Friends,
We do our collective best to resist the lawlessness and brutality of these times of tyrannical rule.
While opposing and working to reverse the worst Trump/MAGA horrors, at the grassroots many of us are also working to reaffirm democratic values, culture and practice. In this vein, we highlight the community based democratic and anti-racist model of Hidden Brookline and hope that some of you will find ways to bring its commitments and methods to your communities.
When I was much younger, I was struck by the coincidence of the great historian Howard Zinn and the acclaimed and accessible novelist Kurt Vonnegut both teaching that without knowledge of our history we cannot be free. Without such knowledge, we don’t have frames of reference to judge the integrity of what our nominal leaders tell us or to discern lies promoted by the “powers that be.”
As you will see in this short trailer-like video, my friend Barbara Brown and her colleagues in Hidden Brookline are doing, we can and should excavate hidden – in this case slavery – histories that lie at the foundation of our communities and communal lives – even in the more “progressive” Northeast. Doing so builds knowledge, but it also builds trust and solidarity that are essential for healthy societies.
As Barbara writes, : We have now captured a key portion of that story in a 10-minute video that invites everyone to journey into our town’s past. Watch it on our home page https://hiddenbrookline.weebly.com or on YouTube. It’s also being screened in Brookline classrooms.”
And of course, Ken Burns has done much the same on a larger pallet with his remarkable PBS series The American Revolution. He and his collaborators provide history that many of us did not get in high school or college, peeling away debilitating myths about how our country came to be and giving us a more honest and firm history.
Good ways to build for the future—and meaningful ways to begin the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and the War of Independence, while confronting the continuities that persist, from white-supremacist deportations to the profoundly illegal and harmful Trump/Rubio/Hegseth invasion of Venezuela.