Sue Henkin-Haas wrote an article for the Pacifica Voice newspaper on the La Honda Indivisible movement.
I put an excerpt of it in the September edition of the La Honda Voice, but agreed to include the whole text here on the lahonda.com site.
La Honda Indivisible
Author Sue Henkin-Haas
The Indivisible movement arose in 2016 after Trump got elected to office. Thousands of local Indivisible groups formed with the mission “to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda.” www.indivisible.org
I joined the La Honda Indivisible group shortly after Trump got elected. When Trump was elected people woke up. It began a wave of activism. No longer could we be complacent.
The Indivisible movement is a grass-roots movement. It is the place where each of us, as individuals, can have a voice. We are not told what we can or cannot say by a higher-up. We are the People. As Bernie Sanders says “We must always remember that change almost never happens from the top down, it happens from the bottom up.”
There are so many issues! First and foremost was to defeat Trump. There remain many other challenges. White supremacy, immigrant rights, police reform, climate change, voter protection – and our democratic way of life. Our Indivisible group has focused on them all.
When George Floyd was murdered, La Honda Indivisible started sponsoring weekly Black Lives Matter protests. Each Saturday at noon we gather for an hour – greet the tourists with signs and a handwave – and remember George Floyd. We meet at different locations in the Southcoast area. We TAKE THE KNEE for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and then increased it to 9 minutes and 29 seconds as more information came out in the trial. Each and every week it would shake us up to realize how long 9 minutes and 29 seconds were. My friend joined us one week and cried the whole time – overwhelmed by the suffering that this poor man endured. We continued this practice until Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
George Floyd was a call to action for many of us. John Lewis said, “Emmett Till was my George Floyd”. Sometimes something happens that wakes millions of people. We saw for ourselves this brutal killing, and the image is forever sketched in our brains.
Why protest every week? It is as Michael Moore says, “We need protests out there every single day. We need to be out in the streets.” To be physically out there and in solidarity with other like-minded people, we keep motivated – we keep focused. It is a time for collaboration and connection. It is a place to define who we are as a community.
The world is in trouble. Our democracy is at stake. Our basic civil rights are at risk. This is the moment to stand up, to be present.
As John Lewis said, “Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime.”
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