Dear Progressive Reader,

October 18 is “No Kings Day” across the country. More than 2,500 events spread throughout all fifty states and overseas are anticipated to draw large crowds nationwide. As Robert Reich notes in his newsletter on Friday, “With No Kings rallies occurring across America tomorrow, and the Trump Administration’s unhinged reaction to them on full display, it’s never been more important for Congress to reform the Insurrection Act. . . . [The] 200-year-old law, gives Presidents near-limitless power to deploy troops on U.S. soil with almost no oversight. It was meant for true emergencies. But as written, it’s an open invitation for abuse—allowing any president to send armed forces into American cities under almost any pretext. I fear Trump is about to seize that power.” (See my note in the P.S. below about the new Robert Reich film we are hosting in Madison on Sunday). My recent “Comment” from the October/November issue of the magazine takes a look at the ways Project 2025 can give us warning of what Trump and his team are planning next in their assault on American democracy.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has called these No Kings gatherings “Hate America Rallies,” but in fact, most of the participants will be there because they care about this country and do not want to see it veer away from democracy. As U.S. Representative Mark Pocan (Democrat of Wisconsin) notes in his email to supporters, “[These] are people who can't stand to see a Presidency turn into an autocracy that props up an oligarchy. Who fear for their rights as they've seen countless videos of masked agents snatching folks off the streets. Who wonder why billionaires keep getting tax handouts while healthcare for working families and public schools are cut. They are people who love their country, and who are turning out because they want to save it.” I will be spending Saturday helping to anchor the Pacifica Radio national news broadcast of the No Kings events, bringing the voices of people spread across the country into the homes of all.

In Chicago, small colored plastic whistles have become almost omnipresent among the groups seeking to protect their neighbors from being snatched up by ICE agents. “When you see somebody and you see a car or something suspicious, you do a break of a whistle (meaning a soft series of whistles),” one woman told NPR reporter Sergio Martínez-Beltrán. “If you see somebody being detained the whistle is long, as loud as you can.” My thoughts immediately turned to the well-known (although apocryphal) story of Paul Revere, warning residents in Massachusetts of approaching British troops. “One if by land, two if by sea,” reads the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861). Today a whole multitude of Chicagoans stand ready to warn their neighbors of the invading army of the federal agents of the Trump Administration. “Short soft series if suspicious, long loud blast if someone is being detained.” Less poetic than Longfellow, but this collective action by countless unnamed everyday people is making a difference in the lives of some of the most vulnerable in our communities.

In Gaza, the bombing has ceased for the most part, but several incidents have called into question the meaning of the term “ceasefire.” As award-winning Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha notes on social media, “I’m sick of journalists who keep asking us if we have ‘hope after the ceasefire.’ Stop calling it a ceasefire. It is not a ceasefire when thousands of Palestinian bodies, many of them children, remain buried beneath the rubble for months, while Israel continues to block the entry of the heavy equipment needed to retrieve them. . . .” This week, after Israel had already broken a portion of the agreement both through two aerial attacks on Tuesday and then cutting off of access to some of the promised aid deliveries, Middle East Studies professor Stephen Zunes looked at the multi-phased roll out of the agreement and analyzed the points of concern in its implementation. As Zunes concludes, “it will be up to global civil society and other governments to take the lead in demanding a fair, just, and lasting peace.”

Elsewhere on our website this week, Paul Von Blum reviews the new book Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance, edited by Raymond Tyler and Paul Buhle; and Bill Lueders reviews another new book, Lab Dog, which looks at the efforts to end the use of dogs in animal research. Plus, David Helvarg pens an op-ed that asks why Donald Trump favors the Coast Guard over NOAA which brings us the news of our climate; and Dorian Warren opines on the role of race in Trump’s authoritarianism.

Finally, The New York Times notes this week the passing on September 30 of ecofeminist Susan Griffin who was “an influential poet, playwright and prolific feminist author who pioneered a unique form of creative nonfiction, blending propulsive, poetic prose with history, memoir, and myth.” Writing in The Progressive in a July 1984 article on the environmental movement, Carol Polsgrove notes, “Feminists [like] Susan Griffin in Women and Nature, added to radical action a radical theory, connecting the exploitation of nature with men's domination of women and linking that, in turn, with the militarization of society. Thus [she] laid the theoretical groundwork for allying the environmental movement with the peace and women's movements.” In her January 1996 review in The Progressive of Griffin’s book The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender, and Society, Kate Clinton writes, “Griffin's latest collection of essays is a walk on the wild side. The long, meditative title essay achieves a luminous mysticism through connections made in art, science, poetry, mathematics, religion. God is in the details and within.” And in an April 2005 review, this time of a collection of essays and poetry titled The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, which includes Griffin, Matt Rothschild sums up by saying, “The person who best encapsulates our present moment for me is the writer Susan Griffin: ‘What is required now is balance. In the paucity of clear promise, one must somehow walk a tightrope, stepping lightly on a thin line drawn between cynicism and escape, planting the feet with awareness but preserving all the while enough playfulness to meet fear.’ ” Susan Griffin’s voice, and her analysis, will be sorely missed as the next generation confronts our current environmental crisis.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – For readers in the area around Madison, Wisconsin, The Progressive is co-hosting a screening, together with the local union Madison Teachers, Inc., of the new film The Last Class with Robert Reich at The Barrymore Theatre on Sunday October 19 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are available online and at the door. Please join us if you can.

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