MANSFIELD Taking A Stand at Standing Rock

StandingRock

This could be it: Our era’s Bunker Hill; our ’68 Chicago Convention; our Edmund Pettus Bridge; our Stonewall; our Selma … complete with snarling attack dogs and water cannons; our Tiananmen Square, our Arab Spring …our drawing of a bright line in the sand that we cannot afford to let a tyrant cross.

We either protect it or lose it … this democratic republic of ours. We cannot afford to fail to take action and then look back one day and say what we “shoulda” or “coulda” done. This is too important for dithering or complacency (see my previous post).

Defeating Trump on the Dakota Access Pipeline is more than just standing up for our Native American brothers and sisters as they strive to protect their water and way of life at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. This is much more than just defeating the building of an oil pipeline. This is about standing up and standing on principle … no matter if your particular issue is women’s rights, gay rights, black rights or environmental rights. At this point they’re all the same; it’s still, in the end, all about principle. We take a stand and stop this madman right now in North Dakota on this issue or we all will eventually get steamrolled.

If we don’t harness all of the energy that was generated by the marches held across the country on the day after the inauguration it will soon dissipate. For those who are asking, “what do we do next?” we have to give them something quickly, and this is it.

Trump and those on the right would just love to see progressives disintegrate due to petty differences; for folks to find a reason not to go to North Dakota because their cause is not center stage, when in fact it actually is. This is about all of our causes, and winning here defeats the right wing agenda that’s been designed to hurt and roll back everything we fought for over the last eight years.

But this is not going to be won by throwing hissy fits, getting our panties all in a bunch, writing our elected representatives, or sending pointed letters to the editor. Nor will this be won by holding weekend protest marches and rallies that resemble love fests. No, this is going to require citizens to get down and dirty for democracy. This is where we have to fight for what we believe in.

Out of all of Trump’s recent policy changes the pipeline issue is the only one that can become in-your-face confrontational with immediacy; the one that can pit the citizenry against agents of the government face-to-face, the one that has the potential to become explosive — and therefore focus the attention of the world on how our democracy is being stolen from us right before our very eyes.

Citizens going to Standing Rock and standing in silent witness is how we accomplish the goal of protecting our democracy. To clog Trump’s machinery with bodies … thousands of bodies … hundreds of thousands if necessary. And we must say, in the words of the old union and civil rights anthem, “We shall not be moved” … and we have to mean it.

I’m already beginning to make plans for my journey to Standing Rock come spring.

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From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com

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