“No…not our favorite grocery store. This one is going to be hard!”
“Yep. They’re on the list of companies that contributed major amounts of money to his Presidential campaign. We stopped buying anything there ourselves. The list of grocery stores not on the list is getting smaller.”
Our dinner partners were showing their latest act of Resistance. We have committed to do the same. But it hits hard when it is our favorite one.
We shop there because it has great produce and a high quality meat and fish section. We have enjoyed having a few more bucks than the poverty we grew up in, so we enjoy the privilege of shopping there.
But now, we’re done with them.
The four of us at dinner are unlikely members of the Resistance. All of us are over 65, we are in various stages of retirement, and we’re part of the generation of Boomers identified as having voted for President “Kevin” the first time.
<Note: To my partner and I, he is known as “Kevin.” It’s a quote from Home Alone where the brother says “Kevin, you’re such a disease.” His sister then adds “You’re what the French call ‘Les Incompetents’!”>
Make no mistake. I have despised the Orange one since the 1980s. It has nothing to do with political ideology. I’m pretty convinced he doesn’t have an ideology other than “I must control everything and have everyone talk about me”. He’s the toxic huckster of our generation. I will not name him.
The four of us mutually despise him. What I learned from the 1960s is that even a single generation can change the political and ethical climate of a nation by consistently living their truth and resisting those who want to kill and manipulate others.
All four at dinner last night had stood up and resisted back in the 60s and early 70s. We remember how to do this.
Resist!
Let your voice be heard every day.
Don’t let a single ally of an oppressor go unchallenged.
Whether it be marching outside the entrance of a Tesla dealership, or canceling your Amazon Prime membership, the Resistance builds by ten million small acts of “Fuck You.”
19th Century poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote this about the social changes in America at the end of her century: “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Wilcox was not a leader in the Woman’s Suffrage movement. She didn’t have a place of leadership in the Abolitionist ranks.
She was just this poet. She did what poets do.
So here are the four of us eating Asian food, pondering our role in the fast-changing world, hoping to embrace the courage of our ancestors in Resistance. We have our phones out, perusing the Goods Unite Us app and figuring out which companies have received their last cent from each of us.
A casual friend questioned me a few weeks ago as I posted I would be participating in the February 28th day of no purchases from billionaires.
“What difference does one day make? People will spend the money tomorrow.”
Here’s the difference. Each day we consider what we will and will not put up with adds one more piece of energy to the momentum rising against the Oppressors. Each time we post a meme, tell a friend about why shopping at Target or Amazon is not going to happen, each time we talk someone into buying a different choice of electric car other than Tesla, each time we post a Ukraine flag on social media, we built inertia toward its ultimate goal: We will keep resisting until time erodes their base to the critical point of change.
Martin Luther King reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
However, it’s not prudent to just wait it out. If we don’t resist as a lifestyle, just resisting for a moment, we truly do not accomplish anything.
I think back to the Arab Spring a decade ago. Even though the Resistance against dictatorial powers was picking up speed in various Islamic countries, Syria bucked the trend as their government cracked down violently against its own people. For most of the last decade, the Assad regime maintained its violent hold on the nation.
The world might have thought that Syria would never enter into a new day. Then, this past year, seemingly out of the blue, the government of Bashar al-Assad crumbled and he fled to Russia. On December 8, 2024, the Arab Spring finally arrived to end the winter of Assad’s dictatorship.
Actually, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the result of millions of dinners, late-night crying sessions, and a billion social media posts. When the historical moment was right, the Dictator was overthrown.
The moment Katniss Everdeen holds out the berries prepared to die by eating them is not when their Resistance started. That’s the moment when it picked up speed.
The moment we stop shopping at Amazon is not when the Resistance starts.
It’s how it picks up momentum.