Back in 2006 there was a pretty nice example of hartal to protest bigoted immigration policy being debated in Congress, and to support the idea that immigrants are an integral part of American life economic and social life. At the time the AP reported:
Hundreds of thousands of mostly Hispanic immigrants skipped work and took to the streets Monday, flexing their economic muscle in a nationwide boycott that succeeded in slowing or shutting many farms, factories, markets and restaurants.
From Los Angeles to Chicago, Houston to New Orleans, the "Day Without Immigrants" attracted widespread participation despite divisions among activists over whether a boycott would send the right message to Washington lawmakers considering sweeping immigration reform.
"We are the backbone of what America is, legal or illegal, it doesn't matter," said Melanie Lugo, who was among thousands attending a rally in Denver with her husband and their third-grade daughter. "We butter each other's bread. They need us as much as we need them."
Police estimated 400,000 people marched through Chicago's business district and tens of thousands more rallied in New York and Los Angeles, where police stopped giving estimates at 60,000 as the crowd kept growing.
An estimated 75,000 rallied in Denver, more than 15,000 in Houston and 30,000 more across Florida. Smaller rallies in cities from Pennsylvania and Connecticut to Arizona and South Dakota attracted hundreds not thousands.
Leading up to the action, I was actually not all that enthused. Then I was more concerned about the mid-terms and Democratic chances of seizing Congress later that year, thought that there hadn't been enough of a strategic escalation plan laid out to use such a tactic, and felt that with the specific, objectionable bill in question defeated in the Senate even a mostly symbolic form of economic intervention was unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive.
I've since decided that I was wrong. Not a Himalayan miscalculation, as Gandhi thought he'd made in pushing for hartal in 1919, but I didn't fully consider how empowering this action could be even--or especially--in the wake of a tactical victory. Of course there was backlash from the usual suspects, but that was outweighed by the impressive mobilization and demonstration of unity and economic muscle.
Two years later, as my understanding of NV tactics and strategy evolved and I'd been more engaged in real application of them, I was fully behind a similar, albeit less successful, action against hate and in support of marriage equality. I still had the same concerns about follow-up and whatnot, but the political environment seemed better to me.
More importantly, I'd moved into a space where I thought action was paramount while jawing endlessly about the perfect way to move only encouraged dangerous impotence. I've grown to embrace tension and conflict as means to effect change, thus am now more comfortable with jumping in with those kinds of tactics, backlash be damned.
I would love to see something like this used in our escalating struggle for HCR, not to mention to achieve other important ends like protecting reproductive freedom, ending our wars, changing how we finance campaigns, etc. For it all to work, of course, we need to stop relying on the same handful of people to do the work and have more step up. So how do we get them on board and out of their comfort zones?
ntodd
(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)
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