Nonviolence News Editor’s Note From Rivera Sun
If you zoom out to a distant vantage point of human history, you can see the arc of the universe bending toward a certain kind of justice. If we secure a future for humanity, historians will look back on these times and identify them as an era in which ordinary people asserted their rights – and the rights of nature – against the greed-based desires of rich people and megacorporations. Many of the stories in this week’s Nonviolence News embody the nitty-gritty steps of a movement made of billions of people and millions of efforts on a wide variety of issues.
In Uruguay (pictured), citizens are protesting the priorities of the government after discovering their water supply was being augmented by salt water. The country faces a severe drought, but officials aren’t constricting water-guzzling industries like corporate agribusiness, mining, or tech giants like Google, which wants to build a server facility that requires 2-million gallons of water per day. That’s the equivalent of household use for 55,000 people. Who should get drinkable water – a business or 500,000 low-income residents who can’t afford bottled water when the government dilutes the reservoir with saltwater?
Similarly, the many labor strikes and cost-of-living protests can be viewed as dispersed, but interconnected struggles to oppose the economic hardships created by profit-driven businesses. While CEOs, owners, and shareholders are raking in profits, workers are facing evictions, hunger, and overwork as they struggle to earn enough to survive. In Kenya, cost-of-living protests faced brutal repression as the opposing political party campaigns against the current administration’s failure to address the crisis. In Canada, 7,400 dockworkers shut down ports. Los Angeles is experiencing a surge of labor strikes, from the revolving strikes launched by low-wage hotel workers to the recent strike of the SAG-AFTRA actors adding their demands and disgruntlement to the Hollywood writers’ strike.
When we examine climate actions, we can see how they are aimed at dethroning the fossil fuel industry from its position of privilege in our society. So far, governments continue to prioritize the greed of the oil industry by issuing new permits, backing pipeline expansions, continuing subsidies. Across the globe, citizens are pushing back – from theatrical fire-breathing protests held by students in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the “Friendship From Hell” demonstrations held by Hungarian and Serbian activists opposing the “Friendship Pipeline” planned to run between their countries. In the United Kingdom, climate rebels challenged society’s sense of business-as-usual during a time of climate emergency by disrupting the Wimbledon tennis championship. In Italy, activists took over a section of motorway and transformed it into a community space for a day, using direct action to assert citizens’ right to determine the future of their communities.
But the issues extend beyond economics. Many stories this week revolve around who gets to decide the direction our societies will go in. In San Francisco, citizens are campaigning against driverless taxis that are falling short of industry’s promises. Snarling up traffic, causing accidents, and worst of all, driving the need for car-centric (not people-centered) cities. As a political decision on the driverless cars looms, citizens are taking a unique approach to protesting: they’re stopping the vehicles in their tracks by gently placing orange cones on the hoods of the cars.
Find all these stories and many more in this week’s Nonviolence News>>
These are the burning questions in Nonviolence News this week, the cultural shift that – if we’re very, very fortunate – future historians will look back upon and see as a defining arc of this era. Who decides who benefits from the daily labors of billions? Who gets to shape the way our society flows, day-in and day-out? While we can cynically answer this (political elites, rich people, mega-corporations), the fundamental question of our time is: what and who should the fruits of our labor support? I know my answer … what’s yours?
In solidarity,
Rivera Sun
Photo Credit: Uruguayans protest megacorporations guzzling water during drought.