{"id":36240,"date":"2018-07-27T06:29:18","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T11:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36240"},"modified":"2018-07-27T06:29:18","modified_gmt":"2018-07-27T11:29:18","slug":"how-to-navigate-the-white-water-of-these-turbulent-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36240","title":{"rendered":"How to navigate the white water of these turbulent times"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

How to navigate the white water of these turbulent times<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
\"\"<\/p>\n

The latest lurch in global statecraft \u2014 Trump\u2019s dissing NATO allies then playing footsie with Vladimir Putin \u2014 leaves many scrambling to maintain some balance. Republicans for whom the enemy status of Russia is an article of faith are beside themselves. Democrats are running out of adjectives to describe Trump\u2019s behavior. And activists who have been around for longer than the last election are wondering how to steer a steady course in the midst of extremities.<\/p>\n

It reminds me of whitewater rafting on the Upper Gauley River in West Virginia, the kind where people aren\u2019t supposed to even get into the raft unless they\u2019ve had prior experience. I never paddled so hard in my life. At one point, even our guide was tossed out of the raft; thankfully a nearby kayaker grabbed him and returned him to us.<\/p>\n

When the activist and lesbian feminist writer Barbara Deming encountered Frantz Fanon\u2019s \u201cWretched of the Earth,\u201d she praised his raising the question of balance. Fanon, involved with with the Algerian war of independence from the French empire, was writing about armed struggle for liberation. He said a major challenge for revolutionaries at a time of accelerating turbulence is how to avoid vertigo, the dizziness that accompanies highly emotional events happening around us.<\/p>\n

Deming\u2019s personal experience in the 1960s civil rights movement brought that kind of challenge, she said in her reflection \u201cOn Revolution and Equilibrium<\/a>.\u201d Deming found in the midst of turbulence that her commitment to nonviolence was steadying for her and others. Locked up in jail in Albany, Georgia, as one of a group of pacifists arrested for breaking the segregation laws, Deming undertook a fast that \u2014 when I saw her in the courtroom \u2014 left her hardly able to walk. The group won their struggle with the infamous Sheriff Laurie Pritchett.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to navigate the white water of these turbulent times The latest lurch in global statecraft \u2014 Trump\u2019s dissing NATO allies then playing footsie with Vladimir Putin \u2014 leaves many scrambling to maintain some balance. Republicans for whom the enemy status of Russia is an article of faith are beside themselves. Democrats are running out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,7],"tags":[137,21005,685,7966],"class_list":["post-36240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-civil-rights","tag-george-lakey","tag-revolution","tag-waging-nonviolence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36241,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36240\/revisions\/36241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}