Sometime after the war, Albert Camus was invited to speak at a conference about religion. He mentioned that during those terrible years it would have been very good to hear the Pope condemn the Nazis. Any respected voice at a time like that would have at least been of some solace, if nothing else. Then, he said, I learned later that the Pope had spoken against the Nazis — this was in his Vatican Encyclicals, Camus was told. The official pronouncements of the Roman Catholic Church, written in Latin. Ah, I see, said Camus, insider talk, unheard by most of those struggling across Europe. That won't due, suggested Camus. Times so urgent require speech so plain and emphatic that every person, of any background and training, will plainly understand.

Most op-eds, social media posts, editorials, blog posts, tv/radio talk spots, and podcasts skip this part in bold type immediately below — any way of carrying out this essential (if you want a hope of success, that is) organizing task:

Click here if you want to receive messages about how to stay involved.

Not informed (vital though that is) but involved. 

Because most political messages skip this step, countless opportunities are lost for organizing people around a cause, for strengthening voices in solidarity, and so forth. If memory serves me, one thing the long-lost Obama 2008 campaign website did was help people stay involved. Not just informed, involved.

We Americans tend to think that voting and maybe the occasional public event fulfills our civic duty. The powerful love that theory of citizenship and all the hundreds of days of silence from us and peace for them that it involves. 

I notice at the end of Timothy Snyder's Substack posts you usually see resource links on the topics of resistance and making positive solutions. That's heading in the right direction.

Not just informed, involved.

The average political speech, the average op-ed, the average social media post, seeks a nod of agreement and maybe a trip to the voting booth. These average speeches and bits of writing don't care about building organized activism. The foundation of their philosophy is that "we insiders, having been elected, will take care of everything. We don't need citizens except for a day in November. It's a pretty story those speakers and writers tell themselves about their own importance, but in a crisis like the one we have now, the writers of these speeches and op-eds are out of their minds. In this kind of crisis, average political speech will kill us.

This post is a cousin to the earlier post about semaphore, I think.

I was thinking about semaphore, the ancient system of very fast communication. You put a team on the top of every ridge between the country's border and the capital. You equip them with a messaging code and a means for sending messages to the next ridge — flags, smoke, flashing lights. 

This kind of system still works. A few years ago my students and I sent a message around the perimeter of a very large university building in 4.5 seconds.

System requirements

At the edge of the country, or in any other danger zone, you need a team watching for hints of enemy action. They have a job that they focus on.

The message teams on the ridge-tops have a job they focus on.

In the capital city, another team must be prepared to interpret the signals and to act on them.

Without these teams with focused tasks, we might as well plant flowers at the top of each ridge and go up there with a nice bottle of wine and sit in the pretty sunshine. Or we can sit at the end of the message stream saying "Oh wow, this is depressing" over and over again.

Semaphore is not broadcasting.

Most message systems we enjoy each day are, down deep, systems of broadcasting, even for those of us with few followers on social media. NBC and FOX broadcast to their millions, and people like me broadcast to my tens. Both are forms of broadcasting, in that seed is tossed out to whatever audience is there, and for NBC and FOX and most social media users like me, we behave as though that's fine, that's good enough. A spray of messages going out is good enough for most who operate on a loosely defined broadcasting model. 

If our media tools were more like semaphore, and less like broadcasting, things might be different. Those who report on whatever issue, from whatever frontier, would not be satisfied with what I'm calling broadcasting. We'd organize at the send end, and we'd want a team at the other end that is organized around appropriate action.

The tools we have for the most part don't support organization at either end of the semaphore chain. Yes, messages go out from ridge to ridge, but there's usually no team on the frontier knowingly attempting a worthy shared task. And there's usually no team at the far end of the message chain focused on making use of the reports.

We have fabulous messaging systems undreamed of a few decades ago. We have for the most part not built the social and civic groups at each end of the message line to test the power of the tools.

It's a bit like a US Civil War army placing cavalry way out front to locate and judge the strength of the enemy, then send a message back. And even if you did have cavalry sending good messages, it's a bit like there's nobody back at the army's headquarters organized to plan a response.

That seems to be the plan, anyway. In the spirit of that heartless joke Ronald Reagan used to tell, about how he hated the frightening thought of a person coming from the government to help. In the old video clips, he took such pleasure trotting out those ugly words.

After my brother died in a workplace accident, a person from OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, asked to speak with my parents about what had happened. In the course of their meeting at the house, the OSHA man said, "Each of our regulations was written in someone's blood."

Building over decades a web of protections for workers was the job of OSHA. The glib Reagan joke, the selfish and deceptive destruction of the worthiest work of this kind of government agency — things like this come too easily to some of our fellow Americans. 

Tearing things down takes little time at all. Building something worthy often takes a lifetime, and sometimes saves many a life.

I remember how the news came that day. My niece jotted me a note today reminding me that she barely knew her father.

There comes a time when every activist movement can no longer sustain itself on the energy it has accumulated so far.

• It can't get its voice out far enough to do the necessary work.
• It can't sustain its voice long enough without exhaustion.
• It can't maintain its morale and confidence in the isolation of its small original membership.
• It can't take on larger institutions and more powerful political and economic forces on its own.
• It can't gather the information needed, build the skills required, fast enough. It can't find some of the tools it needs within the circle of its founding membership.

The activist group realizes it needs more partners if there is to be a chance for its work to continue, a chance to succeed.

If the group has been helping out other kindred groups all along, then allies are probably available. If the group has failed to support others along the way, or if the group has insisted on some sort of purity test before making alliances, it's probably too late, and more powerful forces in society will overwhelm and silence the activist group.

When my students and I used to look at historical episodes of activism, we saw this pattern, and so on behalf of the students who teased out the details in class discussions over the years, I pass along this note.

"The Power of the Powerless" is a 1978 essay Vaclav Havel wrote to help advance the thinking and the courage of individuals and groups trying to live positive, honest lives, faithful to truth as they understood it, self-asserting rather than docile, and trying hard not to cower under the Soviet regime behind the Iron Curtain. This essay has much value in any society where power has been accumulated in places distant from the influence of the citizens, where power is used shamelessly and recklessly by those who have consolidated it, and where the institutions of free civic society have been captured or hollowed out, leaving them unable to serve their vital purposes.

The essay is long and addresses several aspects of political and daily life in such circumstances. Here I will say a few words about the first short section, and I'll paste a version of it in below.

In those early paragraphs, Havel notes that outsiders call people like him dissidents, and says the things dissidents do in that society is dissent. Havel is keen to resist the simplification of these terms. He doesn't care for outsiders to do the naming. People inside the society, living in truth in the crisis, should say who they are and what they are about, Havel asserts there. Don't let outsiders tell you what you should be called. Of course in our political climate aggressive and dismissive naming takes place so often that it's hard to take note of it and push each time it happens. Nevertheless, Havel claims the right of naming for the people living the life. Naming is doubly important because people who love making propaganda are often masters of imposing cunningly misleading names on others.

In addition, Havel begins to talk in specific ways about the circumstances of his country at that time — doing so is necessary for thinking clearly in the pages ahead. And likely most important of all, he begins to ask about the real power of these powerless citizens.

Here is the language of section 1 of "The Power of the Powerless" as translated by Paul Wilson:

A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called "dissent." This specter has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.

Who are these so-called dissidents? Where does their point of view come from, and what importance does it have? What is the significance of the "independent initiatives" in which "dissidents" collaborate, and what real chances do such initiatives have of success? Is it appropriate to refer to "dissidents" as an opposition? If so, what exactly is such an opposition within the framework of this system? What does it do? What role does it play in society? What are its hopes and on what are they based? Is it within the power of the "dissidents"–as a category of sub-citizen outside the power establishment–to have any influence at all on society and the social system? Can they actually change anything?

I think that an examination of these questions–an examination of the potential of the "powerless"–can only begin with an examination of the nature of power in the circumstances in which these powerless people operate.

You hear this idea sometimes:

Don't waste a crisis.

That might mean some very different things, more than just the first bullet point below:

• Building a coalition committed to kicking out the bums and getting America back to what it was in, say, 2014.
• Same coalition, aimed at ejecting the dangerous ones and getting America back to what it was in 2014, with some new patches applied on the system flaws revealed by the current crisis.
• Building a coalition wider than we've seen in recent decades, committing to the needs of the new people joining in (people alienated or left out in recent decades) and patching the American system, for sure, but also expanding on the best parts. New protections to the system, new opportunities for citizens, new rights in place — after all, why should alienated people help restore the kind of America that alienated them in the first place?

Seems likely that Bernie Sanders is trying not to waste this crisis in this larger sense, and people are turning out to his rallies in larger and larger numbers.

Someone was complaining about a place in the Caribbean, saying, essentially, that people there had grown accustomed to distant, powerful others providing substantially for their local needs. It wasn't a subtle moment in the conversation, and with someone I'd just met I decided not to press for more of the reasoning — if any.

I have not spent much time in the region, so my impressions may be faulty. Anyway, here goes. You meet someone in the Caribbean. The more sophisticated as a user of the colonizer's language the person is, the closer you are standing at that moment to the machinery of wealth. Corporations, museums, strong schools, casinos, posh restaurants, curving beaches . . .

Which is the chicken and which the egg here? Probably both, probably it's a reinforcing loop. Drive away from the place where the colonizer's language is spoken well, and you drive toward poverty, readily visible even from a rented car.

Power begets power. The tools of power beget power and the emblems of power. You can often spot the less-than-powerful by the way they speak. They were brought up and educated outside the palace gates, so the language clues are only natural.

* * * 

This is the fifteenth blog post I have composed for akaKenSmith.com using the new WordLand software.

A nation may be tempted to put on the clothes of past adventures and to play the songs of previous generations, to salute what was saluted in the past, to gather up into a pantomime of courage that recalls the actual courage of the past.

But the past's challenges are past. If a nation is to rouse itself to a new courage, it must do so by turning toward the challenges of the new day. If this can't be done, then what follows is a mere puppet show, a costume drama, a farce even or a shadow play. 

Name the challenges of the new day with great care; speak precisely and forthrightly; cast off the shadows of the past and step forward; today is more than dark enough without them.