For a Renaissance of the Gray Panthers Network, Part II

In the previous post, “For a Renaissance of the Gray Panthers Network, Park I”, I ended with two questions:

1. How do we not repeat the mistake of leaving the betterment of our country and world to other people, rather than playing an active role ourselves?

2. What role can Gray Panthers play in not repeating that mistake?

This post will go into what I believe to be the answers to these questions.

Luckily, in addition to the excellent and inspired legacy founding statements of the Gray Panthers, and a handful of faithfully and effectively active chapters like NYC, we also have smart, effective guides to work from and share. Among them are Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, with his 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, and Frances Fox Piven’s Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, which outlines how every successful period of major change in our history began with mass mobilization. There are others of course; two recent updates I’d recommend are Mark and Paul Engler’s This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, and Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You: Organization and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. These resources are only useful if we light them up. Whether we pick up one or all, it only takes a few hours of reading to refresh and redirect and re-energize and relaunch ourselves.

So now is the time for a renaissance of the Gray Panthers network, both intimately deep within our communities and as a powerful national voice that is respected, and when necessary, feared. In many ways this is 1970 again, and we need to work extra hard to regain what we’ve fought for over the last 50+ years which is being taken apart before our eyes today. Our tools aren’t much different either, our experience and our resolve, except now we have the additional platform of the internet to carry our message nationally with immediacy, and to use to more efficiently to organize, to plan and share strategies, tactics, successes. By restoring major chapters in our cities, by encouraging gatherings in every town, by connecting everyone on the internet, we can rebuild the national network with massive numbers that are impossible to ignore. and even to restore some militancy—emphasis on Panthers, not on Gray--to bear on pressing issues for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

If money motivates the most then sure, we can start by creating a ruckus to protect our earned Social Security payments—it’s our money after all, and people are trying to steal it from us. But if we all know anything from living this long, and if we’ve learned from the times we’ve lived through, it’s that we all need to support and teach each other, so our agenda must apply to everyone who needs help, to everyone who is under attack, a broad agenda from expanding human rights through to decelerating climate change. We have a long working list because, sadly, it’s once again the same list from when the Gray Panthers were founded.

The giants who stood up then have mostly passed. It’s up to us now, and while kindness and peace and nonviolence should always be our guiding principles, times like these require us to bring a lot of attitude and even more fight. Voices and bodies shaking or not, we know how to do these things because we have done these things, and we know all too well what the stakes are if we don’t.

Everything of value this country has built in the last century through sacrifice, hard work, and vision, through relationships, reciprocity and responsibility, is being strip-mined by a cabal of bad actors who could never build any of it for or by themselves. Let’s make them know: we run this show. Not them. Us. Remember who we are and what we can do. Fists high, Panthers. Claws out. Let’s go.

Kurt Fliegel is a retired media and technology executive living outside of Chicago.

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Bibliography

Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Framework for Liberation, 1993, The New Press. In print; also available as a free PDF from the Albert Einstein Institution: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62b0eb7da51f3717911bb4e1/t/642f2c6a956bc34188310fbe/1680813163028/FDTD+(English).pdf

Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. OOP; available as a free PDF from the University of Minnesota: https://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4982/Challenging%20Authority%20How%20Ordinary%20People%20Change%20America.pdf

Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the 21st Century, Bold Type Books, 2017. In print.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, Haymarket Books, 2023. In print.