In the early dawn light of Juneteenth, a group of brave people stood outside Mitch McConnell’s house in Kentucky to make some noise. Tension was high. It’s not a joke to show up on the doorstep of a major politician like Mitch McConnell — not when cops are disappearing people off the streets in places like Portland when they don’t like what they see. Cop cars circled around the group. They were nervous.

They sang. They shouted. They held up signs and stood stoic. And the energy grew. Cars honked in support as they passed. Mitch’s own neighbor walked outside to join them. She yelled, “It’s your future too, Mitch!”

Taking the cue in DC, another group rallied their bullhorns outside of Councilmember Anita Bonds’ house at midnight. They demanded better for DC residents who couldn’t afford to keep their homes. Neighbors cheered them on from the sidelines.

It happened again in Providence, as protesters blew air horns in front of the Mayor’s house, and again in Georgia, where a nighttime block party was scheduled outside the Governor’s house.

So why are young people around the country interrupting the sleep of local politicians?

Because it works.

Believe it or not, these tactics are over a century old, inspired by the Wide Awakes, a pro-abolition mass youth movement in the 1860s (right before the Civil War) who turned anti-abolition representatives’ lives into waking nightmares.

Wide awake to the moral iniquity of slavery, they called out slavery supporters as reprehensible and criticized leaders who had dragged their feet on abolition as weak-willed and complicit.

They ensured the safety and democratic rights of those who envisioned a world where slavery was abolished, rallying around pro-abolition speakers and politicians, serving as defenders and poll watchers.

These young people grew up in a world as similarly fraught and polarized as our own, and they took sustained radical action to match the moment. Our generation has lived our whole lives in the wildest dreams of a few billionaires. While they line their pockets and boost the stock market, we’re losing sleep over unpaid bills, student loans, and the rent due in a few days. While they have the best healthcare money can buy, we’re watching our local hospitals and healthcare workers struggle as the national body count grows. While they’re hiring private security to “keep them safe” from us, the police are kicking in our neighbors’ doors and kneeling on their necks, then tear gassing us when we protest.

We were born into crisis, inheriting a failing world. We tried signing petitions. We tried calling and visiting government offices. Through it all, most politicians ignored us. Now, we’re taking actions they cannot ignore. Our generation is done asking nicely.

We are Wide Awake. And, for the next hundred days, the architects of this death economy will be too.

This is not just an uprising, it’s a mothafucking haunting. We will march to their homes at midnight so they understand that we are wide awake to their role in crafting this nightmare. When they try to dine at restaurants we’re forced to work at — despite the risk of COVID — because our unemployment is ending, we will not serve them. When they do nothing to stop federal agents from snatching us off the streets, when they force us to go back to school in unsafe conditions, when they do nothing to stop our democracy from crumbling, we will bang on their doors from dusk until dawn and make them hear us. We will make their lives a waking nightmare until they stand with us or give way to the power of the people and the vision we have for a new world.

The original Wide Awakes were relentless. And they saw results. In the next half decade, Abraham Lincoln was elected, slavery was abolished, and the visionary Reconstruction began in the South.

Like our predecessors, we will demand the future we need, not the future our political leaders think they can negotiate for. Our generation will fight for true abolition and complete the unfinished work of the Reconstruction.

And when these hundred days are done, on election day November 3rd, any politician who isn’t with us will be replaced.

photo by: Michael Clevenger/Courier Journal

I’m writing from Kentucky, where I’ve been since last Sunday, throwing down with others to see if we can help push Charles Booker’s insurgent campaign over the finish line as ballots are cast tomorrow. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to “win” in electoral politics as a movement, and I wanted to write some thoughts down to share with you all before the final ballots are cast in the two June 23rd primaries we’ve been focused on for Jamaal Bowman and Charles Booker. I hope my reflections might be helpful or meaningful for you all in the coming hours and days.

The energy here in KY is electric and it’s clear that something incredible has been happening. Just as in New York and around the country, the momentum in the streets is being channeled into our politics. In the last few weeks Jamaal Bowan and Charles Booker’s races have become the center of national political attention, and Sunrise Movement has been an instrumental part of that. We’ve been with both of the candidates since Day 1, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls for them, helped them rack up major endorsements, supported their political and communications strategies, and more. After all the mail-in and Election Day ballots are tallied sometime later this week — we might just make history. I hope everyone will do everything they can to make that possible in the next 24 or so hours before the polls close. Sign up to phonebank for the final push: smvmt.org/phonebank

But I want to be real, we might lose both of these races. In fact, losing is the most likely outcome, and always has been. Charles and Jamaal are huge underdogs, and the establishment has been throwing everything they have at us in the last few weeks to try to blunt our momentum. In the last week alone, millions and millions of dollars have been spent in both of these races to try to attack our candidates and bolster their opponents. On top of that, we luckily had mail-in voting in both of these races, so more people could safely cast their ballots during the pandemic, but that also means that many ballots were already cast as momentum for our candidates was just picking up in the final weeks. It’s likely these races are going to be VERY tight, and we may not know the results for days. When those results finally do come in, they may not be the results we’ve been hoping and working for.

Losing sucks, and we all know our movement could use some wins right now. From the 2008 financial crisis, to the climate crisis, to this pandemic and economic crisis we’re suffering from now, Trump’s election, and more…our generation has suffered a lot of losses. We’ve got everything stacked against us. We’re the underdogs, and so are our candidates. Every now and then, the underdogs score a victory — and it changes the world forever, upends the political common sense, and defines a new normal. But most of the time, us underdogs lose.

Losing sucks especially when it feels like we’re on the cusp of victory. Anyone remember Bernie? Yeah.

But also, anyone regret backing Bernie? I sure don’t. Why?

Because first and foremost, we used our engagement with the campaign to help grow the movement, and that’s been happening with these races, too. Both nationally, and in NY and Kentucky. It’s been so amazing to see so many new leaders step up with passion and creativity to take on these fights. We’re also really lucky to be working with amazing candidates and campaigns who care about our movement and want it grow as well.

Second, when we fight and lose but get close, it helps us grow our political power and changes the political calculus. Bernie lost, but now one of our movement’s leaders, Varshini, is helping to write Biden’s climate plan. In 2018, we endorsed Abdul-El Sayed for Governor in MI and Cynthia Nixon for Governor in NY. They both lost to Whitmer and Cuomo, but we moved them both to the left significantly on climate and the environment, and they’ve now governed in a more progressive stance than they would have had we not challenged them with those primaries. If we leave it all on the field, but fall short on election night, we will still shift the political calculus in these states and districts for a progressive agenda.

Lastly, we’re the people who try the impossible until it becomes inevitable! We fight the impossible fights not because they are easy, but because they are worth it. People once said climate would never be a top political priority. We believed it was possible, and we made it so. And with every loss, we learn and grow stronger, and make winning that much more likely the next time around.

All that’s to say, elections come and go, we win some and lose some. But the real prize is the movement that we build throughout it all.

So as we get ready for this final sprint, I just wanted to send a note to our movement: let’s give it our all in this last day, but no matter what happens, remember that as long we keep building people power and political power — as long as we stay committed to growing the movement — we are winning, no matter what the pundits say. And one day we will win it all, sure as the sun rises each morning.

To close, I wanted to share my experience with the Charles Booker campaign. I’ve had the privilege of being with Charles when he was first making moves to run, working with him throughout when no one believed in what we were doing, and of traveling with him around Kentucky in the final stretch of this campaign when the world started paying attention.

When he told me about why he was running, I remember him crystal clear saying to me, “Win or lose, I believe this campaign can help build the movement in Kentucky, and build progressive infrastructure in the state for the long haul.” After he told me that, I knew this was a campaign worth our movement investing in and believing in, and we’ve been all in building the movement alongside him since then.

At the start of last week, Charles, speaking in front of a crowd of hundreds, closed a rally saying, “I’ve got some news for y’all: We gon win this race! In fact, we’ve already won.” The crowd went wild.

As he said those words “we’ve already won” tears came to my eyes as I thought about the thousands of Kentuckians — Black and white, old and young, rural and urban, “from the hood to the holler” — that have poured into the streets in recent weeks demanding justice for Breonna Taylor and David McAtee, saying that “no lives matter until Black lives matter.” I thought of the farmers and coal miners who have been inspired by Charles’ vision for a Green New Deal, and the young Kentuckians whose lives have been ruined by Mitch McConnell as long as they’ve been alive believing they have the power to oust Mitch McConnell for the first time.

Charles is right. This movement has already shown that a new way is possible in Kentucky. That there is hunger for a different type of politics in the South. That the people and places everyone has written off shouldn’t be ignored. In New York we’ve shown that politicians like Eliot Engel can’t take their constituents for granted while they amass power for themselves in DC. No matter what happens after all the votes are cast and when the final ballots are tallied, Charles is right — we’ve already won.

Thank you for being a part of this grueling, impossible work. It’s the honor of my life to fight alongside each and every one of you.

Sign up for your final GOTV shifts here: smvmt.org/phonebank

If you care about the Green New Deal, we need you to join the Movement for Black Lives

In the last three weeks, millions of people have risen up to demand our nation live up to our values and see the humanity of Black people in this country. Sunrise has made supporting these uprisings a top priority. As we’ve done that, I’ve been asked why this is something we are focusing so much energy and attention on while climate change still threatens our way of life.

Like so many millions of people around the country, I’ve felt a deep, personal calling to take action in this moment. I want to share with you why I believe it’s essential that our movement take part in the Movement for Black Lives right now.

We must see the fights for racial justice and climate action as two fronts of the same fight. If our society valued Black, Brown and Indigenous lives, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in with climate change in the first place. If Black Lives Mattered, we would have had a Green New Deal a decade ago when Katrina killed 1833 people and left tens of thousands more without homes in predominantly black neighborhoods in New Orleans. If Black lives mattered, we would have invested in our infrastructure when it was clear that Black communities were dying and being poisoned from polluted water in cities like Flint, Michigan. When the middle-class, white community of Bismarck, North Dakota objected to the Dakota Access Pipeline, it was rerouted through Indigenous lands. If the Movement for Black Lives wins, it also advances our collective mission of ensuring that we enact a Green New Deal that includes and empowers Black and Brown people and other marginalized communities.

Historic moments like the one we’re living through right now have the power to fundamentally change our entire society and politics for a generation, for better or worse.

I remember in 2015, I was sitting at a training organized by Momentum, a movement strategy training institute, and they talked about how change usually happens very slowly in fits and starts, and then all of a sudden something big happens and many things can change all at once. These “moments of the whirlwind” are when the rules of organizing and politics are totally upended. People feel moved to take action in record numbers and politicians run to catch up with the times. During moments like this, there is incredible opportunity to change what is seen as politically possible for decades to come. This is what happened with Occupy, at Standing Rock, and with the March for our Lives movement.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been living in one of those moments. In two weeks, public support for the Movement for Black Lives increased by 28%, almost as much as it had in all of the last two years.

This past month, Black organizers have brought our country to a moment of reckoning with what and who we value in powerful ways. They’ve pushed everyone to reexamine how and where we spend or resources: toward pain and punishment for our communities? Or toward investing in Black life and dignity?

It is essential to challenge racism and racial divides to win the kind of just and equitable Green New Deal we need.

For all of American history, elites have used race to divide working people. They claim that we can’t have strong social programs because “welfare queens” will take advantage, that the reason people are losing their jobs is because of immigrants, that government programs like food stamps and housing assistance are wasting money on people who are lazy or undeserving. These thinly veiled racial epithets hide the truth: that elites want to grow their own wealth, not fund these programs, and they’re using racism as a tool to do that And as long as those in power are able to use racism as a way to stigmatize government action for the common good, as long as our government sees our Black communities as disposable and undeserving, we will struggle to build support for the Green New Deal.

And let’s be clear: the roots of runaway climate change and our violent policing system both come from the same sick notion in our country that some lives matter more than others, that some people are disposable, that some people can be sacrificed for the profit and comfort of others. We reject that notion wholesale. Defunding police and enacting a Green New Deal means stopping what kills our communities and investing in what allows them to thrive: good jobs, healthcare, education, affordable housing, clean water and air.

As we move towards that vision, we need to tackle racial injustice head on as a movement. Since we are living in a society stained by racial prejudice and injustice, if big social programs don’t actively promote racial justice, they exacerbate existing inequalities. The original New Deal made this painfully clear. Its housing programs allowed whites to build intergenerational wealth while locking out Blacks and other racial minorities. I’m deeply committed to making sure we win a Green New Deal that does not make the same mistakes, but it’s only going to be possible to get something like that through Congress if we also tackle racism writ-large in our society and politics. We need to make it morally and politically unthinkable for Congress to pass major legislation that doesn’t put racial justice at the forefront.

This is also a critical opportunity for us to build the movement of movements we need to change that common sense and win big changes like the Green New Deal.

One of Sunrise’s principles is “We stand with movements for change.” It says: “Stopping climate change requires winning and holding power at every level of government. This is a huge job and we can’t do it alone.”

At the end of the day, winning a Green New Deal is about changing the common sense: about building a society where the government is responsible for the common good, works to guarantee good jobs, and values the worth and dignity of all people. We’re not there yet. In order to build that common sense and win the Green New Deal, we need a movement of movements who are holding their respective roles and moving forward their issues, while being united in a shared vision of society and ready to come together when fellow movements have all-hands-on-deck moments.

When the movement for the Green New Deal has our “moment of the whirlwind,” we’ll want others to be ready to jump into action alongside us, so we need to model that behavior ourselves. That’s especially important for us because the long history of the mainstream environmental movement not prioritizing economic and racial justice has understandably led to skepticism toward the climate movement at-large from racial justice movements.

We’ve seen the power and potential of that movement of movements in the past few weeks. A few weeks ago, there was a real possibility that Trump and the forces behind him would prevail and, rather than talking about defunding the police and investing in Black communities, we’d be talking about looting and ‘violent protests,’ which would have set Trump up to appeal to fear and do who knows what in the name of order. That didn’t happen, because millions of people closed ranks and said no way, but that required movements like Sunrise rallying behind the Movement for Black Lives during this critical moment.

This weekend will be historic, perhaps the biggest wave of action for racial justice in our country’s history. If you don’t already have a plan to join, find an event near you and make a plan.

As we take action this weekend, we’ve got to remember that this isn’t just about one weekend or one month. We need to see and understand the fight for racial justice as the fight of and for our lives and the lives of our friends, families, and neighbors.

I want to be clear — this is not going to be easy or simple. Fighting for liberation is a process that will take years, a process where we will all be called upon to be our best selves, to make mistakes and take risks, to experiment and learn. At Sunrise, we could not have gotten to this place without the leadership and courage of many Black, Brown and Indigenous volunteers and staff, who constantly called upon our movement to set ourselves on the path to collective liberation and pushed us to be better. I also feel tremendously grateful to our sister movements, particularly Dream Defenders, United We Dream, and the Movement for Black Lives. Our months of relationship-building together have allowed us to show up in deep and evolving ways these past weeks.

I want to leave you with a quote I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately. It’s from George Goehl’s interview with my friend Maurice Mitchell, who’s the National Director of the Working Families Party and a leader with the Movement for Black Lives. When asked what his message was for non-Black people at this moment, he said:

“What I tell non-Black people is that your anxiety around possibly getting something wrong has nothing to do with my liberation, nothing at all. So if the reason you are sitting on your hands is because you are afraid of making mistakes, then that really is a personal, insular, self-centered concern, that isn’t a collective communal social change concern. You don’t want to deal with the discomfort, the shame that might come along with getting something wrong. That has nothing to do with me, it has nothing to do with my freedom or with collective freedom. You need to do the work personally to get over that. And understand that the human condition is frail and it is flawed and by your very nature, you will get things wrong and just engage that and go out and fight. Now that doesn’t mean you aren’t intentional. Be intentional, but ACT.” [26:50]

In that spirit, I want to share three intentions I have:

• Continue to develop meaningful relationships with our movements for change. Sunrise having relationships with Black movement organizations allows us to show up in accountability and more effectively marshal our resources.
• Act and be willing to take risks in doing so. Respect and follow Black leaders and also take initiative so that Black leaders don’t have to lead on every single thing.
• Personally and organizationally interrogate how this moment has fundamentally called Sunrise into greater leadership in our racial and economic justice work as part of the fight for a Green New Deal. Commit further to my own learning around anti-blackness and how that shows up in my community through reading, 1:1 conversations, and caucuses.

Earth Day: 50 Years and Nothing’s Changed

by Mattias Lehman

Fifty years ago, twenty million Americans poured into the streets for the first Earth Day with a radical statement: we only have one planet and we can’t render it uninhabitable. Fifty years ago was the time for incremental action on climate change. We have not taken the necessary actions since. Now, fifty years later, with time running out, the only option we have left is drastic action.

That is why Sunrise Movement, along with many other coalition partners, structured our year around mass mobilizations like the original Earth Day. Two months ago, most of our work was oriented toward that goal. But a lot changed in two months.

Mass gatherings of any kind — celebratory or radical — have been rendered dangerous and impossible because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we have watched the responses to this coronavirus — some failed and some successful — we cannot help but see the direct similarities between the chaos caused by this pandemic and the climate crisis. The lessons we learn from this pandemic must be applied to our efforts to avert climate change.

There are no incremental actions that will stop a pandemic — and the same goes for climate change. The appropriate reaction will always seem like a disproportionate overreaction — until it works.

At the beginning of March, with only a handful of confirmed deaths and a few hundred confirmed cases, people were still saying “it’s no worse than the flu.” That was the time to shut down public gatherings — including delaying elections until they could be held entirely by mail.

Instead, many states ignored safety suggestions and moved forward with elections. Michigan, Florida, and Illinois — the three states that insisted on continuing elections — each now have a similar number of COVID cases to California, a state with a population close to those three states combined.

For these and other states, lockdown came too late to prevent mass death. The result: over 46,000 deaths across the United States (and counting).

And it could get worse. What happens when workers on the front lines of human interaction — like our underpaid and overworked nurses and grocery workers — start getting sick? If they stay on the job, they infect countless more people. And without them, society grinds to a halt. Can we fight a pandemic without nurses? Can we feed America without grocery store workers?

If we’d reacted from the beginning with the urgency we feel now as we watch the digging of mass graves, we might have saved thousands of lives.

The fight against climate change is much the same. The strikes on Earth Day 50 years ago brought attention to the destruction of our planet in a way we hadn’t seen before. But we did nothing and, since then, the situation has only gotten worse.

We’ve started to hit very dangerous tipping points. The glaciers are melting, depriving us of the ice which cooled wind patterns. Fires raged across California, the Amazon, and Australia in the last 12 months, destroying the very trees which we need to continue absorbing carbon dioxide and spewing out oxygen. Each hurricane season is worse than the last, thanks to warming seas which cannot absorb much more heat. Escalating floods and droughts trigger famines which kill people around the world.

Like the spread of coronavirus, we know that carbon and methane has a delayed impact. But instead of days to show symptoms, it takes decades for these gases to reveal the damage they’ve caused to our climate. Much as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases is only the tip of the iceberg, the climate chaos we are currently experiencing isn’t close to the full extent of the crisis.

We have to do for the climate what the government failed to do with COVID-19: react swiftly, and ambitiously. Politicians who are pushing a “measured,” “moderate” approach simply aren’t facing reality. The time for moderation has passed. We need a society-wide mobilization to avert climate change. We need a People’s Bailout to bounce back from the crisis we’re facing now, then a Green New Deal to ensure what comes next won’t bring us to our knees once again.

If we’d taken a different path, this 50-year anniversary of Earth Day could have been a celebration of humanity’s foresight — how we saw global warming coming and took the small, necessary steps to wean us off our addiction to oil and gas. Instead, the only thing that’s changed in 50 years is the stakes.

Today, across the nation, Sunrise hubs are taking action to bring attention to this problem once again. Although they’d planned to take part in mass, in-person demonstrations, coronavirus halted those plans. Instead of giving up, these resilient hubs pivoted to action appropriate for the moment. Over 50 hubs organized action today, including Sacramento, South Bend, NYC, Boston, New Orleans, and more.

It can’t and won’t stop there. The spirit of Earth Day has to live beyond today. That’s why we’ve spent the last month rolling out a massive training program: Sunrise School.

Our generation understands what it will take to stop climate change, which is why we backed the only candidate whose proposed climate plan met the scale of the crisis.

If the results of that primary have taught us anything, it’s that the “adults” in the room are still asleep at the wheel. It’s going to take a mass mobilization by our generation to convince those in charge to take the decisive action necessary to avert the worst effects of climate change. We need to train a whole generation of organizers to make it happen.

Click here to learn more about Sunrise School and how you can register for free training to be a leader in the movement to stop climate change.