The door is open

My brother thirteen is ready for a General Strike.  Laid off from work in the days of COVID, he has lately been participating in more than his share of the many marches and demonstrations that have sprung up in response to the plethora of outrages coming out of the Trump II White House.  Marches have their place- but there is something to be said for the General Strike as an effective weapon against the authoritarianism that is threatening to turn Americans into complicit abettors in TwentyFirst Century Fascism.  

My brother thirteen is all about the General Strike.  He was ready May 1.  In principle I support the idea-- I find the daydream of a work stoppage across the land a tantalizing fantasy, but the May 1 movement my brother informed me about remained a daydream when the day rolled by,  I told thirteen I would gladly  participate in any organized General Strike as long as it wasn't just a Bluesky thing.  It needs to be The Big One-- a voluntary mass stoppage of work and of commerce participated in so broadly that it causes the severe pain in those it is designed to communicate to.  It needs to be a threat that normies take seriously.  I will commit to it the day I overhear my work colleagues discussing it. There is talk of General Strikes if you look for it-- but you have to want to find it.  But until it is a phrase buzzing from late night talk show hosts' lips, and tossed about in the banter that precedes workaday meetings, I don't think I'll be joining.

Taylor Lorenz recently made a video about the "Someone Needs to Do It" Meme.  I can wholeheartedly relate to the sentiment.  A General Strike would be better because it's something we could all pull the trigger on. How satisfying would that be?  But while we wait for a movement to congeal around an act that demonstrates the power and the seriousness of the anti-fascist masses, I concur with Taylor Lorenz that hoping for the vicarious thrill of some anonymous working class hero's taking of matters into his or her own hands is not an unpleasant way to pass the time.  It's just too passive a pastime, and history suggests there are ways for the non-violent among us to spring into action.

I think of G.A. Cohen's parable of the self-imprisoned man from Karl Marx's Theory of History:

A man is in a windowless room whose door he mistakenly thinks is locked. Unlike a man in a locked room, he can leave it. Yet since he does not know he can, he is not likely to try the door. One reason why people sometimes do not exercise their power is their lack of awareness that they have it.

Now is the time for us to collectively walk through that door.  Whenever we agree is Now.