No is Not Enough

 No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein
2017
Weight: 14 oz
Method of Disposal: Mailing to Someone

Do not let the current climate wear you down.  

It is incredibly hard.  

I do not always know that I can do it.  It is challenging to dedicate your life to your work and family, and then have anything left over to help change the current tide of politics, but we all have a part to play in this community.  This book was written before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and in it Klein warns about what will happen once it hits.  Only, she did not know what "it" was.  She writes, 

"So far Trump's unending atmosphere of of crisis has been sustained largely through his own over-the-top rhetoric--declaring cities "crime infested" sites of "carnage" when in fact the violent crime rate had been declining nationwide for decades; hammering away at a manufactured narrative about an immigrant crime wave; and generally insisting Obama destroyed the country.  Soon enough, however, Trump could well have some crises to exploit that are distinctly more real, since crisis is the logical conclusion of his politics on every front." 

So here we are, and I am exhausted.  I remember a time when there was not BIG news every. single. day.  Sometimes, multiple times a day.  He is still on the offensive and all over the board, even as Covid-19 rages.  Remember the early days of the pandemic when there were news stories coming out of California saying that ICE was still conducting raids even as there was talk of releasing people from prison due to not being able to keep them safe.  At least it made the news back then, I suppose, so we would know and could be outraged.  We have unmarked security forces patrolling protests.  Do you remember when people dying in a protest in America had become shocking?  Now, it is hard to keep up with who is getting killed and where.  Meanwhile, the "President" chuckles about staying in office past his term.  

Klein writes, "People can develop responses to sequential or gradual change.  But if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, the hope is that populations will rapidly become exhausted and over-whelmed, and will ultimately swallow their bitter medicine."  She had already laid all of this out for us in her powerful book, The Shock Doctrine.  In No is Not Enough she writes about how some populations who have been through a shock previously are less susceptible to fascism.  They see it, and they rise up and refuse it.  She writes about the inverse of the "Shock Doctrine."  A "People's Shock" rising up from below.  She seems to have, somehow, maintained some hope that globally we can rise up and ask for more, save our planet from global warming, implement a culture of caring, do the opposite of what Trump proposes in the Art of the Deal.  My optimism was waning as I read, and I found it hard to envision, but I do not want us to stop trying.

She says it is important to have a Utopia to strive for and work for.  The one she describes seems worth a good fight.