People say we’re not doing enough enmadden me. “We,” my fellow engaged Americans, are standing on street corners, calling their congresspeople, filing lawsuits, boycotting businesses, talking and waiting for people who have gone Maga to come back, making jokes, making art, writing songs, sending postcards, getting out the vote, sending money. It’s nearly a full time job working against the regime and it’s insulting to say that we’re not doing enough. Of course, if you me “we,” the unengaged Americans, well that’s true, but they’re not getting your admonitions either.

Writing things on bullets—unverifiable nonsense coming from the FBI, and nothing come from other  from job numbers, from climate

Fasicsm so fast that they’ll trip and we’ll gather up the failed system and push not for a return to normal but a reach toward better. Big social changes with a new democratic party, lowercase letters, that might even change its name to democratic socialist (although that’s probably too charged) or Worker’s Party (which is too Marxily charged), but maybe like the Everyone Party. Everyone including the animals, rivers and trees! Or The Party of Everyone Except Billionaires. PEEB for Short!

How could this happen? I have heard great stories of people turning against the fascism one by one. Often, it’s by having someone not ideologically bound, but open-minded, to listen to someone who has questions about the direction the country is going. The wall of die-hard MAGA people can be splintered by one right-directed postcard, saying, or question. The more splinters, the weaker the wall.

Big ideas like general strikes and massive protests are hard to organize. Not so much because we don’t have the will but because we are such a huge country—it’s one of the things that will save us. We don’t have to be ideologically pure. We can just keep our many, varied mouths moving and our many, varied ears listening. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her author’s note at the end of her new book Dream Count wrote, “Ideology blocks different ways of seeing and art requires many eyes.”

There is a reason teachers, artists, writers, journalists are silenced. It’s not only because we talk and put our work and words into the world—it’s because we also listen to the people and the world. As we listen and make and do, we lift someone up, change someone’s mind, save someone’s life, one by one. I don’t know if paying attention to the tiny details counts as a philosophy. William Blake’s there is a world in every grain of sand though resonates. One postcard, one FB post, one conversation at the grocery store, one meal, one instance of pointing to another person as a hawk lifts off from a tree branch whether you’re in Central Park or Mobile, Alabama.

On one of my attempts to get people to send postcards of facts to random people in red states, I noted that it would just take 100,000 of us to send 1,000 post cards to reach the 100,000,000 or so who voted for Trump. When my book, How to Plant a Billion Trees was on submission, Harper Collins wanted to publish it, but marketing came back and said “we really need her to have 100,000 followers.” (Not that everyone needs 100,000—just that this book and I would need a big following). But my point is, 100,000 people could be inspired to send 1,000 postcards. We don’t need all hundred million people to change their minds, but if we can note that health care, food, housing, clean air and water, renewable energy, no genocide, Universal Basic Income, natural resource preservation to enough people, a small percentage will join PEEB! (exclamation point required). We have to be ready when the fascism falls to pick everyone up and in so lifting them, we will become the country we deserve to be.

Edited to note: In my latest blog post, I wrote about the new party, The Party of Everyone Except Billionaires.” When I told Andrea Askowitz about it, she said, “PEEB? PEEB sounds ridiculous.” But hearing the word upon her lips, I recognized the incipient future. PLEEB! As in we Plebeians versus the Billionaires. Now I just have to make the L stand for something. I thought of Love but you all already think I’m a cheesemeister. So far, we’ve crowd sourced Party of Liberty for Everyone Except Billionaires.”