NORTHAMPTON — Leverett peace activist Paula Green says that rather than dwelling on habits that “solidify rage, hatred and alienation,” those caught in despair and fear in the aftermath of last month’s presidential election, “need to learn what we can from the catastrophe.”
Green, who has worked around the world to try to heal the effects of social and political conflicts and build means of reconciliation, told a Traprock Peace Center gathering of about 100 people recently, “Our communities, our country and our world need our concentrated determination to protect, resist and follow what musician/activist Harry Belafonte calls our ‘rebellious hearts.’ We have a long history of nonviolence to draw upon as we engage in acts of resistance in these next years.”
Franklin County voters chose Democrat Hillary Clinton at nearly 62 percent to nearly 30 percent for Donald Trump. In Hampshire County, Clinton won nearly 58 percent of the vote to Trump’s greater than 36 percent.
Speaking to a gathering of about 100 people from around Franklin and Hampshire counties on “Despair to Empowerment in Our Watershed Moment,” Green took solace in Trump’s election having disrupted our “business-as-usual” path, which “has no rational approach to addressing the fundamental threats of militarism, resource depletion, global population and migration, rising inequality, and environmental calamities, each problem feeding on and exacerbating the other to produce devastation and chaos. Business as usual allows our resources to go into defending ourselves with extravagant military budgets and increasingly militarized policing. Perhaps it has taken the election of Trump to realize that the industrial growth society is bankrupt.”
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