Today, we examine the psychology of Trump’s assaults & his possible very scary end game. In addition we include an urgent plea to respond to ICE activity in Santa Fe, an urgent need to lobby for the Health Security Act RIGHT NOW, the Santa Fe Ward elections & Ward elections being held elsewhere in NM, and a plea to attend our Outreach Planning Mtg. Mar 7.I apologize that this post is so long and so late getting out today, but literally as I type, one urgent issue after another breaks. YOU ARE NEEDED NOW! Know that ICE is active in Santa Fe right now. Your town. Get mad. Get active. This is an affront to all we hold dear. The Health Security Act could emerge from the House except there are three key Dems dragging their feet. This is about healthcare for all of NM. Get Active. Make calls. This post is almost all about seeking your urgent engagement in important actions, so please, please read through this entirely.  To reward you for doing so, at the end of this post are three tremendous videos: one from Charlie Chaplin as the Little Dictator. It is incredible how germane his speech is today. Then Keith Olbermann on the war on Latinos and Muslims. If his chronicling of offense after offense is too much, skip to 4 minutes in and stick with it to the end. Then at the end of the blog, a hilarious harpooning of Donald Trump by Steven Colbert. 

Going forward, I encourage you to pay close attention to our Facebook page, click here and click “like” to follow, then under the “Following” button click “See First. Increasingly, we are getting information on events, hearings, training activities, and protests, with very little notice.  For example, we will be posting urgent events later today with information on how you can help support SF Dreamers, Somos Un Pueblo Unido, the ACLU, and our immigrant neighbors with ICE now very active in our community. This is serious, folks. Time to set aside petitions and put our bodies on the line. The Events and Opportunities page has been updated with other trainings and events click here, but liking our Facebook page is still the best strategy for keeping current. The Personal Action Tool Kit has also been updated significantly. Click here.

Insight On Many Donald Trump Voters.  This Psychology Today article almost seems irrelevant given all that is going on right now. I’d encourage you to save the post and come back to this after you take some of the actions below.  This article, from back in Sept, references a number of studies on cognitive thinking, opinion formation, and critical thinking to help understand how Trump supporters form their allegiance to Trump and then can sustain it despite outrageous behavior and lies. A very interesting read. Click here. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide much insight into how to reach these voters and change their minds, which is one of several reasons why over the next few weeks I will discuss how our outreach efforts (please read about this below) should focus first on building our base among those who largely agree with us rather than devoting much time to trying to reach even the most humanistic of Trump supporters. First, we outnumber them significantly, and second, as this article describes, most of them can’t hear us.

A brief note that, miraculously and largely due to intense pressure from people like you, the Health Security Act is still alive in the House. But several Democrats are expressing doubts and we need them all. So please call these representatives NOW, especially if they are in your District. We urge you to call and ask them to support the Health Security Act (HB 101).

• Rep. Debbie Rodella (Española): 505-986-4329
• Rep. Patricio Ruiloba (South Valley – Albuquerque): 505-986-4433
• Rep. Carl Trujillo (Santa Fe): 505-986-4236

Friday, Mar 3, 9am-5pm Friday. Genoveva Chavez Center.  Chain Breakers Presents Development Without Displacement in Santa Fe. Santa Fe is facing a housing and equity crisis. Our high cost of living is forcing many people to move farther to the outskirts of the city, often to areas that lack essential services and amenities. This can lead to car dependance, contributing to climate change and perpetuating a cycle of poverty. As Santa Fe continues along this path, we are becoming increasingly segregated and divided. Because of all this, many Santa Feans feel they must choose between disinvestment and gentrification. for a day of interactive activities, speeches and panels focused on solving these problems and creating a path for Development Without Displacement in Santa Fe. Join Chainbreaker Collective to:

• Learn about Santa Fe’s Resident’s Bill of Rights Resolution.
• Hear the experiences of front-line communtiy members.
• Give input and feedback about how our city grows.

Click here to RSVP:  This is one of those late-breaking events where it would be tremendous to have good representation from Retake Our Democracy. Community Development is a critical component to social justice, but only if all constituents are represented at the table and all communities benefit. This is a great meeting to form relationships with others concerned with these issues. Roxanne and I will be there all day. We hope to see you there.

ICE Is Now Active in Santa Fe: A Conversation with Allegra Love, SF Dreamers Project. It was difficult to keep a focus, as we were interrupted repeatedly by ICE-related emergencies, but yesterday I met with Allegra Love from the SF Dreamers project. She tried to share her concerns about how policy making in Santa Fe fails to effectively engage residents of the immigrant community and residents from the lower-income south section of Santa Fe.  Her criticism wasn’t focused on any one organization or campaign that would seek Southside support, but a historic perspective. And her words rang very true.  Our discussion had a profound impact on how I feel our Santa Fe outreach efforts should unfold. Whenever a politician or organization wants Southside support, town halls may be held in these communities, but the critical ground work to getting residents to attend is almost never done. This ground work takes time:

• Seek meetings with principals of schools located on the south side to help them understand the importance of getting the word out to parents, and then with support from the principal a range of effective outreach efforts could result, including a parent meeting at the school, robo calls from the school district announcing the meeting, and flyers in English and Spanish sent home with students.
• Conduct one-on-one conversations with leaders of the faith community and leaders of organizations serving those communities to seek their input and find out how Retake supporters can support their work.
• Show up for their events, demonstrating our commitment to their issues by being at these events (like the Chainbreaker all-day meeting on Development without Displacement tomorrow, March 3) see above.

As I listened to Allegra, I realized that first Santa Fe for Bernie, then Retake the Roundhouse, and now Retake Our Democracy have all been guilty of failing to take any of these steps. And at the end of the day, that is my fault. Part of why I have reduced the number of posts and also stopped going to hearings is that I think it is more important for me to meet one-to-one with leaders of organizations that serve those communities we want to engage. Retake needs to form alliances with those organizations, support their efforts (as we did the Sanctuary resolution) and show up for them before we can expect them to show up for us. And indeed, if social justice is what we are seeking it may be far more important that we show up for them, than that they come to our Town Halls. And it is time for us to show up big time for our immigrant community.

An outgrowth of my meeting with Allegra was learning about two critical opportunities for Retake Our Democracy supporters to play hands-on roles to support out immigrant community. ICE is very active in Santa Fe right now. As I spoke with Allegra she took a call concerning ICE showing up at Walmart seeking to speak with the manager, then in quick succession two immigrants, one with daughter in tow, sought clarification of their status. It is almost impossible to convey the level of tension and stress contained in that room. Anyone working with immigrants these days is doing so under intense pressure. As a result, SF Dreamers, Somos Un Pueblo Unido, and the ACLU are launching a Rapid Response Team to help support the work of these groups. I don’t have all the details yet, but will post them on Facebook and include them in future posts. But here’s what I just received this morning:

Organizing meeting for Rapid Response Volunteer Lawyers 

• Date March 14, 5:30-7pm
• Where: TBD in Santa Fe
• What: FOR ATTORNEYS ONLY. This will be our first meeting to orient volunteer lawyers to the details and issues surrounding the immigration crisis in our country as it applies to our local community. Think of this as a working-group where you will be informed of what we know and what we don’t know, what plans we have made, the challenges we are facing, and the resources we are looking for in our legal community.
• RSVP Details: If you can make this meeting please email Jessica Terrazas at jessica.r.terrazas@gmail.com  with the subject line Rapid Response Meeting. We will email all participants at a later date with the venue and any relevant materials.

Rapid Response: Community Education, March 23. Community members are urgently needed to be trained and then to conduct outreach and education to restaurants, hotels, schools, churches, and businesses where immigrants work. These people need to understand their rights, what they can do, and what they can’t do, how they can protect their employees, etc. Time and location will be posted in the next blog, but please keep this date open.

Make a contribution today.  Click here to make a contribution to Somos Un Pueblo Unido. Click here to donate to Santa Fe Dreamers. Dreamers contributions will go to YouthWorks, their 501-c-3 fiscal sponsor, but all funds will go directly to the Dreamers. These organizations are on the front lines and right now they urgently need your support.

Outreach Meeting. Tues. Mar 7. 5:30pm-7pm. Center for Progress & Justice. 1420 Cerrillos Rd. A New Approach to Outreach. As the Roundhouse session ends March 19, and as other time-consuming infrastructure efforts are slowly being completed, we are ready now to launch a more systematic approach to outreach. This outreach will be informed by a number of one-on-one conversations that have been conducted over the past 2-3 weeks with experts in community engagement, cultural awareness, community organizing, and with leaders of communities we want to engage. In addition to these conversations, we are nearing completion of a number of key organizational readiness projects like building the new website; planning a sequence of training events; establishing the KSFR radio show; piloting Open House Activism Parties as a means of engaging and activating others; and preparing tools and protocols for a range of outreach efforts in Santa Fe and in other parts of the State. At this Outreach Meeting, we will present specific protocols and plans for expanding our Open House Activism; for launching neighborhood-based canvassing efforts; for conducting outreach to organizations and communities with whom we want to form alliances. Specific draft tools will be presented for input: Retake Our Democracy Elevator Speech; scripts for canvassing; protocols for Open House Activism Parties; phone scripts for outreach to organizations. We will also ask for volunteers who want to become trained to hold one-on-one meetings with leaders of organizations with whom we want to form alliances and with leaders of institutions serving communities where we want to support initiatives to achieve social justice.

I will be honest, some of our efforts to organize through Action Teams have achieved mixed results, in part due to trying to do too much too soon and so not having sufficient clarity of purpose and approach to effectively marshal those volunteers who have stepped forward. But slowly (and we said this was a long haul, a marathon, not a sprint), we are achieving more clarity and more pieces are falling into place. The KSFR radio show is in place, the new website is almost done, alliances are being formed with Somos Un Pueblo Unido, New Energy Economy, Earth Care, SURJ, Common Cause, Santa Fe Dreamers Project, ACLU, NM Progressive Coalition, and other allies. A series of trainings have begun, two of which were held to packed rooms last Sunday and with more to come. Each of these pieces took time to develop, but the fruits of these efforts are now ripening. So please plan to attend this outreach meeting. For some reason our folks really hate to RSVP. This makes it so much harder to plan for meetings, so please, be respectful of how much work is being done behind the scenes and RSVP by clicking here or if you don’t do FB, respond to this email and let us know you are coming.

Ward Elections:  People have asked how the Ward Elections went in Santa Fe. Since there was no formal ‘slate’ of candidates committed to activate Wards and infuse the party with a progressive perspective, it is hard to precisely quantify, but from my experience at the Ward elections held two weeks ago, the result was overwhelming. It appears that almost every single ward now has new leadership, leadership committed to conducting ward meetings, fostering involvement in community and party issues, and voting for progressives to represent us on the State Central Committee. This is the first step of retaking the Democratic Party, and as the DNC vote rejecting Keith Ellison reveals, as does the Democratic Party Chairs immediate embrace of these results, the party needs reform from top to bottom. And the bottom-up reform has begun. Santa Fe came first as our elections have been conducted, but to have a statewide impact, it is critical that other counties activate and elect active progress Ward leadership.  Bernalillo and Dona County elections are coming and there is a planning meeting Saturday in ABQ.  If you have friends in ABQ or Las Cruces, please forward this post to them and encourage their attendance at these elections. Be there and then vote to retake the party:.

• Bernalillo County – Precinct and CCC election – March 25 – meetings are in the afternoon. Click here for a schedule of Ward Election times and locations.
• Dona Ana County – Las Cruces – Ward/Precinct Elections – March 23. Click here for times and locations.
• Progressives are organizing in Bernalillo County to try to do what Santa Fe has done. They have a planning meeting set for this Saturday, March 4, from 3:30-4:30pm. For more details and to RSVP via Facebook Click here. Don’t have FB, Click here to RSVP via Action Network.

Universal Early Childhood Education Resolution. Weds, March 8, 7 pm at the Santa Fe City Council Chambers, 200 Lincoln, there will be a hearing on the Universal Early Childhood Education resolution. Make plans to attend.  But between now and then, please contact your City Councilors and tell them you support expansion of the early childhood program and will be paying attention to their vote. Click here for contact information for your City Council representatives. When calling or emailing your Councilors, tell them that you support the Universal Early Childhood Education resolution and speak from your personal perspective. But please do raise your voice.

About now you may need some inspiring words.  It’s absolutely remarkable how germane Chaplin’s speech is today.

Olbermann is again spot-on chronicling one inhuman offense after another and as he does this chronicling, know that ICE is active in our Santa Fe. Your town. Get mad. Get active. This is an affront to all we hold dear.

Ok, you deserve to laugh now.

Categories: Actions, early childhood, Healthcare, Healthcare coverage, Roundhouse Lobbying, Trump

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