Dear Readers,
John Lewis, who died last week at the age of 80 after a life of activism and service to the country, once said:
Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden...where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.
As the federal government sends troops in unmarked vehicles to Portland, hauling away protesters, beating them, and throwing them in unmarked vans, the truth of Lewis’s words is pretty viscerally obvious.
Shifting one’s understanding of freedom as a state to understanding it as an act makes what is going on in Portland and a lot of other things crystal clear right now. First, why hard-earned rights we took for granted can evaporate so easily. But also, that in the same way that freedom is an act, oppression is, too. All it takes is one act of the latter to diminish the former.
The arc of freedom bends to the whims of people who crave power. Because they crave power, find their way to it. It’s up to those who see something wrong to use whatever power in their means to right the balance again. John Lewis saw this responsibility as pretty straightforward: When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something. Do something. Get in trouble. Good trouble.”
Good trouble is not only trouble for what is right - it’s defined by the fact that it is necessary. Good trouble is also not just for the group oppressed to undertake. The 13 original freedom riders who rode buses across the South challenging segregation laws were made up of six Black people and seven white people.
Looking further back, good trouble has always been with us. In the progressive era (circa the late 1800s to early 1900s), people across the country mobilized for a laundry list of causes. From food safety, to government corruption, to civil rights, to education standards, progressives of the era, many of them women, used any means they could think of to cause trouble for a cause. Women went on hunger strikes, Black people in the south founded an environmental movement, photographers went on decades-long pictorial campaigns to expose child labor, and muckraker journalists wrote fearless articles exposing wrongs.
Progress was made, and the country became safer, less corrupt, and - in some ways, at least - more equal.
Since Donald Trump was elected, we have our own set of troubles, and trouble to make. Since 2016, millions of Americans have marched, around the country - in the Women’s March, the March for Science, the March for our Lives. We have marched for families separated at the border, held a national student walkout and a global climate strike, and are now marching for Black Lives Matter, on a scale not seen since the civil rights movement.
We have a veritable diner-sized menu of issues to fight for. And all new ways of getting into good trouble.
In 2017, in what feels like the very definition of good trouble, LGBTQ protesters threw a dance party outside Mike Pence’s house to protest his anti-LGBTQ positions. The result, was - well, you can imagine how perfect that was.
When Elizabeth Warren was prevented on the floor of the Senate from reading a letter from Coretta Scott King opposing Sessions’ unconscionable civil rights record (“nevertheless, she persisted!”), protesters paid a visit to McConnell’s home and read the letter through a bullhorn.
In New York City, Yemeni bodega owners (and others, in solidarity) closed down their more than 1,000 bodegas to protest Trump’s travel ban. If there are any New Yorkers reading, well, you know just how much good trouble that is (I mean... if you want to talk about essential services.)
Amazon workers defied company rules to speak out against CEO Jeff Bezos inaction on climate issues and the company’s contracts with oil and gas companies. Despite threatened firings, more than 340 tech workers at the company went public with their concerns. The company shifted stance and created a $10 billion climate fund, with Bezos pledging to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
Good trouble also means using what you’ve got. Where activists in the progressive era took advantage of the decreasing cost of printing in order to reach wider audiences, and the freedom riders took the bus, well… we have TikTok.
Teenagers - bless their hearts - made Trump look foolish after they organized online to request more than a million tickets to a recent Tulsa rally. K-pop fans combined forces with TikTok users to spread the word, and seeing as Trump hasn’t quite made it to TikTok yet (though, almost), he had no idea he was being set up. In the end, the Tulsa fire marshal counted a mere 6,200 attendees at the event. Overflow events were canceled, and images from the event show a backdrop of empty seats.
Kids have also used their online power to drown out the voices of white supremacists and raise money for Black Lives Matter and other civil rights organizations, hijacking trending hashtags and overwhelming them with music videos, anti-racists content, or links to donate to Black organizations to dissipate momentum.
We may hold onto the belief that we live in a free country, but in truth even if we have certain human rights, other people in this country don’t. Beyond that, we can find ourselves bound to all kinds of things that entangle us and rob us of our agency - religions, relationships, employers, governments, systemic oppression. The longer one lives, the more obvious it becomes that freedom is a remarkably complicated state to hold on to.
Good trouble was part of the fabric of John Lewis’s life. It got him arrested more than 45 times. Why did he keep causing good trouble? Because it works.
Good trouble combines the human spirit of mischief with a deep concern for freedom and human rights. It’s like being “bad” for good. It’s ongoing and never ends. Good trouble, while being an act for what is right, is also an act that connects us to what we are at our most human. It’s creative, and it’s underpinned by hope. As we find more ways to do good trouble, John Lewis’s words once again come to mind:
Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.
Let’s all go find some good trouble to do.
-The team at Lioness
What we’re reading this week…
Lioness recently ran a campaign to amplify Black voices in the media. One of our respondents was David Hughes, a black police officer in Virginia with over three decades experience on the police force. He told us about the racism he had experienced firsthand throughout his career. He also had ideas for solving racist policing, born of a long career serving his community, that he wanted to share with the public. We worked with him to craft and pitch an opinion piece, and we’re pleased to announce it was published by the New York Times on Friday. You can read it here.
The age-based hierarchies conceived by Confucius are underpinned by the understanding that social skills such as self-awareness, self-regulation and the ability to understand others normally increase over time. This may explain why cancel culture is driven by the young. In this article, the author tells the story of a rupture between Samuel Johnson and young friend - providing a beautiful model for managing differences, conflict, and rupture in relationships.
That’s our newsletter for this week! If you have any reader responses, news tips, good trouble or unsung stories of your own to share - reply to this email.
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