Terry, but wait. There’s more! Another post by our randomly selected history teacher Mr. Proffitt at the Organize2020.com website discusses the “next steps towards [sic] democracy” in North Carolina, a heartfelt complaint about how the “conservative” Democratic Party allowed our beloved state to be hijacked by those evil right-wing Republicans, and other belly-slappers.

This leaves us with a few choices to shift power back in the other direction. We have to spend the next few years building and employing a combination of the following forms of power:

Electoral? In the short term (i.e. the next 7 years and then forever after that), we have no choice but to work diligently to strengthen the voting power of the progressive electoral bloc that elected Barack Obama and made North Carolina history in 2008. The Black, Latino, Asian, and Native communities that are the demographic future of North Carolina must be registered and mobilized on voting day. Same goes for young people, women, and LGBTQ communities. College students, school workers, and other public sector workers will also play a critical role, as will those currently battling unemployment, a lack of access to (mental and physical) health care, and those who prioritize environmental policies that will allow humans to have a future on this planet. We will not be able to buy the TV ads and mailers that move these voters. We’ve got to put on our comfortable shoes and walk into communities across the state, knocking on doors, having conversations, and mobilizing our “people power” to make sure that our people are voting in big numbers.
Economic? One of the main reasons why these folks have money to beat us is that we just keep giving it back to them. Let’s identify a few targets (i.e. anything owned by Art Pope) and work hard to make sure we hit them in their pockets. Stop shopping at their businesses, stop our friends from shopping at their businesses, and pool our money together for solutions that get each other fed, clothed, cared for, and strengthened for the fight. Let’s start co-ops, mutual aid organizations, and community gardens, just to name a few examples.
Disruptive? When a group of people has a relative disadvantage in the two previous categories, they often have to rely on their ability to keep “business as usual” from moving forward. This means sit-ins. This means shutting down our workplaces and schools. This means preventing the General Assembly from meeting. This means shutting down roads and commerce. This means standing on the feet of the people in power until they give us what we want. And then doing it again until we get more.

The problem here is pretty obvious: Most of us don’t recognize the violence inherent in the system.