2021-2025

Who are we as humans?

Small minds and big hearts?

The energy has been surreal.

Beyond the quarantine, the loss, and the transitions.

The momentum of chaos has picked up steam as we roll into another year with uncertainty and a little bit of shame.

We…the people of this nation.

Saturday, the streets were exploding with horns, four lanes wide in every direction. Arms swinging about from every window and heads bopping about from every sunroof, “no justice, no peace” painted on cars, “We Are the Champions” blasting from one car, “F!@# Donald Trump” thumping from the next in line. Los Angeles was out in the streets immediately…out with the rest of the nation in celebration.

Drive a small ways out of West Hollywood or outside of Downtown and you’d found tents with fellow humans struggling to keep warm after the afternoon sprinkle. We saw a rainbow, they saw a disaster.

While the essential workers, activists and voters all danced in the streets, have we seen where the real work begins?

How do we unify our momentum?

how do we build consensus?

The joy was felt, and appreciated.

Anxiety was lifted, the heavy weights of Trump-ism gone for one day in many minds. The smiles were so positive, you had to smile back at their excitement. As expected the news headlines repeat, he will not concede.

The Freedom to Assemble.

A Right that has been utilized by PR based activism in order to direct a movement and react within the system for so long, that we have forgotten the foundations of this right.

The Occupy movement, revived “The People’s Mic” that had been utilized by previous generations as they unified ideas and messages across large crowds with no electronic amplification. During those crisis years of economic "crash” and Occupy Wall Street, assemblies were the process through which groups could organize solutions. Paths forward to improve local social problems, and paths forward to build nationwide coalitions.

Hannah Arendt said it in her book, On Revolution,

“Even the right of assembly, which has come to be the most important positive political freedom, appears still in the American Bill of Rights as 'the right of people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances' (First Amendment) whereby 'historically the right to petition is the primary right' and the historically correct interpretation must read: the right to assemble in order to petition.”

Will we all be the dreamers we wish for?

Will we, individually stand up and create the change we wish for?