Next Tuesday, July 16, is another national day of action to send this message: Close the concentration camps*. There will be a march in D.C., as well as local events you can find through NeverAgainAction.com.
If you can’t march, share the website via email and social media. You can call your senators and congressperson the day of the protests by following my instructions in this post. Can’t make a call during business hours? Text the word RESIST to 50409 and use Resistbot to send your message to your elected officials. I think I’ve covered all your excuses now, right? I mean, if you’re in a coma, you’re off the hook. Other than that, I expect great things from you!
Click to sign up for an action.
By the way, if you’re already very active activist and have different ways of organizing people, don’t freak out: There’s a strategy here. I’ve been on two conference calls run by the organizers of this and other previous actions. They are working closely with Movimiento Cosecha and other immigrant-rights groups to create actions that make a powerful statement without inadvertently having a negative impact on vulnerable people.
We can do this thing! Recently, huge protests in Hong Kong halted an extradition law that would have allowed the Chinese government to grab up dissidents and critics living in the freer Hong Kong territory, which was a British colony before being returned to China in 1997. I’m happy to see the protestors aren’t falling for any efforts to appease them with words instead of actions. One protestor’s statement about Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam — “Her personal guarantee is meaningless” — applies to the chief executive here too.
And in 2017, South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, was forced to resign when millions took to the streets for weeks to protest rampant corruption in her administration. She was arrested and later sentenced to 24 years in prison.Now, a Korean protest song has been taken up by the protestors in Hong Kong. Authoritarianism has been spreading around the globe but the fight against it spreads too. Do your part and make sure you’re on the right side of history! Then we can all get back to blogging about jewelry and fashion and maybe I’ll finally get that Thursday book club of mine back up and running. Wouldn’t that be nice?
*Concentration camps aren’t defined by the presence of gas chambers and mass executions. Read about Bergen-Belsen and Anne Frank here.
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