “or a memorial service for Crispus Attucks, the Black man who was the first – and often forgotten – casualty of the Revolutionary War. She even held a Thanksgiving Day small pox die-in at Plymouth. I’ve been her lawyer since she was twelve and decided to steal a horse to crash the Fourth of July Paul Revere Race dressed up as Sybil Luddington, the teenage girl who really rallied the minutemen.”

But Elisha’s stunts didn’t stop at historical antics. She had been organizing for social justice since middle school, and today’s challenge to City Hall was just one of a long series.

“Your time is up, councilors,” she said. “It’s time to cancel the pipeline project. It’s time to stop that export terminal. It’s time for people-power to replace your foot-dragging and inaction.”

She spun to the bleacher seats, appealing to the scattered citizens.

“Who will stand with us?” Elisha Adams demanded, swiveling to look around for supporters.

Someone coughed. Another squirmed. A few people hastily looked away as the girl’s gaze sought their solidarity. The long moment stretched painfully as citizens wrestled with their consciences. They still held out hope that the political process would work, that the councilors would rally to the crisis, that they didn’t need to take drastic action.

Zadie pursed her lips, scowling. This, right here, was the very phenomenon she and Charlie had led an insurrection to prevent: citizens’ concerns ignored, corporate officials dragging their feet on important issues, people cut out of the political process. She rose before Charlie could reach out and stop her. She strode down the bleacher steps to the center aisle. Astonished gasps and murmurs leapt up as people recognized her. She heard her name whispered from one person to the next.

Zadie drew close to Elisha Adams, Frankie Mirelli, and Meera Sundaran. She stilled.

Who will stand with us? the teens had asked.

“I will,” Zadie Byrd Gray answered.

She tossed a grin at the astonished teens. The mayor signaled to the police officer. He charged forward and the room erupted into chaos.

_________________________

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third part of the Dandelion Trilogy. You can get the novel by supporting the Community Publishing Campaign here>>

The Democracy Lab – Winds of Change

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy. Find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

____________________

The Democracy Lab’s Forum took place in an old chapel which had been stripped of religious iconography. It had been converted into a theater-in-the-round by removing the pews and circling concentric rings of chairs around a central open space.

“Our mission, here at the Democracy Lab,” Olli informed them, “is to empower citizens to engage in vast experiments in democracy, as if they were searching for remedies for what ails us.”

The Democracy Lab was a wild, unruly beast. The people were boisterous, brimming with ideas and enthusiasm. They were all ages and backgrounds. They had come to explore one complex subject: democracy.

“There’s no wrong way to make a democracy,” Olli told Charlie and Zadie, “and no singular right way, either.”

The more experiments, the merrier; that was the Democracy Lab’s unofficial motto. Charlie and Zadie had been invited to speak at the Forum. Zadie planned to use the time to relay a request from Elisha Adams, Meera Sundaran, and Frankie Mirelli. The three teens had been following the cross-country journey avidly all summer. A couple of days ago, they had phoned Zadie.

“We’ve been thinking,” Frankie began, their voice tinny on speakerphone. “Now that you’ve riled up the country for real democracy – “

” – you should ask everyone to do it,” Elisha interrupted.

“Like the constructive programs that Gandhi did,” Meera put in. “Every day, each citizen should do real democracy, practice it a little bit, put it to work in their lives.”

Charlie and Zadie had explored this idea with the teens that day on the beach. They’d strolled to the far end, down by the breakwater jetty where the crowds thinned out. The wind had swept over their skin, siphoning off the seawater, leaving the salt, gritty and primordial, a reminder of the long journey of humankind’s evolution. Meera remembered rubbing her forearm with her palm and thinking of her great-grandfather who had stood on the beach with Gandhi, lifting a fistful of sand and seawater, poised to shake the foundations of British rule. Salt and homespun cloth had set India free, giving millions a symbolic and tangible way to stop paying the British for imported cloth and the daily necessity of salt. By wearing the homespun khadi and making salt in defiance of the British monopoly, the two campaigns made a significant dent in the colonial government’s tax revenues. They also galvanized people into opposing unjust laws, demonstrating their support for independence and defying British authority.

The question that kept Meera up at night was: what is our salt?

For the United States, a nation struggling to end the rule of rich people and giant corporations, what were our versions of Gandhi’s salt and spinning wheel? Local food and small business, of course. At the heart of all constructive programs was the principle of self-sufficiency. Frankie, Elisha, and Meera had chatted about this as they beachcombed.

“A community reliant on imports, giant corporations, slavery, or other injustices is weak,” Meera commented as they strolled northward along the curving shore. “It is dependent on those systems when it should be autonomous. Gandhi saw that. The early American Independence movement recognized that. If we’re going to keep off the yoke of corporate and oligarchic control, we must build local self-sufficiency.”

Charlie glanced westward toward the sedge-crested dunes, the dark forests, and the distant city. Ninety percent of their daily goods came from somewhere else. It made them dependent on the corporations that produced these goods. What would the nation be like if ninety percent of their food, clothing, entertainment, products and services were created within a hundred-mile radius of their homes? It would be a startlingly different world.

“Beyond local production,” Meera went on, side-stepping the next brush of a salty wave, “Gandhi had programs for education because the colonizers shouldn’t control the knowledge of the people.”

Zadie nodded. Her Indigenous friend, Kinap, had spoken to her at length about the efforts for food, water, energy, and education sovereignty among the Penobscot Nation and other Indigenous Nations. Local power built resiliency and responsiveness to the unique characteristics and strengths of an area. In many ways, local resilience was democracy in action.

“Gandhi also restored the local justice systems,” Elisha put in, remembering her father speaking about this, “so the Indians could take the fate of their people out of the hands of the British court system. For us, the parallel is restorative justice. My dad was big on that. He helped keep kids out of the punitive justice system and used restorative justice to get at the underlying problems.”

Now, Meera, Elisha, and Frankie thought it was time to add democracy to that list of constructive programs. A constructive program had to be symbolic and tangible. It had to be something everyone could do. With dialogues, public policy crafting, participatory polling, wisdom circles, and more, real democracy was as tactile as making salt from seawater or spinning cotton into thread. A constructive program should build the strength of the people and lessen their dependency on their oppressors. It should have revolutionary potential even if it wasn’t directly confrontational. Participatory democracy was all of these things.

Democracy should be a daily practice. It was a family collectively deciding the week’s dinner menu. It was teachers asking their students what they wanted to study. It was unhoused persons setting group rules for their encampments. It was joining an artist collective that created community-designed murals. It was the old guys on the block pooling their tools and turning one person’s garage into a tool library. It was holding listening sessions with coworkers to find out how to improve life at the office. In the United States, these kinds of democracy projects held the keys to ending corporate rule, the rule of the rich.

These day-to-day democracy practices weren’t just about democratizing the bread-and-butter staples of our daily lives . . . they were the training grounds for the skills we needed to self-govern as a nation on every level and scale. The ability to listen deeply could be used by the manager of a hair salon as much as by the president of the United States. The capacity to reflect on contrasting opinions was a skill both church members and congress members should have. Every schoolchild should learn how to be part of a student assembly, how to listen, how to use hand signals, how to speak succinctly and to the point, how to learn from others and how to share their truth. Then, when they grew up, they would know how to participate in a workers’ assembly, a citizens’ assembly, a neighborhood assembly, a street assembly, and more. The skills we learn in local democracy serve us in every other place real democracy erupts.

But Americans couldn’t just read about real democracy online. They had to do it in their communities.

“Doing democracy is our version of Gandhi’s salt,” Meera told Zadie and Charlie. “It’s our spinning wheel. It’s something we can all do that helps us build our independence from the people who want to exploit and abuse us.”

There were dozens of ways for communities to make decisions together. The problem was, people weren’t using them. Like the Indians who nearly starved their traditional spinners and weavers to death because they wanted to buy imported British cloth, we had outsourced decision-making to politicians and bosses. The average citizen had little direct participation in the rules that affected their lives, and they were suffering because of it.

In order to have real democracy, the populace needed to learn how to listen to each other, talk with each other, and solve their problems, together. Like spinning yarn, democracy had to be a daily activity, part of a way of life. Like knowing how to work the fibers and turn the wheel, everyone should have practical skills for making decisions together. And, like wearing khadi, the plain-weave cloth in traditional style that became symbolic of Indian independence, every US citizen should find pride and powerful symbolism in the act of doing democracy.

Charlie and Zadie listened as the three youths explained. The teens wanted the pair to issue a call-to-action: don’t just read about democracy. Go out and practice it. Try it on for size. Take democracy for a test drive.

“If we’re going to scale up the movement,” Zadie replied, “we’re going to need more troubleshooters, teachers, and democracy repairmen than just Olli.”

Fortunately, Oliver Lang had friends at the Democracy Lab. The organization had started as a street experiment and grown into a loose network of scholars, trainers, and practitioners. They crowd-sourced the funds to buy the old convent when it came up for sale, securing a roof, a common kitchen, and rooms for both office space and residential study programs. In the Forum, the community gathered to debate and discuss the best practices, emerging experiments, and challenging questions around this thing called democracy.

“It’s not always this argumentative,” Olli apologized as the lambasting harangues made them wince. “They’re debating whether or not non-humans should have rights.”

“Non-humans?” Charlie queried as they walked down the narrow aisle from the door toward the center.

“Oh, not corporations,” Olli clarified, seeing the hard look on Charlie’s face. “We’ve debated that many times in the past, but today they’re talking about trees, animals, ecosystems, rivers, that sort of thing. Should the forests have rights and if so, then can the Loraxians really speak for the trees?”

“The Loraxians?” Zadie asked. The word evoked childhood memories of a fuzzy orange creature warning about the dangers of chopping down the Truffula trees.

“They use Seuss’ Lorax as a name, but it’s really the concept of humans offering representation to other species. That’s controversial. I mean, can the Beef Industry be trusted to speak in the best interests of cows? What about PETA or other animal rights groups? Who knows what wooly sheep dream about, let alone electric sheep – and don’t get me started on tech and robot rights!”

Olli rolled his eyes and slid into the second row from the front. Zadie squeezed in after him. Charlie eyed the stained glass windows and wondered if gods and angels, devils and mythological creatures would get representation some day – or maybe that was a good reason to maintain separation of church and state.

Olli glanced at the time and began rapping his knuckles on the back of the chair in front of him. The man to his right picked it up, then the next person.

“It’s a point-of-order signal. You’re on the schedule for the four o’clock slot,” Olli explained as the whole assembly replicated the metallic rapping.

As a single person, the tapping was barely audible. Multiplied by the whole room, the din was deafening. The heated exchange of the debaters faltered. One glanced around as if emerging from a deep-sea dive of logic and argument. The other blinked, then stuck out his hand. The pair shook and sat down. The people in the front ring of chairs gathered notes and coffee mugs then shuffled back into the secondary rows.

“If someone wishes to enter the debate,” Olli explained, “they step into the ring and sit in the first circle of chairs. The rest of us listen in the back rows until we have a point to make, then we step in. If we’ve had enough, we leave. It’s a bit like boxing, I suppose, but without the violence.”

He shrugged. It was one model. They used over a dozen more. On a whiteboard affixed to the stone columns of the cathedral ceiling, the names of the other formats were posted: the Ring, the Shuffle, the Tides, the Soapbox, the Classic Debate, and so on. Someone stood up on a chair and wrote a new model on the whiteboard. Their dry erase marker squeaked as the word Matchstick was scrawled across the surface. Charlie and Zadie had been invited to introduce their concept like a matchstick in a haystack and see what unfolded from there.

The knocking din died down. Zadie admired the elegance of it. If the assembly wished to disregard the point-of-order, they simply didn’t knock. But, if they supported the shift, the noise quieted the debate and they could move on. Unlike a bell or loud whistle, it took general agreement to make the transition.

Olli nudged the pair onto chairs in the center ring and stood up to address the crowd. The floorboards beneath him had been worn black and shiny by countless feet. The hall quieted as Olli held up his hands. He introduced the visitors and thanked the assembly for allocating floor time to them. He did not mention their purpose, leaving the explanation up to them.

“As you undoubtedly heard,” Zadie said, rising to her feet, “Charlie and I have been traveling the country, writing about the participatory democracy stories happening all over the place. Our young friends, Elisha, Meera, and Frankie, think it’s time for participatory democracy to become a constructive program for this country, something everyone does, everyday, to build local and community control, self-reliance, and people power.”

In the folding chairs, a keen-edged focus settled on the room. Faces stilled. Fidgeting stopped. Beyond the arches of stained glass windows, the rain slowed as if listening. The sky lightened. A kaleidoscope of diffuse colors painted the chapel.

“I’ve come to ask for your help,” Zadie said, humbly, quietly. “Our nation has a steep learning curve ahead of us. The greater parts of our lives are deeply undemocratic. Will you . . . can you escalate the nation’s learning curve? Can you scale up your experiments? Can the members of the Democracy Lab help us as we expand the good work already happening? If every single town or city in this nation called you tomorrow, how would you deal with such a glorious onslaught of interest?”

A hush of reverence hung, suspended over the gathered. Breaths poised in chests, hoping, longing for such a miracle.

“Because,” she mentioned with a wry grin and a wink, “tomorrow, Charlie and I are thinking of asking millions of Dandelions to give you a ring.”

Create, copy, improve, share; that was the viral operating principle of the Dandelion Insurrection. It’s what had fueled their wild and unruly growth. All summer long, she and Charlie had told the stories of those who were creating new democracy practices. Now, by issuing a call-to-action, they could invite millions of Dandelions to take these ideas to the next level.

Zadie gestured for Charlie to speak up. He stood. The wind hissed through the trees outside, sending a shower of raindrops over the old slate roof, the drumming fingers of Earth, impatient and waiting.

“Democracy is the science of our times,” Charlie said, “a social science, a field of inquiry and experimentation that involves all of us. The United States has fostered many waves of scientific curiosity from the natural sciences to atomic physics to space exploration and genome mapping. We can expand our laboratory to include the entire nation. We can catalyze a mass experiment – or rather, a mass movement of thousands of experiments.”

“So, what do you say?” Zadie challenged them, flinging her arms as wide as she could stretch, a matching grin on her face.

The sunlight broke out from the clouds in luminous brilliance. A dazzle of gold and emerald, ruby and azure showered through the grey hall, illuminating smiles and grins. A murmur of excitement swept through the members of the Democracy Lab. A thrill of anticipation shifted through the group, an eagerness to begin. The conversation opened to the whole Forum. Ideas raced forward. Concerns over capacity were raised, met, and dealt with. When the vote came, they ayes had it . . . the Democracy Lab was in.

Charlie and Zadie released a new essay, a call-to-action to the nation to use one small act of democracy each day, and to add one more democracy practice to their lives each week. In one year, they pointed out, we, the People, will have infused fifty-two new practices into three hundred and twenty million lives. That math equated to more than nine billion moments of democracy added to our world.

It was a match laid to a web of fuse lines. The projects exploded in all directions at once. When the change agents in a system reach a tipping point of interconnectivity, it only takes one final spark to trigger an immense catalytic reaction. The democracy effort was in a primordial soup moment, a point in the evolution of this field, when the catalyzers and multipliers connected with the readiness of the nodes to transform. Everything was poised for change. The examples existed. The test models had been tried. One last touch and . . . poof! It was an evolutionary leap for both the Democracy Lab and the Dandelion Insurrection.

Elisha, Meera, and Frankie launched out of the gate with an enthusiasm that set the tone for the nation. They inventoried their city, giving out one-to-five star ratings in democracy to every business, institution, club, nonprofit, social network, and governmental department. They mobilized the youth and seniors in an intergenerational effort to infuse democracy into their city. The community centers launched public surveys to determine programming. The summer camps held world cafes with youth, parents, and camp councilors on next year’s activities. One of the newspapers put together its first-ever community advisory board in a bid to beat their rival journal in moving from one star to two.

Small, daily acts of democracy catalyzed larger projects. Vermont burst into a wild frenzy of action; doing democracy was a local pastime, right up there with maple sugaring. Long known for its rebellious autonomy and local self-determination, towns across the state were the first to scale up participatory democracy practices in town councils, local schools, worker coops, and more. Milton, Vermont was the first municipality to declare a town-wide Democracy Revolution. Others swiftly followed.

In New Jersey, a state long regarded as a mere bedroom community of the New York behemoth, a Black and Brown-led housing justice movement shut down planning and zoning commission meetings with a Renters and Residents Assembly. They demanded immediate public referendums on anti-gentrification and rent control measures.

In Minnesota, the youth walked out of school to demand that the state hold intergenerational dialogues before approving any new pipelines or fossil fuel infrastructure. The youth of today objected to getting stuck with the long-term bills and cleanup costs of fossil fuels, and an unlivable planet, to boot.

Alabama’s university students took the administration by surprise with an occupation for participatory budgeting. “We’re paying for it,” was their slogan as the students argued against budget cuts for the health center and the failure to pay graduate teaching assistants a fair wage. Their itemized list of suggested cuts included eliminating the million-dollar ice cream bar.

In Alaska, citizens demanded veto power on oil drilling. Since state law mandated that each person received a cut of the tax revenue on extraction, organizers launched statewide kitchen table conversations about economic justice, transitions to wind power generation, and what would happen when the ice melted and their unique way of life vanished along with the permafrost and polar bears.

State by state, city by city, the campaign for real democracy took off. In Detroit, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix, citizens demanded public governance of privatized water utilities. Towns and cities in New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado launched stakeholder meetings on nuclear waste, giving downwinders equal say to nuclear scientists and public officials from the Departments of Defense and Energy. In the College Belt, students at Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire colleges formed student assemblies to meet with administrators on governance of higher education. Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri workers went on strike for the right to bid for worker co-operative ownership of corporations put up for sale. In New York, Houston, and Los Angeles, renters unions and land coops launched occupations at public offices, using world cafes to hash out policy for housing justice laws. In Denver, Atlanta, Seattle, and Baltimore, citizens demanded direct control of police departments.

After two hundred and seventy-five years of the representative republic, corporate dictatorship, and hierarchal domination at work and throughout their culture, people decided they didn’t just want “voice”. They wanted choice. They wanted agency. They wanted self-determination. They wanted more than input. They wanted to make the decisions. The screams of outrage from the Constitution-loving faction reached new heights of histrionics. They hollered bloody murder over the “treasonous insurrection” . . . and they weren’t entirely wrong. It wasn’t an insurrection. It wasn’t treason, but it was a revolution. It was the only truly revolutionary change the Dandelion Insurrection had ever called for.

Their critics complained about the project’s complexity. Why not just implement wisdom councils everywhere? Weren’t the two dozen formats confusing to everyone?

“You don’t put out beach chairs in a Montana snowstorm and you don’t hand out snow shovels to Floridians,” Zadie answered. “Every place is different and these differences can and should inform what practices we try first.”

The Dandelion Insurrection has never shied away from a certain unruly madness, Charlie wrote, championing the complexity. We are a vast and complex country, with peoples as unique as the terrains we inhabit. We can embrace our diversity and use it as a saving grace. The trap of homogeneity is for authoritarian regimes, not us.

But every action had an equal and opposite reaction. When Charlie and Zadie’s article on The Revolution of Democracy hit the Alternet, it exploded like a sonic boom in all directions at once: the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. Democracy – real democracy – put decision-making capacity into the hands of those affected by the decisions. If implemented broadly, it would rattle the foundations of the entire structure of the United States.

It was simple, really, and yet, almost beyond imagination. If the shape of the world was made by an undemocratic ruling class, adding democracy would radically alter it.

“Business as we know it will collapse!” the critics shrieked as consumers called for greater say in what stocked the shelves. They demanded that businesses take responsibility for their products from “cradle to grave” and acknowledge that there are no externalities. They insisted that the full costs be taken out before profits, not shifted onto consumers and workers while owners raked in fortunes. Companies had to pay for cleaning up mine tailings and effluents. Corporations had to account for the particles churning from their smokestacks, the plastic packaging on the shelves, and the ultimate resting places of worn-out products.

Humanity had constructed ivory cities built on the bones of the exploited and oppressed. Glittering fortunes amassed atop hidden toxic waste dumps. By ignoring the outcry against the innumerable abuses, humanity had built a shiny hell, a global economy whose maintenance required endless destruction, despair, and death, poison, pollution, lies, and war. Suffering was the hidden fuel shoveled into the furnaces of this economy. Why should humanity grant its continued loyalty to this?

“The economy keeps billions alive, day in, day out,” the business moguls claimed, launching a massive counterattack as Charlie and Zadie’s article crashed websites with its popularity.

The slave owners said the same thing, claiming they kept the enslaved alive as they fed them cornmeal mush in pigs troughs, Charlie wrote in his rebuttal. That does not mean the enslaved should support their enslavement.

“Millions have a high standard of living because of us,” the pundits of money claimed.

But Zadie argued back:

“We have constructed a trap in which those who enjoy the highest standard of living require others to live in misery to maintain it. This is not normal. It’s sociopathic. It behooves all of us to dismantle this so-called civilization and build a better world that works for all of us.”

Democracy – real, functional, inclusive democracy – transcended arbitrary boundaries of state lines and even national borders. It offered the only governing system that could, by its very nature, end the current abuses and prevent new ones from arising. The process of identifying who was affected by a decision demanded a full accounting of the impacts of any action.

Humanity had circled the globe, met people who lived upside down and backwards to one another, gone to the moon and seen Earth rise on the horizon, stretched their imaginations to the ends of universe and inside atoms. There was no terra nullius anywhere. There was no place for adolescent fantasies of narcissistic freedom. There was only community and interconnectivity, a web of life and relationship that could not be ignored.

In a world where there was nowhere left to run, how would humanity live? What would people’s lives look like when they took full account of their actions? When every place was somebody’s backyard, how could there be any more sacrifice zones?

This, Charlie and Zadie discovered as the online commentators screamed in vitriolic protest, was the true revolution of their lifetimes. It wasn’t about replacing one political party with another. It wasn’t about inventing fancier technology. It wasn’t even about ousting oligarchs or corporatists from power. It was about the rise of an ancient understanding, a truth so self-evident that the Founding Fathers in all their racist, colonialist, patriarchal, classist, Christian supremacist madness could not acknowledge or else their entire pseudo-nation would unravel at the seams. It was an idea that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would articulate so clearly and poetically on scrap paper in a Birmingham jail in 1963: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

A living democracy was the only choice when presented with that reality. It was an inarguable, self-evident truth in a world where everything matters. In such a world, no one should abuse the next, or profit from another’s misery, or ignore the destructiveness of their actions. In such a world, we can no longer justify war, exploitation, poverty, or ecosystem abuse. It sounded like a fairy tale as they sat in the midst of the current nightmare, but it was so, so, so very close, only a heartbeat away. The revolution would be a revolution of the heart, a remembering of ancient truths, a coming full circle for humanity, a healing from the millennia-long sickness of the soul, a return home to our one-and-only planet, a reunion of brotherhood and sisterhood with each other and the Earth.

This was the revolution of democracy.

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This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy. Find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

The Murmuration – Winds of Change

“Starling Murmuration – Eastbridge” by Airwolfhound is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The Murmuration – From Winds of Change

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This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy.
Find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

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The murmuration swarmed through the streets like a wild dance class released from studio walls. It was a flocking movement, modeled after the ever-shifting groups of starlings that swooped and flew in formations at dusk. Zadie had introduced the concept to the Dandelion Insurrection and it had grown into a popular, versatile street action. Conducting the training from the sidelines, a small pair of figures passed a megaphone back and forth as a sea of bodies moved in synchronized gestures, mimicking the motions of the temporary leader at the front of the group.

“Remember,” one of the trainers said into the megaphone, “this is a leaderful structure. As the ‘flock’ turns, the leader changes. Whoever is in front leads until they turn. Look for the new leader now. Who is that person?”

The trainers reoriented the demonstrators as they lost sight of the changing leadership. Laughter rose up like bird wings. The murmuration pivoted and worked through its awkward moments, bumbling hiccups, and confused stumbling. As they practiced, they gained skill, speed, and grace.

“Can’t see the front?” the co-facilitator asked, taking the megaphone. “Follow your wingmate’s cues. Stay equidistant. Keep moving forward. That’s it! You’ve got it!”

The pair cheered from their perch on a concrete garden planter. Charlie and Zadie made their way closer, skirting around the edges of the moving flock of humans, arriving near the trainers just as they called a break.

“Great work, everyone. Remember, those guiding principles will determine how we’ll fly through the city, swooping in groups, splitting into smaller clusters, and rejoining with others once again. Go get some water and get ready. We’ll start at the top of the hour.”

The megaphone squeaked as it shut off. The pair of petite organizers hopped down to greet the new arrivals.

“Well, if it isn’t the Mother of All Murmurations,” the first said, grinning at Zadie and sticking out a hand. “We were part of the DC Swarm, but we’re from Chicago, originally. Lately, we’ve been migrating westward training people in cities all over.”

They were a pair of siblings, almost mirrors of each other, twins with identical features. They were in their thirties, compact and muscular. Caramel skin creased around the deep dimples in their cheeks. Laughter lines formed around their eyes. They flirted at the edges of gender, refusing to be male or female. They wore jeans, blazing yellow T-shirts, and a set of hoodies, black and blue. Zadie noticed a tattoo of a dandelion seed on the back of one twin’s hand and tucked the distinguishing mark away for later reference.

“I’m Sparrow,” the one with the tattoo said.

“Starling,” the other offered, extending a hand to shake.

As the mass of protesters readied for action, unfurling banners and fetching signs, Starling and Sparrow filled the pair in on the objectives of the day’s protests.

“We’re trying to remove the moral legitimacy of stockpiling wealth at this pivotal time in human history,” Starling explained. “We’ll swarm around the financial district with dozens of messages, all pushing, compelling, and demanding that the ultra-rich give big and give back.”

“They’ve gained unprecedented wealth in the last decade. Now let’s see them give at an unprecedented rate,” Sparrow chuckled.

“People know how to solve the problems we face,” Starling chimed in. “Like Bramble Ellison’s community, they have good ideas for moving forward. But in order to move them forward, they need the resources that the ultra-wealthy have.”

“We need to democratize wealth along with democratizing everything else,” Sparrow stated emphatically.

At the stroke of eleven, the sun burst through the fog, the twins gave the signal, and five hundred people moved into action. Soapboxes were scattered throughout the district on the street corners. People swarmed in ever-shifting groups from one to the next, leaving when they felt ready, staying when the speaker held their attention. They carried signs and banners calling for democratizing wealth. They stopped traffic and blocked roads, bogging down the pulse of the city’s traffic patterns. They swept into lobbies of finance centers for two-minute speeches then swept out before the managers could call the cops. They picketed the luxury skyrises and deluxe hotels. They flooded the sidewalks near expensive boutiques and hair salons, asking wealthy women to give to the Community Fund. Zadie and Charlie split up, each shadowing one of the twins, trying to witness as many of the flash actions as possible.

“If that woman gave away a million dollars a day for a whole year,” Sparrow whispered to Charlie, pointing to a wealthy patron of a high-end salon, “she’d still be a multi-millionaire.”

A billion was a thousand millions – a fortune impossible to spend in one lifetime. It was the wealth a whole species needed to transform a broken world into a whole one, to rebuild after the ravages of not just fires and floods, but centuries of greed and exploitation.

Sparrow and Charlie tracked as many actions as they could, taking photos of small pods of protesters holding up banners in front of high-end art galleries, filming a flash mob and die-in at the Palace of Fine Arts during its fundraising soiree. Charlie posted photos online as groups painted a giant message across six city blocks in under twenty minutes: Invest In Resilience Not Destruction. Each letter was the size of a bus. Artist-activists used roller brushes to paint the enormous letters onto the street. With Sparrow, he slipped through the revolving doors of a financial district skyscraper while the guards gawked. They rode the elevator as high as they could and snapped a photo from the twentieth floor. From there, they could see Zadie and Starling down the block, recognizable by the twin’s blazing yellow shirt. They were in the middle of an immense murmuration dancing in the street.

On the ground, Starling and Zadie turned slowly, following the motions of the nearest people as they stood in the heart of the giant murmuration. Zadie had never seen anything so beautiful. Elegant. Masterful. Peaceful. Strong. Here, a sense of calm settled like sunlight. The bustle of the city fell away. They lifted their arms and rotated like a field of sunflowers. They stepped forward in the rhythm of antelope herds. They stilled like watchful birds then darted into motion, swooping and diving. The shape of the mass of people rippled and contracted, shifting direction from moment to moment. They flooded the streets. They drifted onto sidewalks. They charged along crosswalks. On the outermost rims, murmuration monitors in orange vests halted traffic. They also handed out fliers that explained that the murmuration was a reminder, a dance of respect for all living beings, a way of invoking the ecosystems of the world in the heart of a financial district whose decisions affected the entire planet.

They moved like rivers, curving and churning. They rippled like shoals of fish and mimicked the swooping wings of manta rays. They banked and turned in avian spirals. All of life swept through them: the patterning of clouds, amassing, swelling, breaking open into rain; the upward curls of unfurling ferns, the loping gamble of the wolf pack, the thundering gait of bison herds, the leaping flight of deer and dolphins, the slow sunning of turtles on logs.

The Earth thinks in circles. She dreams in spirals and nautilus shell revolutions. She paints in sprays of wildflowers, clusters of lichens, stands of trees. She moves in tidal dances, forward and back, in stretches of time too long for human conception. She tells her stories across eons. Her epics are epochs.

Humanity is not excused from this dance. Every breath of air entering our lungs weaves the ever-shifting formations of clouds into our blood. The circumambular journey of the sky feeds into our cells. The phytoplankton riding the ocean swells winds up in our veins, transformed. Invisible, they hitch a ride on water molecules, climb the elevator of evaporation, gather into cloudbursts, and split into rivers, only to reunite in our bodies after a journey across entire continents and ocean currents.

Awe – sheer wonder – was the only acceptable response to the majesty of the Earth.

This murmuration, pulsing in the heart of a glittering city, swarming through the streets like salmon runs of old, swooping and diving in a flock hundreds strong, was more than a protest . . . it was a prayer, a ritual, an invocation of the Earth in the places that had forgotten how to think in circles and cycles, curves and spirals. With it, the rules of natural systems crashed the opium dream fantasies of the line-and-grid urban world. Their feet, lifting and falling – not in march-step unison, but in patterned waves of rippling, subtle drumrolls – reverberated through the tar into the ground, down, down to the shivering fault line that trembled beneath the city, a reckoning built by plate tectonics and continental shifts.

It was more than a protest statement; it was a return of reverence. With it, they laid their human lives upon the altar of the planet, and swayed and swarmed back into the ancient dance their species had forgotten. They did not speak, they listened, and their rusty animal alertness crept back into their limbs. They let their presence proclaim their message. They allowed the unexpected sight of hundreds of humans embodying the primal patterns that had birthed and nurtured their species for millennia shock and baffle the passersby. Spectators gaped, still caught up in the doings built by humans. Drivers blew their horns when the murmuration blocked the street, resenting the interruption of their headlong rush toward extinction.

And still . . . there was the woman in tears on the street corner, filming with her camera, unable to explain why this movement evoked despair and hope in the very marrow of her bones. There was the old man at the outdoor cafe, cream overflowing his coffee cup as he stared in wonder, a smile crinkling his face. There were the children who tugged their harried mother’s arm, pointing to the magic breaking through the bustle of commercial mundanity.

There were those who saw and understood the beauty dancing before them; those who paused amidst the day and let the murmuration call them back to their human nature . . . the human nature birthed in ocean wombs and built in primordial times, the one entwined to moon cycles and seasonal minuets and a world more wild than tame. When the murmuration turned the corner, these humans stepped forward, transformed, and they, in turn, transformed their world in small and large ways, choosing the smaller footprint, stepping lightly and gently on this beloved Earth, cradled by their abiding interconnection with a living world.

Zadie danced with the murmuration until she tired. Then she stilled in the shade of a building, watching the movement sweep through the intersection. She rested for a spell then followed, catching up to Starling as they stood back to record a video.

“It’s . . . beautiful,” Zadie sighed. She had been part of dozens of murmurations, but this one transformed the protest tactic into art. She felt transformed, exalted, grounded, and broken open into awed vulnerability.

“It’s modern-day magic,” Starling agreed. “It’s a ritual dance in the ancient sense. It deepens with time. Duration matters. If you watch the old dances – think Sufis spiraling or stamping dance rituals of African traditions – the movement is not performative so much as experiential. The length and repetition is what works the magic.”

They tracked the murmuration down the next street. There was an abandon to the participants’ motions, a surrendering. They settled into the space between leader and follower, alert and receptive.

“I could watch it all day,” Zadie sighed.

“Or move with it all day,” Starling added. They shared a grin and stepped forward in one stride to follow the murmuration around the corner.

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This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy.
Find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

Change the Story, Change the World

2-hr Webinar w/ Authors & Activists Rivera Sun and Nina Koevoets
Wed, June 10th at 1pm ET/7pm Central European Time

Today we have a unique opportunity: we as humanity are at a crossroad where we can choose to continue with the violent practices that have brought enormous destruction to our planet and all beings OR we can develop nonviolent practices and shift to more peaceful, sustainable and cooperative ways of being on this planet. This is “the New Story”. But how do we change the story?  In this 2-hr webinar changemakers, writers, and peace activists Nina Koevoets and Rivera Sun will take you on an adventure that explores this question. You’ll get to know tools for re-imagining your personal story and tapping into the mythic imagination. Together, we’ll look at how to frame our experience of the world as a story, replete with archetypes, challenges, wisdom speakers, discoveries, and even a fellowship of friends. If you’ve been trying to make sense of all the rapid changes we are experiencing, come explore how the architecture of story offers a bridge from the world we’re in to the world that’s yet to come. 

Date June 10. 1PM Eastern Time/ 7PM Central European Time

Pricing: Sliding scale from $15-25*

*This is an indication of the donation we’d like to receive. If this is an obstacle for you, you can offer us a smaller amount. Likewise, we’re also grateful to anyone who has the means to be more generous. We do this work from the heart (not for financial compensation, but because we believe this is important), and hope your contribution will be from the heart as well.

REGISTER HERE >>

MAKE YOUR DONATION HERE >>

Ari Ara Wins A Silver Nautilus Award!

Hip hip hooray! The Lost Heir is the winner of the 2019 Nautilus Award Silver Medal in Middle Grade Fiction. This honor is given to books with socially-engaged themes. Ari Ara’s second adventure, full of youth organizing, economic justice, and a fantasy world where street urchins and migrant workers build peace and wage nonviolence to stop the threat of war was a perfect fit for the Nautilus Awards. I am utterly thrilled and delighted. The Ari Ara books are magical. They’re enjoyable. Kids love them. Readers of all ages adore them. They’re teaching peace … and winning social justice fiction awards.

Want to read it or send it to a young friend? Here’s where you can get copies directly from me. Teachers, peace activists, and parents will all love this story, too.

Find the books here.

Discover peace skills through these fantastic novels! The Nautilus Award Silver Medal announcement comes just as we launch our first-ever, intergenerational Peace Literacy Summer Program using the Ari Ara Series as the inspiration. Join Author Rivera Sun and an incredible group of guest instructors for this unique summer program that shares Peace Literacy skills through peace literature. June-August, you’ll get to read and explore all three novels in the fun and eye-opening Ari Ara Series (The Way Between, The Lost Heir, Desert Song).

Find out more about the Summer Peace Literacy Program here.

Each week, you and other participants will gather on Zoom to learn exercises in peace, nonviolence, and conflict skills that YOU can use to train others in your community. Guest instructors will present on topics that relate to readings in the books. This course is perfect for educators, parents, youth, peace activists, faith leaders, and others who yearn to teach peace in a fun and engaging way.

Thanks for celebrating all this exciting news with us. It’s a good time for stories of peace to be getting attention and recognition. We need them – and the inspiration to be those kinds of (s)heroes.

“Wendy” Movie Brings Peter Pan’s Deepest Messages Forward To Our Times

(From L-R): Devin France, Gavin Naquin, Gage Naquin, Romyri Ross and Yashua Mack in the film WENDY. Photo Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures. © 2019 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

by Rivera Sun

“Wendy” is a mind-blowing, intense, and soul-shattering new film from the creators of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The movie burst through my heart and soul like the freight train that conveys the modern-day remix’s characters to Never Never Land. This adaptation transcends the syrupy interpretations we’ve come to expect from Peter Pan adaptations. Much to the chagrin of some viewers, it puts the wild Pan back into Peter, and reminds us that children are not possessions, but beings with secrets and mysteries not even their parents will ever truly understand.

Wendy begins at Darling’s Diner in the rural south – stripping the upper class mystique straight out of the narrative and replacing it with a rural working class tint as gritty as train smoke and poverty. Wendy is just a toddler slung against her formerly-incarcerated mother’s hip when the movie begins. Her older brothers, twins, charge into the diner with the ferocious – and obnoxious – intensity of all hyper-excited young boys. Wendy watches their friend Thomas scowl under the mockery of adults who predict a life of drudgery and misery for him. She sees Thomas rebel, hop a passing train, and vanish into the distance. Several years later, when another whistle-stop train calls and a whispering voice in the night speaks to her, Wendy leads her twin brothers out the window, onto the train cars, and off into the darkness.

From there, it’s a non-stop ride to Never Never Land – one that walks a knife’s edge of magic and danger. Wonder hangs in the next heartbeat – as does disaster. There is something achingly familiar with the shrieks of delighted children and their lived sense of wild enchantment. At the same time, like all ancient myths, this is a place of danger, too. Loss and consequences haunt the edges of fun and excitement. The adaptation brushes up against familiar archetypes from the JM Barrie original, but pushes the themes to new levels of understanding. The references to the original will sneak up on you. The twists on the old elements will surprise you and make you look at this story in a whole new way.

The Lost Ones (for Wendy boldly ditches the sexism and racism of Barrie’s original Lost Boys) are not watered-down Little Rascals. The children are neither over-scheduled little adults nor cherubic inventions of Hallmark cards. They are feral creatures, fully alive in their self-determination. Peter Pan is a real Pan, half boy, half mystical creature, standing firmly in his power and mastery of his world. He is not the kind of child that cuddles up to you – he stares at you with burning, defiant eyes, and dares to laugh in your face. Wendy is a casting triumph, a directorial masterpiece. This ferociously untameable girl breaks the mold of every Wendy interpretation to date. She bluntly rejects the original notion of being anybody’s mother. She is Peter’s equal, nothing more, nothing less. She stalks the screen in a too-big tee-shirt that once belonged to her formerly-incarcerated mother. She is the ringleader, the first to leap off the cliff, and the one who leads them all back home with the kind of love and heart that our world desperately needs in its sheroes. In so doing, her character is a stern rebuke to the childish narcissism of contemporary individualism. Peter’s arrogant non-concern for the heartache of others is unacceptable to Wendy. Like her female counterparts in our real world, she leads the way to rescue her brothers from death or trauma-induced exploitation.

These are children on their own terms, the sort of characters that we all might remember being in our days of building treeforts and wandering half lost between imaginary realms and the gloaming hours until “supper” was called out by our parents. Perhaps, you, like me, have never really grown up or out of this. If so, you’ll understand that this movie is to our culture what JM Barrie’s play was to his stultified turn-of-the-century culture. In this adaptation of the beloved classic, Benh Zeitlan has brought the original message forward to our times. Wendy portrays children in revolt against the dreary world created by adults – a revolt that happens in our real world on a daily basis as children squirm at desks during standardized tests or walk-out of school for climate strikes. Just as Tinkerbell represented the fey and pagan wild magic that needed to be revived in Barrie’s times, Wendy‘s Gaia-like Mother reminds us that the feminine and the Earth are imperiled. We must revive them or face the consequences of lost life.  

In this movie, there are no stereotyped Indians. There are no sanitized pirates. Instead, the creators dig deeper into the archetypes of wildness and lawlessness. Hook is a “villain” of Peter’s making, a soul torn asunder by grief, loss, and trauma. Aging Lost Boys (and girls) who have become “really, really lost” turn into pirates only when they decide to hunt the ocean-creature embodiment of the Mother. In scenes that shock us with their contemporary parallels of extraction and exploitation, this adaptation is a painful reminder that myths and stories are here to shake us awake, and teach us the peril of our current paths. From start to finish, Wendy is a sharp commentary on our world. In Wendy – asin real life – grown-ups kill their spirits by conforming to cultural norms. They strive after false promises of youth and beauty, and in so doing, kill the earth and the sacredness of all things. At its heart, this movie is an anthem for everyone who dares to defy our contemporary world of cruelty and greed, exploitation and despair.

Wendy doesn’t play by Hollywood’s rules. It challenges those indie movie critics who have become complacently accustomed to jaded cynicism. It defies the unspoken dictum that artists must veil their true meanings and tone down the messages that the critics aren’t ready to hear. Wendy’s mixed reviews are split right down the lines of critics who still understand magic and wildness, and those whose calcified hearts are a hallmark of how “grown-up” they’ve become.

Clap your hands if you believe in faeries, the original Peter Pan implored us as Tinkerbell lay dying from Hook’s poison. Wendy is asking us to “clap our hands” to all it represents: love, courage, wildness, unbridled joy, magic, mystery, childhood’s clear ferociousness . . . and the fact that it is not only childhood and the earth that are worthy of our love. It is the entire journey of growing up with our hearts intact, our love for the Earth undaunted, and our spirits ready for the greatest adventures of our lives.

Strategy 4 Action!

Strategy 4 Action! Webinar w/ Rivera Sun



Sun, April 19th, 5pm ET

This 2-hr webinar introduces strategic concepts that you can use for a variety of nonviolent action campaigns.

These are tools for everyone! Nonviolent action comes in all
shapes and sizes. It’s powerful. It works. In this 2-hr webinar with Rivera
Sun, learn the guiding principles of how to make change with nonviolent action.
From local campaigns to national issues, you can apply these ideas and tools to
every issue you care about.

300+ Methods of Nonviolent ActionDesigning Direct Action CampaignsBuilding Mass ParticipationGaining Support From Allies & OpponentsBuild the Solution, Stop the ProblemTaking Aim & Choosing Achievable Goals

Need a scholarship? Just ask. I understand. rivera(at)riverasun.com

These are the tools we need for the times we’re in. We’ll cover types of actions we can use during social distancing, and also the kinds of strategies that will help us protect our communities, build alternatives, and push for meaningful change.

Strategy 4 Action WebinarThese are tools for everyone! Nonviolent action comes in all shapes and sizes. It's powerful. It works. In this 2-hr webinar with Rivera Sun, learn the guiding principles of how to make change with nonviolent action. From local campaigns to national issues, you can apply these ideas and tools to every issue you care about. Price: $20.00

Author/Activist Rivera Sun has been training people in strategy for nonviolent change for 6+ years. She works with groups striving for water justice, environmental protection, banning fracking, anti-nuclear, peace efforts, racial justice, economic justice, and more. She is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and other novels. Rivera is also the editor of Nonviolence News.

New! 6 Week Online Nonviolence Community Course w/ Rivera Sun & Veronica Pelicaric

EVERY WEDNESDAY AT 1PM PACIFIC / 4PM EASTERN, BEGINNING APRIL 29TH THROUGH JUNE 3, 2020

Sign-up here: https://paceebene.org/events/2020/4/29/join-the-nonviolence-online-community-course

Six weekly sessions of 1.5 hr each – approx.

Goals of the Course:

This online course is a basic introduction to principled and strategic nonviolence using Pace e Bene’s Engaging Nonviolence Manual. It is intended to provide an opportunity to build community while studying nonviolence. Participants will connect with up to 50 people who share their interests in discovering the many dimensions of active nonviolence. Using small and large groups, facilitators Veronica Pelicaric and Rivera Sun will guide the participants through explorations into the personal, interpersonal, and social justice aspects of nonviolence. This Community Course is designed to be accessible, fun, friendly, and fearless. Using an online platform, participants can engage with this exciting field from the comforts of their home. The course will familiarize participants with the overall contents of the Engaging Nonviolence study program which will serve to foster personal growth, healthy relationships and work for world peace.

Weekly Themes:

Week 1: Understanding Nonviolence; Unpacking Violence

Week 2: Exploring Nonviolence: Going Deeper

Week 3: Conflict & Community: Using Nonviolence In Our Lives

Week 4: Nonviolence, Emotions, & Inner Awareness

Week 5: Principles of Nonviolence: Gandhi, King, and Beyond!

Week 6: Building a Culture of Nonviolence: Why We Need Nonviolence In Our World

Sign-up here: https://paceebene.org/events/2020/4/29/join-the-nonviolence-online-community-course

Requirements: All participants need to purchase the Engaging Nonviolence Manual. It can be bought on Amazon or directly from Pace e Bene. The course will be held on Zoom. Participants must have internet access, and microphone and video on their computer. Each week, participants will be expected to complete weekly readings/viewings and come prepared for group discussions online.

Participants are strongly encouraged to invite friends and community members. Shared knowledge increases the power of active nonviolence in our communities!

Maximum number of participants per course: 50

Cost: $80 USD for the 6 sessions. Register below. If you are in need of a scholarship, a few are available, just let us know. Email Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service at info(at)paceebene.org

Book Sale!

A note from Rivera Sun:

I know many of us are hunkered down in our houses, responding to the crisis as best we can. I’ve decided to put my books and novels on sale (20% off) to help out parents who want engaging reading for their kids. The Ari Ara Series – including the newly released Desert Song – is perfect reading for these times. With its focus on peace and its high adventure plot twists, it’s the kind of book that absorbs readers and offers a great take-away message.

You can find all my books and novels here.

I hope this helps you and your families. These are challenging times. We can each do our part to make them a little easier.

This sale also helps out Amazon workers – as many of you know, Amazon workers are on strike today, demanding hazard pay and safety measures as they pack and ship your orders. By ordering via my author website, you alleviate the pressure they’re under. Believe me, I am not overworked in the packing and shipping department, and you’re more than welcome to try to overload my shipping capacities. (Hah!)

I’m at home in New Mexico right now, tucked away in my earthship, working on the newest manuscript and trying to support others in a variety of ways. I may host some free Zoom Author Talks and Q & A’s in the coming weeks. Hang in there.

Much love,

Rivera Sun