 Okay, we are getting ready to start here. My name is Gloria Partida, and I am the co-chair of along with Tracy Tomasi, co-chair of the Davis Phoenix Coalition. Tracy is in the back there, and I would like to welcome you to today's gathering, which is a part of a series of conversations that we have had in the community. Our hope for these conversations is that they will continue to, they will continue to preserve our, what we believe, our community evaluates. We've been really excited to see the engagement that the community has had in our local social justice groups, as well as on the national level, and we would like to keep that momentum going. In an effort to aid that continuation of momentum, we have a resource fair today. We encourage everyone to visit the tables around the room after our final presentation. I would like to recognize Lucas Peretz, our council, our Davis City Council member in the back there, and Dan Saylor, one of our county supervisors. They have been part of the team that has been working on these gatherings, and their leadership and connection to resources has been invaluable, and so we really, really like to thank you. This event would also not be possible without the help of our many, many volunteers who have put in countless, if not tireless, hours, and who are around the room. They've got things that look like this. So if you see one, please thank them as well. We also have the Davis Units Coalition table back here, and has a place where we encourage people to make donations, because these gatherings do take some funding to put on. You can also go online if you would like, and we will take any donation that you would like to make. Thousands are in the back, just as you came in, and there are drinks and food that are available as well. Let me get the end of my welcome. I would also like the Davis Units Coalition. Our mission is a prevention of hate-motivated violence. We realize that the ideology of violence is complex and multi-classic, and one of those classics is the frustration that fosters when you have imbalances of power. And so we hope that after today's presentation you can find a way to make your activism tangible. And with that, I am going to... Oh wait, is there anyone here that needs Spanish interpretation? No. Okay. I again, que necesita interpretación en español. Yeah, you just had that question. Yes, yes, I realize I need to ask any explanation. Okay, with that, I'm going to turn this over to Jim, who is going to introduce our keynote speaker. There's a tradition in the United States of journalists occasionally going beyond just a routine description of contemporary events and conducting extensive, thoroughgoing research into problems and writing about the problems in the United States in a way that is so dripping that it shapes political discourse and so on. One thinks of Upton Sinclair a hundred years ago, the book The Jumble, Michael Harrington's book The Other America 50 years ago. A leading exemplar of this tradition today is our speaker today, Sasha Abramsky. Sasha is a freelance journalist. He's published articles in most of the leading outlets, The Nation, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and the list goes on and on. He's written three books on crime and criminal justice system. He's written a book about hunger in America. And most recently, his book, The American Way of Poverty, talks about, gives illustrations about people's actual experience with poverty that goes beyond that to talk about the causes, the nature of poverty and what we can do about it. I've used this book in various book study groups and it's absolutely riveting. It's like reading a novel, you can't put it down brilliantly written and yet extremely challenging intellectually. In addition to his journalism and research, he teaches courses on nonfiction writing in the writing program at UC Davis. And he's a research fellow at the Center for Research for Poverty Research on campus. In addition, he serves as a guest speaker in courses around campus. Certainly he's given talks in courses in sociology, American studies, and other departments. So I am just thrilled to have Sasha here and I'm eager to hear about this contemporary current research project and what he has to say. Please welcome Sasha Abramsky. Thank you all for inviting me. And Jim, thank you for that more than generous introduction. I think what he was really trying to tell you is that I'm an enemy of the people. What I thought I'd do today is talk to you about some themes from the last book, the one Jim mentioned to you, The American Way of Poverty. But also bring up to speed to my upcoming book, It's called Jumping at Shadows. And it's about the rise of a demagogic, beer-based political culture. And it seems to me that the two sort of come together quite nicely. Now, one of the reasons I was so delighted to accept this invitation is it seems to me that a political moment like this goes through a trajectory. And that when a new leader comes in, the normal approach here as well would try and work out ways to cooperate, even if it would disgrace. And then if the cooperation proves to be impossible, at some point you move from cooperation to opposition. And then if the opposition becomes impossible, at some point you move from opposition to active resistance. The amazing thing about this moment is that trajectory happened in about 10 seconds. And as soon as Donald Trump got elected, it became absolutely obvious that we were in a historically unique moment. And that it created all sorts of obligations, not just for progressives, but for anybody thinking and caring about how the country was functioning. And that it was a moment of tremendous power. But also, if enough people organise gatherings like this, or willing to come out on an afternoon and devote time to thinking about the moment, thinking about what's gone wrong and what can be done to fix it. So that at the same time as it being a moment of peril, it's actually a moment of tremendous opportunity to reshape and rethink our political agenda. It's not just for a month or a year or an election season, but for the next several decades. So what I thought I could do is start by just telling them a little bit about 2008, the Great Recession. I began writing my book, The American Way of Poverty, in the shadow of this extraordinary collapse, this moment where the economic circumstances of an order that has existed for 40 or 50 years was crumbling around us. The economy was wobbling, the housing market collapsed, the stock market plummeted. It looked for a moment like the banking system itself would fail. Now, I spent three years, that period, surrounding 2008 and immediately afterwards, researching the book and interviewing people around the country about what the economic chaos and the economic uncertainty and the slides of poverty meant for them as individuals and as community. When the book came out, came out in about 2012, 2013, I can't remember the exact year. When the book came out, 2008 was very much still an immediate present legacy. You'd have to look very hard to find people whose homes were still in foreclosure or who had lost their homes already. You'd have to look very hard to find massive levels of unemployment in states like California and Nevada and Michigan and pretty much any other state around the country. We didn't have to look very hard to find people who lost their jobs, lost their savings, cashed out their retirement plans, and were downwardly mobile in a very, very active way. So when I first began giving the variation of this talk, it was very easy for audiences to connect because I'd be talking about all of these uncertainties and a good part of the audience was experiencing the new director. And that was the first presentation of this talk. And then the headline numbers began getting better. We started seeing fairly regular decreases in employment, fairly regular decreases in the unemployment rate. The housing market began recovering and in states like California, it began absolutely booming. Stock markets started creating record upon record upon record. An economic growth return. So we just looked at the headline numbers. Now five years out from the great recession, the headline numbers were looking pretty good. So I had to give a second variation of the talk. I'd start off with a conversation about how the numbers were improving and then because nobody wanted me to just come and give good news, I think, but things aren't looking so good. I'd explain why despite the numbers improving, we still have one in six Americans living in poverty. We still have one in six Americans on food stamps or otherwise politically food insecure. We still had tens of millions of Americans without good stable access to health coverage, total insurance. We still had a housing epidemic, a homeless-ness crisis in cities like Los Angeles or here in Sacramento, Davis. And that was the second implementation. Just explaining how to spike the good news that we still weren't going to approach it. And now we come to the third implementation. There's weird, strange, dangerous, demagogic political moments. And the third implementation is how does a country with headline numbers as good as Americans, a country at the peak of its political power and its diplomatic power and its military power, a country which has more economic resources than any other country in human history? How does that country fall prey to the politics of fear and the politics of demagogy in a way that we saw in the last election season and in a way that we now live with the consequences of today? How did a country that wasn't in the midst of demographic or economic or political or military collapse vote for a demagogy? A man who looked at Muslims and said, they're the reason for your problem. Who looked at Mexicans and said, their criminals are buildable against them. Who looked at the disabled and said you know better than to mock them. How does somebody who goes from one moral outrage to another moral outrage to another moral outrage pick up a critical political momentum? Because we've seen this kind of stuff in history before. There's nothing unique about it. But it normally occurs at a moment of complete national collapse without overdoing the comparison. We understand when and how Hitler came to power. He came to power amid hyper-employed inflation, a devastated economy, massive levels of unemployment, national utilisation, the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty and so on and so forth. America didn't have that. It had problems, per se, but it didn't have a by-mar German in kind of field work. And yet, somehow, Donald Trump uses all of the mechanisms of fear and anxiety and insecurity to carve out a road and power. But how does that happen? The answer, I think, lies in last part. In a combination of things. First of all, is the economic anxiety. It was present not just from 2008, but going back decades that affected critical numbers of people, especially at the bottom of the economy. And the second part was this pecky dish of fear and anxiety created by terrorism, created by demographic culture, technological changes, sexual identity changes, all the things that have been occurring over the last 30, 40, 50 years and that for many people are scared. When you put it all together, the cultural changes, the rise of global terror networks and economic insecurity, suddenly you have a combination of events that creates a fear-based political culture, a rumor-based political culture, a political culture defined by a belief in conspiracy, all of which is a pre-grant result for the rise of demigod. Now, in this talk, I'm going to focus more on the economics than on the other things. You want to be talking about all the other anxieties and fears in the culture. Come back in here in a few months when my new book comes out in September. But for now, let's talk about economics. So here's the thing. Those headline numbers I gave you a while back, the unemployment rate going down, economic growth going up, housing market going up and so on and so forth. That's all true. If you go back to 2008-09, unemployment rate in California peaked in double digits. It was over 10%. To our east in Nevada, it was about 12%. In the industrial west belt areas, again, 12%, 13% unemployment. Glass numbers of people were unemployed. You look at the unemployment rate today, it's half that, less than half that. Nationally, it's about 4.3%, 4.4%. Hasn't been this low in nearly 20 years. California went from budget deficits that was seen as being intractable to budget surpluses. Went from cutting and cutting and cutting, schools, public transport, other necessary infrastructure to being able to grow them again. All of that's good news. And yet, that stubborn poverty remains. So yes, we have 4.3% unemployment nationally, but we have 14% poverty. And that's by an extraordinarily cautious measure of poverty. Government defines poverty as $11,000 a year for an individual, $23,000 a year for a family of four. It doesn't take account of high housing costs, for example, in a state like California. If you put all of that back in, instead of getting 15% economic insecurity, you head up towards 25-30% in many, many states. With child poverty, we do even worse. Child poverty, we go from having 1 in 6 being in poverty, which is the national average, to 1 in 5 when you're talking about the population under the age of 18. 1 in 5 kids lives in poverty in America. You go to Detroit or New Orleans, you're looking at 1 in 3 African American kids living in poverty. Just extraordinary numbers. We look at deep poverty, which is half the poverty line. You find several billion Americans living on less than half of the poverty line, unable to afford healthcare access, unable to afford food, unable to afford stable or safe housing, unable to buy even basic school supplies for their children. When you see those numbers, and then you hear the stories of those people in poverty, suddenly the economic anxiety starts to make more sense. Because for the people at the bottom of the economy, they're not wrong. Their lives are heading in reverse. If you're a white, high school educated American, very specific demographic, whites with no more than a high school degree, your life expectancy in the last decade hasn't just risen at a slower pace than that of other demographics. It's actually gone down. It's gone down by about five years. Now, that creates an extraordinary stress if people's lives are actually getting truncated to the extent that we're seeing now. That hasn't happened in any other Western democracy. The only other modern example of such an inflation of life expectancy is the Russian and Ukrainian populations after the Soviet Union disintegrated in the late 80s and early 90s. For that demographic, life expectancy is going down. Access to healthcare is going down. Opioid addiction and overdose death is going up. Suicide rates are going up. Is it any wonder that that particular group in particular was very, very susceptible to the politics of fear and the politics of anxiety and the politics of demagoguery? Now, one of the things that has fascinated me about this is how it plays out on the ground. There's a Yale political scientist called Jacob Hacker. There's a term for what's happening. He says it's a great risk shift that even though on average we're getting wealthier as a society, we're doing so in such an unequal way that for tens of millions of Americans, they're not seeing the benefits of economic growth because those benefits are going up the economic ladder to the very, very, very top. Pop 1%, pop 0.1%, pop 0.01% to the millionaire, 100-millionaire, and billionaire class. But the further down that pyramid you go, the less you see economic benefits occurring. If you're in the bottom 20% of the economy, your real wage is peaked in the Nixon era. That's a long time ago. I was in diapers in the Nixon era, now I've got gray hair. That's two generations ago. And in between the last 45 years, year in, year out, that bottom quintile has seen its real income go down. And the next quintile up has seen its income pretty much stagnant. So for the bottom 40% of people in this economy, at best, they and their families have been running in place for the last four and a half decades. And at worst, their standard of living has been imploding. What does that mean again on the ground? Well, when I was reporting the book, I met a man called Matthew Joseph. Matthew Joseph lived in Stockton, so not too far south of there. He was middle-aged, worked as a metal worker at a local factory. He's also a deacon of the church. And Matthew Joseph had a house that was worth a fair amount of money prior to the housing collapse. And a house after the housing collapse was worth about 30% of what it had peaked at. So he was under water on his mortgage. He couldn't refinance. Recession comes. Matthew Joseph loses his job. And he has nothing. He says, I went home and I curled up in a fetal position on my bed. And I began to cry because I didn't know how I was going to take care of my family. When I went to visit Matthew Joseph, it was an extraordinary sight because he was living in a suburban tract, the development of which had just ground to a halt as the recession attend the housing crisis had hit. And you saw overgrown lots, which had never been built. You saw street signs peeking out of these overgrown lots as a sort of aspiration for what might have been before the recession. He said to me, look, I've never seen so many garage sales in my life because all of my neighbors have lost their jobs as well. And all of them are under water on their mortgages. And so they were all selling things off. Not so they could fund a kid's school outing or something like that, but something they could pay their housing bills. It was an act of utter desperation. That was Matthew Joseph in Stockton. I went to New Mexico, a tiny little desert town in the south of New Mexico called Antony. And I met a couple that had this lot of land. And they had a mobile home and they had a storage unit. Recession hits, they lose their jobs, can't make the payments on the mobile home. Mobile home gets repossessed. So they move into the storage unit. It's unventilated, it has no windows, it's damp, it's cold. Because even though it's the desert, deserts get cold in winter. It has no electricity, it has no gas. They're cooking on a propane stove. It's a desperate fire hazard. And in the center of the room is a wicker chair. There's a hole cut out of the wicker chair and underneath it is a chamber pot. And at the end of the interview I said, look, that's your American dream. The woman looks at me and she says, my American dream is that one day we will have enough money to be able to live in a house with a flush toilet. This is the wealthiest country in the world, in the 21st century. And there are people so poor they cannot access running water or electricity. I went to Abilator in Pennsylvania, old mining communities, Trump territory. We interviewed a woman who could go on crock-ups. She was middle-aged, she was an accountant. She had a fairly decent income, was earning $50,000 to $60,000 a year. And in that part of the country, on 60,000 dollars a year, you can live very well. The recession comes, loses her job, sends out her resume everywhere. All over her part of Pennsylvania, then all over Pennsylvania, then all over the country. Can't get any job. Nobody's hiring. She cashes out her savings, cashes out her retirement account. She can't afford to make her house payment so she falls into her rears. She takes her kids out of all the extracurriculars, plants, everything else they were involved in. She starts skipping meals. When I met her, she finally had found another job. The job she'd found was in a community center with a food pantry attached. And it paid one-third of what her previous job had paid. The only benefit of it was to get free food every so often from the food pantry. But her chance of retiring was shot. Her chance of stability was shot. For the rest of her life, she was going to be playing catch up. And her story speaks to a broader problem, which is that even though, and this also speaks to why you can have 4% unemployment and 14% poverty, even though the economy has created a lot of jobs in recent years, many of those jobs now pay poverty wages. And most of those jobs pay less than the jobs that were lost before the recession. You want to know where the anger comes? The anger comes from people who feel cheated by a system they have no control over. The anger comes from feeling that they played by the rules, they did what they were supposed to do. And at the end of the day, they ended up poor and insecure and looking forward to an old age of destitution. That's enough to breathe anger in any country at any time. Final story I'll give you about the people I met was some kids in Las Vegas, North Las Vegas. I know almost everybody here probably has been to Las Vegas for some time. It's not a fun. You go, it's easy to get to California, you go to the casinos or the theater or the bars or the restaurants. You have a good time. How many people there have been to the north of Las Vegas? The handful of you, very different. It's only three miles from Las Vegas Strip, but it could be a world away, desperately poor, really gritty, a lot of unemployment, a lot of very hard-core poverty, addiction, halfway houses and so on and so forth. I went to a really big public high school there, Rancho, I think it's the largest high school in Las Vegas. And I was talking to the principal about poverty, about the difficulties his students experience. And at some point in the interview, he said to me, look, you've got to meet Angela Rogiaga. She's our full-time homeless counselor. I did a bit of a double take. The reason I did a double take is I had been to a lot of schools around the country and even schools with problems. I've never encountered one with a full-time homeless counselor. I'm used to principals telling me, look, you've got to meet our math teacher. He's really creative. He knows how to teach really well. You've got to meet our arts teacher. He gets the kids doing all kinds of wonderful things. So on and so forth. Very rarely have I been told you've got to meet our full-time homeless counselor. So Angela Rogiaga is there and she says to me, look. When the recession first hit, we had about 20 or 30 homeless students. This is a school with about 2,500 kids. And then the year after that, we had about 50 homeless students. And then the year after that, we had about 100 homeless students. And then in 2011, when I interviewed her, she said, we have 200 homeless students. 8% of our students are homeless. That doesn't mean they're all literally living on the street. Some of them were, but a lot of them were couchsurfing from place to place to place with their families. A lot of them were living in church places with their families. Some of them were living in vehicles with their families. Well, some of them had some kind of housing, but it was deeply unstable. And they've been homeless a month before and it could be homeless a month from now. And she said to me, look, what chance do these kids have in life? What equal shot do they have in life? They have nowhere to do their homework in the evening. They have nowhere to go home and have downtime and watch TV in the evening. They have nowhere to eat a hot meal in the evening. Or a breakfast before they come to school in the morning. How are these kids conceivably being given an equal opportunity to succeed, to make it in the American economy? And I think it's absolutely true. When you've got the kinds of inequality we're seeing today, and the kinds of ingrained poverty we're seeing today, an awful lot of people, as a result, are being essentially told they're disposable, that their dreams are less valuable than other people's dreams, that their lives are less valuable than other people's lives. And a society isn't willing to make that effort to see that they have a fair shake, a fair chance in life. Now, when I started writing my book, I went to somebody I'd known for a few years, a guy called Marshall Gantz. Anyone here work with Gantz? I'm seeing it's a fever in the morning. The Gantz is a wonderful human being. He must be in his late 60s or early 70s now. He cut his teeth back in the 1960s, here in California, as a farm worker organizer. He was working with Cesar Chavez, and he spent his entire life working on organizing, on the front lines of organizing, in community building and resistance. When he was in his 60s, Harvard finally realized this man's brilliant, which is higher than him. I'm sure I'm missing a few chapters in between, but at some point somehow, Gantz ends up at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, teaching leadership studies and community organizing techniques. And I thought, all right, who better could I talk to when I'm starting a book on poverty than Gantz? So I flew out to Boston, I went out to Cambridge, and I sat down with Marshall and Gantz talking. I said, Marshall, I'm writing a book on poverty. He stopped me, said, no, you're not. Which was strange, because I had a contract, and as far as I knew, I was writing a book on poverty. And Gantz said to me, let me tell you a story about the man's canary. Is it all right? So he told me a story about how for thousands of years, human beings have been going down in mines, and mining coal, and metal ore, and so on and so forth. And for most of that human history, they didn't have gas monitors, or any other modern scientific monitoring equipment. But that didn't make the mines less dangerous. Miners knew that they were at risk of asphyxiating, they knew they were at risk of dying and explosions. And so they developed a series of sort of ad hoc techniques for dealing with the risk of trying to minimize the danger. And one of the techniques was, they would take canary birds down with them a little cage. The reason for that was, by trial and error, they found out that canary birds are really sensitive to gas, and they're also really talkative. And that's a very, very handy combination. If you're a miner, because if you've got that bird down with you, birds chattering away, tweet, tweet, tweet, as people do, or on birds do, tweet, tweet, tweet. And suddenly that bird stops. You look over, bird is sort of lined up like dead. You don't know it yet, but your atmosphere has been compromised, and you need to get out of that mine as quickly as you possibly can. You can't say to me, this is what American policy in the 21st century is. It's a warning sign the atmosphere has been compromised. It's a warning sign the economy has been compromised through inequality. It's a warning sign the political system has been compromised, that things aren't working the way they're supposed to be working. Now, as soon as you frame it that way, it's hugely liberating. And here's the reason. In policy, it's the equivalent of a natural disaster, or if you're a religious mind, they don't give them tragedy. Nothing much you can do about it. In policy, it's just the way things are. Some people are going to be unlucky, and they're going to just end up homeless or hungry, or lacking access to doctors, or lacking access to employment, and there's nothing really anything to do about it. Well, then what you do is you raise your hands, you shrug, maybe if you're feeling charitable, you dip into your textbook every so often, write a cheque, make yourself feel better, give it some working cause like Salvation Army, and then you move on to get off with your life. But, if poverty isn't a natural disaster, but it's a cause, but it's a consequence of human action or inaction. Now, we're deliberate, compromising of our political and our economic environment. Well, that's the things we can do about it. We don't live in a failed economy. We don't live in a system where there are crop phases caused by plates of locus or by uncontrollable droughts. We have more food being produced in this country, and produced cheaply in any other country on earth. We have a lot of food, and yet we have one in six Americans with food insecure. We don't have an economy that is entirely ground to a halt for all its problems, it's generating jobs. And yet, we have one in six Americans nearly living below the poverty line. What's going on here? I think one of the things that's happened is, over the last half century, our political system has become increasingly insensitive to the existence of poverty. We went through a good moment, in the 1960s, when an American Michael Harrington, social justice activist called Harrington, essentially embarrassed Lyndon Johnson's government into creating a war of poverty. It was very effective over a 10-year period from 64 to 74, a series of anti-poverty interventions, in traditional programs, educational programs, job training, housing, healthcare access expansions, reduced America's poverty rate from 22 percent down to 11 percent, the single most rapid decrease in poverty in American history. But Johnson kind of framed the issue wrong. He didn't say, I'm going to do my absolute level best to get rid of poverty. What he said is, I'm going to end this poverty. You can't do that. If you frame poverty like a moonshot, there's no halfway to the moon. You either get there or you don't. If you frame a poverty war the same way, you're setting yourself up for failure, because as long as some people remain poor or homeless or addicted, as long as some kids go to school without adequate supplies or without shoes that fit, well, if you claim you're going to end poverty and people still see evidence of poverty, a lot of people are going to think we're throwing good money off the bat. And that's sort of what happened. By the mid-70s, we lose patience with the war of poverty, even though by many measures it was successful. And from then on, from the mid-70s to today, at best we've treated poverty as an afterthought, but more often we've treated the poor as being too blame for their poverty. Why are you poor? You must have slowed the wrong driver, injected the wrong driver, slept with the wrong person. Why are you poor? You must have failed educationally. Why are you poor? You must have been profligate. You must not have saved enough. We've treated it as a disease of an individual, as instead of as a holistic societal problem. And as we've taken our eye on the ball of poverty, more and more, those who can have locked themselves away from the consequences of poverty. So the higher up the economic ladder you are, the more likely you are to privatize every aspect of your life that you can. You don't want to see poor people in your neighborhood, higher private security. You don't want your kids to go to school with poor people. That's easy, you send them to private schools. You don't want to have to deal with the consequences of a collapsed infrastructure. No worries, go to the best private doctors you can afford. Use the express lanes on the highways that allow you to pay to avoid traffic, and so on and so forth. And so for 45 years, we've managed to underplay the consequences of poverty. And now what's happened? Is all of this is leaving the rails. All of the enmity created by poverty. All of the insecurity, not just amongst the poor but at least amongst the affluent, that is created by an unequal society has been unleashed. All of the rage that poverty or fear of the poor generates has coalesced. And all of these streams have come together in our current political moment to pave the way for demagogy. Now I know I'm running out of time here, so very quickly, what do we do about it? Well in the same way as Gantz's argument is liberating because it shows you how to understand the problem, it's liberating because it allows you to put forward solutions. If we're poor not because we lack resources but because our economic priorities are wrong, we can fix that. If, at least in part, we're underinvesting in job training and nutritional programs, education for kids because of tax cuts for the wealthy, that's easy. Let's restore a progressive tax system. If at least in part, we have so many people homeless because we are underinvested in public housing or in affordable housing, let's reinvest in those structures. If at least in part, in places like the Central Valley, kids are suffering health-wise and education-wise because their water is contaminated. And they're getting too much lead, too much arsenic, and too much pesticides when they drink water. Let's fix it by investing in public infrastructure again. Now these seem to be the challenges of our moment. We can either seed the ground to demagogues and say, look, we live in an era of inequity, we live in an era of poverty, we live in an era of anxiety. There's nothing we can do about it apart from hunkering down and waiting for the storm to pass and watch as Donald Trump and his minions demolish every pillar of civil society. All we can say enough is enough that we're a wealthy dynamic creative society and we have the abilities to get people health insurance and we have the ability to get kids housing and we have the ability to provide living wages for people so they're not working 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week and still be counted as amongst the poor in America. And if we do that, I hope and believe that one day the storm of Trump will be nothing but a bad memory. If we don't do that, the risk is that our new normal will be Trumpism or variance thereof. And that's not a world I want to live in. I suspect that's not a world any of you here want to live in. So I guess where our end is, let's roll our sleeves up, let's get to work, let's create a slightly better vision of the future than the one we're being offered at the moment. Thank you very much. I do have time for questions. So the question is how did this happen? I assume when you say this, we're talking about the slides of Trumpism. How did this happen so quickly? And I guess how I'm going to respond to that. I don't think you did. I think if you look at some of the forces I'm talking about and some other ones, which I address more in the upcoming book, well let's talk about some of these other ones. And I want one at least an absolutely extraordinary level of anxiety and fear in this country. And some of it was very rational. We suffered a very big, very visible terrorist attack. But the way it played out, the way it was amplified, especially in the emerging social media environment, made what was a manageable single event look like an unending catastrophe. And you started seeing opinion poll numbers. My next book is concerned with how we misappropriate risk or misunderstand risk. You started seeing in these extraordinary opinion poll numbers in the months after 9-1-1, where upwards of 25% of Americans and some posts up to 50% of Americans were convinced that they were likely to be themselves victims of a terrorist attack in the next 12 months. And if you do the maths on that, to get up to even 25%, let alone 50%, but Americans being direct victims of terrorist attacks, you would have had over 75 million American casualties in the year 2002. As it happened that year, there were none. There were the absolutely appalling events of 9-1-1. There was the Anne Franks attacks a few weeks and months later. There was the sniper shootings in Washington, DC. And then there was this period where there were no domestic terrorist attacks. So if you look at that, 75 million people think they're directly at risk of attack. None actually ended up being victims. There's a mismatch. And you can see the same with, let's say Ebola would be another case in point. At the height of the Ebola epidemic, more Americans responded that Ebola was the number one public threat in America than thought that poverty was the number one threat. Ebola killed five Americans, I believe. Now, not just that. If you look at where Ebola was centralized, it was in three countries in West Africa that almost no American civilians traveled to. They're not tourist destinations. If you go to that part of West Africa, the chances are you're going as a medical worker, an aid worker, you're going to build a school. Very few people go. At the height of the Ebola epidemic, somewhere in the region of one in five Americans reported they were changing their travel plans. Now, again, there's no reality behind that. It's fear of unbridled and unmanaged. And I think that that's the sort of thing that you have to add into the economic mix. This sense of unbridled fear, the echo chamber that social media creates and that we don't yet know how to sort of navigate smartly. The rise of Ebola polarized media that fails to distinguish between fake and real news events and increasingly an audience that does not have the ability to distinguish between fake and real news events. Put all of that into the mix and it starts to make more sense. But very, very quickly, I don't think this happened overnight. I think trends were there at least since 2001, which is how we tolerated the slide to torture as a normal practice of American democracy under George Bush. Could not have happened in another moment in time. But we somehow went down that road where torture became just something we had to do. We knew about the torture scandals and then we still re-elected George Bush in 2004. And I think we just cannot overestimate the damage that did to our political culture. So in a way, it's possible that Obama was a sort of extraordinary exception during a 20-year period of cultural and political crisis. Yeah. They're able to more and more control elections and now they realize the demographics we're going in since they come up with this voter suppression thing. And you can deal with those issues. So the question is, what do we do about voter suppression given that the economic elites have sort of made it the fact of policy to turn down the vote? Well, that's just one. So we have a very carefully controlled political system at this point that the 1% has now planned to influence it. I think that's true to a large extent and it's a huge crisis. Obviously, one of the things that anybody concerned with the survival of democracy in this country has been how to get a have-long is how we register people to vote, how we protect that registration. If people are going to pass a law saying we're going to present a driver's license to all the political photo ID, we've got to have freedom summers that get people those licenses in the same way as 55, 60 years ago there were people going in to pass to the country where it was official policy to deny African Americans to vote through any means necessary and somehow finding ways to get those people back into the political system or into the political system. We're going to have to do the same thing. It's not a clean fight. It's not a fight. I thought we'd have to fight in 2017. I thought we would be on that. But we aren't. As a society, we seem to be right in the middle of a new era of just protest voter suppression. So we're going to have to get active and counter that voter suppression on the ground and get people out into poor precincts teaching people how to register to vote. A broader question though or a broader response, I don't think the 1% is happy and the slightest with Donald Trump. I think they can get away. I think they think they can get away with Donald Trump and still get their taxes reduced and still get the regulation and all these other nasty things. But Trump himself as a persona, I suspect scares the elites as much as he scares everyone in this room. Because even though, you know, at the moment the stock market's booming, if you have the most powerful man on earth as irrational as he is, and I don't mean left-wing or right-wing, I just mean irrational, you know. If you have a guy who seems to be quite capable of blowing up every relationship America's cultivated over the last century, and I say this quite seriously, he's in the last six months at least undermined America's relationship with Australia through an extraordinary political prime minister. He has berated the German leadership to the point where Germany can hardly talk to the European leadership anymore. He has tweeted insults to the mayor of London within about 30 minutes of terrorist attacks hitting London. He has completely pissed off the French political establishment by everybody endorsing Marine Le Pen to be the leader of France. He's almost, you know, sort of verbal. He's in a verbal war. He's almost involved in the verbal war with the European Union because he's made it clear he hopes it's demolished. And NATO doesn't trust him because he can't really articulate a collective defense thing. So if you think that at least in part America's leadership, it's elite, it's one percent, needs international stability and needs alliances that web of soft and hard-cower alliances that America built very, very, very carefully over a hundred years, he's put in a slight hammer to every single alliance under the sun. So my suspicion is that behind the scenes, that one percent is just as keen as you and me to find a way to get this man in peach for declaring competent if they have an ounce of rationality to them. Yeah. Sorry, my question, my answers were too long. I apologize. I think frankly as, you know, both sobering, you know, and stark portrait of the so-called wealthiest nation in the world, we are just, before we get going to the panel here, we want to just do a couple of things. Firstly, I want to offer an extreme round of thanks to Davis Media Access, our local media non-profit who is here taping this alive, taking this event live today and also we'll be recording it and then we will also be ready for broadcast and within the next couple of weeks. Davis Media Access has been a partner with the Gathering Initiative for, since the beginning, several months ago. So we've been recording all of the events. So please, quick round of applause for Davis Media Access. I'm actually going to call the panelists up here. I'm going to start to move to the edge of the stage because they're going to be up on the stage. Actually, you can come right on up if you want. I'm really excited to moderate today's panel where we've actually, I think, assembled some of the leading voices of activism, community engagement and empowerment here in Yolo County. We're going to touch on some of the issues that Sasha raised in his talk, certainly, and also some additional ones as well. They're not necessarily in this order, but I will have them all raise their hands as I am. Actually, I think they are sitting in order that we have. All right. Well, starting off, we have Mindy Romero. Mindy Romero is the founder and director of the California Civic Engagement Project at UC Davis Center for Regional Change. Romero is a political sociologist who also holds a PhD in sociology from UC Davis. Mindy has been invited to speak about civic engagement and political rights in numerous venues and has recently provided testimony to the National Commission on Voting Rights and as well as the California State Legislature. Her research has been cited in numerous major outlets, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Politicova and Huffington Post. A native of California Central Valley, Romero is also active in community leadership. She currently serves the president of the Board of Mutual Housing California and a wonderful local affordable housing nonprofit organization and is also the vice chair of the social services commission here in the city of Davis. I'm going to go to Ann here since Sandy stepped off the stage for a second. Dr. Ann Kentrum, Ann over there, is involved with the local group Davis Muslim Hands and is a public health epidemiologist who works for the California Department of Public Health Center for Infectious Diseases and has also served as the first female board chairperson of one of the largest Islamic centers in the Sacramento area, Salon, the Salon Center, Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims Ann, of course, has also been quite long involved with Davis' annual celebration of Abraham in an attempt to increase understanding and respect amongst the major three Islamic states in New York County. Sandy Holman right here is the founder of the Culture Co-op an organization she developed to assist people and organizations working with equity and diversity education businesses in the community. She has served as a consultant to countless organizations locally and nationally to help meet the needs of diverse populations. She's also committed herself to advocacy for children and education. Sandy has an MS in school counseling with a focus on education from California State University, Sacramento. She served on the board of directors local and national agencies serving youth and adults including the Youth Services Task Force, the National Dropout Prevention Network, Center for Regional Development, Progress Ranch Group, home for emotionally disturbed children in Yolo Unite and organizations serving youth and community. And Kate Laddish is a long time winter's president, previous professional incarnations as a geology professor, editor and ranger in Yellowstone National Park. Kate also writes for The Winner's Express and The Davis Enterprise and most folks in this community may also know her as a musician, a woman for other loves and as a member of the Pudupri product ads. But more recently, Kate is also a founding member of Democracy Winters which is a non-partisan network of volunteers working in Winters, California in West Yolo County to preserve democracy and uphold constitutional freedoms through community outreach in local, state and national political activism. So please welcome our panel. Six questions that have been pre-submitted to the panelists. We are going to ask one question on each of the panelists and then two of the questions will ask all of the panelists to respond to. And then if we have a little bit of time then we'll also open Q&A for the audience as well. So question number one, this is for all of the panel. So the post-November 2016 election, emotions running very high in this country, there has been an energizing and increasing engagement with community members here in Davis but also throughout our region. How do we sustain that energy moving forward? And whoever wants to start us off. And thank you so much to Lucas, Don, Tracy and everybody else and Gloria of the Phoenix Coalition and Gathering Initiative for inviting all of us in Sasha Abronsky. I'll get closer to the microphone. Thank you to Lucas, Don and Gloria and everybody of the Phoenix Coalition and Tracy of the Phoenix Coalition Gathering Initiative for inviting all of us as well as Sasha Abronsky and putting on these forums. So after the November election and then the inauguration there was obviously for many of us an outpouring of concern and the need to do something. And speaking for democracy winners and many of us in this group that it was something where either we could just be at home freaking out and not feeling very effective and overwhelmed or we could try to band together. And so and when we get to the part about democracy winners I'll talk about that a bit more. But in terms of I think part of the question is how to sustain this? And that's a great question. And if anybody here has a fantastic answer to that I'm all ears. I know it's something that we've been working hard on a lot. We had a huge outpouring at the beginning and now that we are five almost six months into this it's tricky to to try to figure out how to sustain this. We can only be in panic mode for just so long as the neuroscientists in our group have pointed out. And so it's something that we're trying to address with establishing social connections between members of the community and within the group to try to continue and to play to strengths and identify the key areas that we can be active in. I want to start off by acknowledging my elder my grandfather who was wiser than five PhD holding individuals in any one that I know and I just want to say right away one of the things that we're all going to have to do is massive self-care. I'm seeing people stroke out have heart attacks all kinds of things right now because of the stress of all of this. And on that note I want to say and I don't say this disrespectfully this has been going on for people of color for centuries. A lot of you are new to this kind of dynamic but this is not a new thing that Sasha was saying in fact it goes back way more than decades it goes back centuries and what we're experiencing right now is what I call a fascist uptick in things but for black and brown folks it's been horrible forever. So standing your lane and knowing what you're part in this is essential. We need to learn from people who have been going through this just the inception of our country. And one of the things that we know is all of you have a gift all of you have a special proclivity towards making a difference in a particular area. So you need to stand your lane or you're going to burn out. You will burn out you will get sick you will stroke out you will have high blood pressure you will not be able to sustain this if you don't do those things. Learning from groups who have been through this is paramount. A lot of the groups I feel a part of they're hurting right now. They're hurting because they feel like they have not been acknowledged for what they've been going through for centuries that now that only because this is hurting mainstream culture so much all of a sudden it's been a legitimized problem and there's a hurt to that but there is a lot that all of you can learn from that. They've been there done that they've learned some lessons we know what does not work and what does work so you need to be consulting with traditionally historically oppressed people of color who have gone through this forever in a day and I don't say that disrespectfully I just want to be real with you. The other thing is that we need to be strategic you cannot just be going to every movement going to every march although those things are really important things to do but you need to be strategic and focused for example if I'm into the political scheme we know that you need to be focusing on things like gerrymandering our districts are drawn so crazy it's going to be hard to change of people who are in office you need to be focusing on how we do our funding there needs to be public funding for candidates who are running always there's going to be a skew towards the wealthy being able to get into office you need to be focusing on the electoral college for example that is very it was based on slavery when they were trying to compartmentalize slaves and when they counted it is an antique system and it should be the popular vote that's putting people into office so we need to be strategic I'm just giving an example and visionary when we do decide what our focus is going to be and do the research and again learn from people who've been doing this so that we can implement that and then we need to learn about systems of oppression and how they work so this system this whole country it's been a continuum I'm not surprised by Donald Trump this just did not happen with Donald Trump if we're thinking that way we need to change that way there's been this slow escalation for a long time and really genocidal tendencies towards certain groups for a long time so we need to realize that just because he got in this is not when all the problems started it's been a slow uptick climb that now we have this big ol' ugly zip that is out there and it's just popping but it's been a zip forever a lot of very very powerful messages in there you know I was going to say that coming from the Davis Muslim hands and the Muslim community has been trying to do this outreach from 9-11 but we're babies in comparison to the work that you folks have been doing but you touched on something that I think is very important in keeping up that momentum and that and that is while we do create new organizations to feel a specific need it is really important to build these partnerships so actually this kind of organization that we have today where we can touch base to other organizations and say oh wow I could work with you to do that and so then you're not going to lose yourself in that other organization but you're going to build together on those the strengths that they have so that's what it's basically an echo of a lot of the things that obviously your experience speaks to thank you first off I'll just say thank you let me know if you can hear me thank you for inviting me here today and it's great to be here and see an engaged group and a large group right what would I add to everything that you've said everybody's touched on so many important things so I think what I'll add and this is going to sound a bit negative but bear with me it's just to keep in mind just how hard this is so engagement sustained engagement is difficult and if we look back at the history of social movements in this country for all those that we can think about there are so many many others that didn't get off the ground or get off the ground and then burned out or were crushed or trampled right and so it's a difficult thing just to get something off the ground and what we see now was a growing set of groups right and marches and different types of engagement around the country that's exciting right no matter what your politics are it's exciting busy engagement period but at the same time so that's right there a huge hurdle right that we've we've gotten that far and it's visible and it's numerous and in the media and people are talking about it right at the same time it's going to be very difficult to sustain particularly when you're going up against a system right where every element of that is is really built not to necessarily hear or listen to social movement right the only thing that our system is guaranteed to somewhat listen to is voters and even then we know that folks in political power elected officials don't always for various reasons always listen with all due respect for your elected officials in the room but for a variety of reasons they don't always listen to voters or at least not completely to voters so the difficulty is there and we look at voting numbers I do a lot of research on civic engagement broadly but particularly voting the disparities and turnout low turnout were one of the lowest turnout nations and links established democracies period and then of those who are voting there's a great deal of disparity across income across educational age race ethnicity and those disparities are entrenched they are if you look back over the last 30 years the gaps in comparable elections presidential to presidential midterm to midterm very little has changed actually right there's some bumps for a little bit better year disparities were reduced but only by a small percentage point and that actually includes 2008 it was a good year but still we had a great deal of disparity and we had a lot of folks in this country who were not represented and certainly not fully represented but not represented very much at all so when we think about 2018 because I know a lot of folks in this room were thinking about 2018 right I have heard and I've been asked this by huh counting the days counting the days okay so I say all of this in the end the punchline is not to give up by any means but it's to work that much harder so I've been asked a lot about 2018 I do a lot of media interviews and things like that and the only caution that I hear from a lot of folks that will assume well gosh in 2018 if you're of the mindset which I think everybody seems to be here that there needs to be a change and certainly in 2020 a lot of folks are assuming that's almost a given now right figuring out what to do in the meantime how to fight the battle but they think that gosh there's gonna with all this right percolating everything that we see there's gonna be a change in 2018 it's gonna be an uphill battle because of the demographics of who votes in midterm elections and even in 2020 now we may not get to 2020 in terms of Donald Trump because of many of the investigations that we see happening but still the larger dynamic that extends beyond Donald Trump it's difficult so I think what that says is there's power in numbers also so you need greater numbers and we need include what should we be doing inclusivity is absolutely critical so there needs to be a common narrative that everybody can can believe in that everybody can come together around and don't forget that there's framing and there's narratives if we're gonna make this about one side versus another on both sides right and one of the reasons why if you're unhappy with Donald Trump as president why we have Donald Trump as president is because there were a whole lot of efforts on that side to get to voters to frame it as I think in one of the things Sasha was talking about was this us against them us against the poor us against those of color right us against whatever the threats are right that were that were framed so there's a framing battle on this side as well and on the progressive side of things it's difficult it has historically been difficult to frame like a clear narrative right that gets an inclusive group on board that power in numbers and just in closing there's so much to say is there there we have to reach out and we not only have to reach out I would argue here with those a different socioeconomic status and different race and ethnic groups we also have to reach out by age as well and I don't see a whole lot of young people here actually that that's a perfect segue next question next question it's actually for Mindy so oh okay yeah yeah okay which is if you would please tell us a little bit more about the work of the California Civic Engagement Project but also are we experiencing trends related to youth involvement engagement and if so what are the driving changes and what can we expect well a little bit about the California Civic Engagement Project because the latter half of your question is a lot more important so we're a research center on campus right just a little bit of ways away from here and we do research on civic engagement a lot of work on voting behavior and we do a lot of outreach with that research so we're not on the ground in mobilization campaigns but rather we are disseminating our research as widely as possible and working with folks at the policy level to the local level whoever can be empowered or can use data right and powerful hopefully by hopefully powerful ways we do a lot of work with we particularly pay attention to underrepresented groups period underrepresented in our civic and political landscape and that means we do a lot of work with young people young people of color but young people period as they are very underrepresented in every election and they are very underrepresented in our civic structure so I think you were asking me what some of the trends that are happening yes exactly trends related to youth involvement or engagement and also what's driving those changes if anything involved I don't know if I would frame it as trends but just kind of I guess I'll just say what's what's happening with young people period so when you look at voting numbers and we do hear a lot of it we heard a lot about this after November right it if you look at just the straight turnout numbers of young people they're very very low and I'll actually skip that conversation because I think many of you are aware of right that narrative is out there there's a framing around that narrative to explain it that says that young people are just apathetic what's wrong with this generation they just don't care look at the numbers right something that I I have to navigate as a researcher when I release those numbers because I don't want people to take those numbers and think that young people are apathetic or just give up the you know give up the it's a bad investment right to work with young people electorally because they're not going to participate now there's actually so many reasons many many reasons why young people don't participate they're in a system that really suppresses their vote that doesn't encourage them to vote that doesn't give them the tools to vote but I'll I'll put that aside for the moment more broadly even with those low turnout numbers that's not the full story in terms of their broader types the broader types of participation that young people are doing and how they feel about the world around them so I think many of you probably work with young people right hopefully and young people are very engaged they care very much about issues in their communities and in the broader world they're pretty darn informed right by citizen's free they're very likely to be progressive right and they don't get a lot of credit for that but more importantly they're not being supported in that right to encourage to be encouraged further in that work and also be transitioned into voters so a lot of you people are doing so much in care but when it comes to casting a ballot they don't see why casting a ballot is an actionable step on something they care about I'm going to go out and join a movement I'm going to go clean up a park I'm going to I'm going to do XYZ tangible real things that I care about that I know is going to make a difference but why is voting right something that's going to make a difference and a big part of that is the belief in institutions and I actually would include this in my other answer my earlier answer too we're struggling right now with a lot of the young people are very much but I say the broader society with a lot of distrust in our institutions particularly yeah particularly a electoral system but beyond that's why voter suppression efforts and the idea of fraud is so concerning but even more broadly do you trust the political structure do you even trust the civic structure do you trust your local government and that's a very real thing and for a sustained movement period for people to think that they should get out and do something in March or get out and talk to their local elected officials or whatever it might be you have to believe that the system is actually that the system cares that that actually is something that that's a pathway to change right you have to believe in it if you think that doesn't matter that you're not going to get anywhere that route then you're going to completely check out so believing our systems really matter and young people believe and care about their world around but they have a difficult they're having a greater time statistically in caring about their institutions and again there's very real reasons for that which maybe we may or may not address later but that's the challenge is reaching out to young people helping them show them how to vote show them how to get engaged tell them the why it really matters and then you can connect young people to them to the greater structure yeah oh thanks very much Middie the next question is for Anne sadly we continue to see an increased instances of hate and tolerance and even violence including I think you know anti-Muslim and immigrant rallies anti-immigrant rallies in Roseville yesterday we had a hate motivated murder recently unimportant work and a light rail train considering all of these incidents can you please tell us what you think are some of the concerns hopes and fears that might be specific to the Muslim community in the Yolo and Sacramento region and how can the average citizen be a stronger ally thank you so I'll take a brief moment to talk a little bit about who is Davis Muslim hands because we're a very new organization I click at my watch let's see but we're really in the process of being registered as a nonprofit entity and we're founded by members of the Muslim community here in Davis and our mission is to promote cross-cultural and religious awareness within these diverse communities we live in in order to help establish a better society where individuals love respect and accept each other as they are so that point is basically our goal is to be a resource to the community to provide outreach and information and events in which people can come to us and we can go to them so in response to this question I have to speak from my experiences and from those of friends and family particularly within the Davis Muslim hands so in other words I can't speak for the Muslim community and that's because there isn't such one big monolith that has a mindset because they are so amazingly diverse in culture practice national origin and faith trajectories so our really our mosaic provides a lot of nuance but I'll try so speaking about some of these concerns and fears one is it is really exhausting and particularly for our youth who have to spend so much energy just growing up then to be constantly on the defense of a religion that we love or in pain to see the ongoing slaughter of Muslims who indeed it is Muslims by far who are most affected by the extremism we see so one reason we formed this organization is to help free our youth to develop themselves as youth to study to do what they need to do so that we can contribute to a safer space for them another thought is that we know from the experience of the mosque vandalism and individual stories from students who have been targets of hate like one Muslim female student who got a bag of dog poop apparently dropped at her door is that there are people who fear and even hate Muslims in this community yet will not reach out to understand so our challenge here then is how can we reach these folks in order to address their fears and misunderstandings before they act on them and then I wanted to talk briefly about the refugees coming from Muslim countries more so in Sacramento but some here as well and this is actually brought a pretty big resource challenge to our institutions our Islamic institutions so we welcome them with open arms and have to find creative partnerships and again building on this partnership idea to manage all these issues that they bring so we are tremendously grateful to the many refugee organizations and other faith-based organizations who help out but we do have hope we have had two recent events in Davis that give us all hope so in face of the vandalism the outpouring of the community support from all levels was amazing we had close to a thousand people in Central Park the Friday after the vandalism and the mosque received financial support from the community for repair I mean that is an incredible place to live that that happens it really speaks a lot about this community secondly we had a community interfaith iftar just celebrated last week here with similar enthusiastic turnout so most people in this community want to share a delight in the cultural tapestry we can find in Davis so this is very wonderful the other aspect that brings us hope is that from negative event comes motivations for us Muslims to do war and that's creating these outreach organizations and participating in the interfaith events and other organizations and so the positive is that we're doing more and how can the broader community be a stronger ally which is a beautiful sentiment in question and I really think education is the biggest factor stereotypes and myths about Islam really come from believing in too much of the new spin and not taking the time to understand how we got to where we are in the first place so how many of us really think about the impact of the 19th and 20th century colonialism in countries of Muslim faith and we're really experienced the negative reverberations of that today so can we as Americans step back and look more at the global view of how we got to where this we are today and away from this immediacy of the wars and understand our whole situation as a global responsibility is what I think and so I've actually provided a bibliography and suggested websites there my husband is waiting them up there so feel free to come by and pick up a copy and if I could just catch in the last thing I want to talk about that motto you see in the see something say something motto I would like to just say that extend that to motto to all acts of intolerance whether it be towards Muslims, African-Americans, LGBTQ, any marginalized community so don't allow the online troll to go unanswered answering them with love and you and I want to finish with the tribute to those brave men who gave their lives to stand up to that man's fuming hate towards a Muslim woman and her African-American friend those are the true heroes and those are the people that make our country great feel free to clap the next question is for Sandy and Sandy you touched on some of this in your opening comments but certainly as you referenced previously many communities and especially communities of people of color have faced institutional challenges and discrimination certainly for not only generations but as you said in your opening statements for centuries how is today any different what hope exists for stopping or reversing these agendas that perpetuate inequality now and in the years ahead okay I want to go through this quickly because this is a very profound question for communities of color again this is not different which you all are experiencing what mainstream culture is experiencing what women are experiencing now it has been profound deeply genocidal for generations across generations and I want to touch on something that Sasha said very quickly not only is this an economic thing that's really hitting what we would refer to as dominant culture but it is a framing of what is good and evil based on the darkness of one's skin which is why I wrote that book Graham Paul's Everything Black Bad and which is why a lot of people are able to be manipulated in their hate in their isms whether it's racism sexism homophobicism Islam phobicism and so forth and we need to really understand that until we address this sense of darkness being cast as a horrible thing people are going to be able to be manipulated and I'm saying that because I feel a lot of people voted not only because of their economic pocket which is something that was very difficult for them and certainly was affecting them more than ever in their lives before and I'm referring to dominant culture but they also voted based on keeping those others out those others whether they were muslims black and so there was this dis-ease in their mind in that some brilliant person said and I can't remember her name they may not feel they're a sexist or a racist or any of the other things but they felt comfortable voting for someone who clearly was putting that forth this is important to understand as we go forth and strategically try to address problems if we do not address the isms that are going with this and particularly colorism and having darker skin in our world in our country we're never going to make progress and this is going to keep cycling as it's done I want to say that one thing that's different now too is we have more research about what works and what doesn't work so we shouldn't just be jumping into things without a strategic plan and really a focus and understanding the ideology of hate there isn't actually an ideology of hate and elitism and so forth and if we don't understand it our solutions are only going to be half efficient and because dominant culture is being affected more right now it's like all of a sudden we're supposed to care because white working men and women are not you know their pockets have been hit we should be caring as a common humanity regardless of who is suffering in this country as I said it's been for centuries but it does create a unique opportunity to forge collaborations and partnerships that can be powerful and that's something that's different that's going on right now people with privilege are now understanding that you can't just think about yourself that eventually when you have snakes coming out of the pit and I'm talking about rabble snakes they will eventually start to turn on each other so we have to work together as a humanity you have to care for me or that black man that got killed by a police on camera that a lot of time that we try to justify or he stole the candy bar that's why they shot him or he didn't put his hands up enough even when we're seeing these things on videotape it creates a disease and a disease in the mind where we have to rationalize not doing anything so that we can still feel good about ourselves and we have to address this and address it honestly the other thing is that we need to understand because we frame things against race and race is that big elephant elephant in the room that we don't want to talk about that they are able to manipulate systems of oppression divide and separate people that way we won't work with each other because we're fighting over crumbs and that is something that we're going to have to come together as a common good to fight I believe that love has to be the center of this even as I'm saying these tough things to you I am known as a love person and I'm saying these things to you in love because I want to be real with you if we're serious about changing things so you need to understand for example that this system this theory of darkness and you being less than because you are darker or you come from a certain neighborhood is something that is perpetuated by oppressive systems so when a person who's been in person who's white has more of a chance of getting a job than someone who's black with a degree that says something to you and my time is going by very very quickly church burnings have been going on non-stop you don't hear about it in the news it's not only mosques it's not only temples they are burning churches like crazy and so I just want to say what's different about now is we have a unique opportunity to be strategic learn about systems of oppression and how they work forge partnerships together and go to our brothers and sisters black and brown who've been suffering forever to say what can you teach us how can we do this differently how can we truly make a difference and trunck is just a symptom he's not the problem yeah he's the problem too I'm sorry he's a symptom of us not addressing the sin and I use the word sin that has been going on forever for a lot of targeted groups and we need to stop that because what eventually affects one will affect the total that's what I've been taught when karma goes out to others that we ignore it comes back to us and that's kind of what's happening now but I'm hopeful that we can make a difference and that we can change things and by working together and on the power of love and learning and teaching reading those books reading hearing speakers speaking to our elders my grandfather would say y'all need to get busy and learn that we can make a difference thank you so much this next question is for Kate Kate you're representative of a newly formed community group democracy winters that is doing work certainly you've explained that in the beginning of winters but also Western New York County and if you please tell us a little bit about it and then also why does it exist but also how are you able to successfully bridge different perspectives and factions within the community and I think this will help to shed some light on not only what's happening in winters but also with some of the nonprofits and other organizations that exist here in Davis on the parts of the region that are experiencing the same issues thanks Lucas and I appreciate the optimism of the second half of the question there we'll get to that part so democracy winters is we are very newly formed we're as a group and many of us as individuals we're babies at this and we'd really like to learn from Sandy and other people who've been activists for a much longer time and have a much deeper understanding of it so for I do feel like for me to be up here in the guise of something of an expert is a little bit of a misnomer the only expertise I have is as somebody who became very active very recently and so it might a number of you might relate to that as well so we started on January 21st when Bonnie Dixon if you want to raise your hand handed out a flyer at the Winters Women's March describing democracy winters as a network of volunteers working locally in Winters, California on a number of issues and by saying that she made it so and there we now we had our first meeting a week later we have a mailing list of 75 people which is 1% of the Winters population and with people active in a number of different ways so what we are really quickly is we are in fact a network of volunteers in Winters and working to preserve democracy and uphold constitutional freedoms through community outreach and local, state, and national political activism our clip notes is that we are non-partisan as much as we can be pro-democracy anti-authoritarianism and a lot of our focus has been looking at corruption in government and preserving the constitutional rights of different minority and targeted groups in our community and more broadly and they need to act on many of those concerns so in terms of what do we do and how are we organized we don't have a particular leader nobody in the group was planting on forming and leading a group at this particular time in our lives but there was a need to do something now and enough collective energy for people to come together and do it and so we have a steering committee many of whom are here today and the general membership meets a couple of times a month but we have a pretty extensive communication network what is it we do there's a lot of organized calling and I see Indibus Boyolo is also here I think they do they do many of these items as well and so we have organized calling of elected officials at the local, state, and national levels we are able to mobilize people to turn out to rallies and town hall meetings we're able to go to meetings at the local and county level and to follow some of these different issues we write letters to the editor about particular issues so that there is public visibility of issues and so that people get an idea that they aren't the only ones who may be concerned about something and we're also been able to establish lines of communication with elected officials at different levels of government and their staff and since we're able to speak as a group with that it has been more clout than any one of us just going individually and so that's something that we've had some real success with of what we've done in terms of trying to with the second half of the question with the bridging the different opinions within the community we're working in winters and winters is a small town with a long memory and so touch on something that Sasha said at the very beginning of his talk with if there's somebody with whom you disagree do you start what level of opposition do you start in and something that we've talked a lot about is how do we do that in a small town where people are going to remember that and so we've been able to work with forming connections rather than confrontation when we're working within winters when we're looking at issues coming from the administration our time is probably different I'll just say and or our approach we've been some of what we've been able to do is I worked with supervisor Don Saylor again Don and the head of IHSS came into my apartment building it's all seniors and people with disabilities to get people plugged into a program most of the people in my subsidized apartment building probably have different voter different voting habits than I do and so that's that's the idea with that being said it's something we're able to work with people with a lot of different ideas but on particular issues where many of us have common concerns and but then we've also been able to work many of us turned out when an organization at the Hispanic Winters Hispanic Advisory Committee was very involved in a Winters community proclamation of Winters community values and affirmations and so we were able to turn out for a city council meeting and able to speak to many of the people who were most concerned about this for very personal reasons weren't comfortable coming to the meeting and so we were able to go and speak and the Winters City Council passed a very robust version of it unanimously and so that's an example of something that that we've been able to do as a group as a very new group that's working across across some different different areas thank you so much final question is for the entire panel and Sasha had referenced I would actually spoke at the next election about the war on poverty that was sort of taken on during the presidency of L.E.J. and many of the programs that were started during that time food stands were what is now known as something like Nutrition Assistance Program a community about the block grant program many others those all seem to be under attack you know there is a increasingly fear that generally every one of those sort of social programs that you know with social services and also even environmental programs may be subjected to the chopping block even during those certain those threats but it seems like increasingly there may be some reality to that as well are there any ways that the non-profit or the faith communities might be able to step in to help preserve programs or perhaps other possibilities as well this is a question for anyone on the panel or all the members of the panel and actually Sasha may also have a response to that as well too and then we will give to anyone some final thoughts after that okay I'll just very quickly I just want to say the faith community and I do have a faith tradition I believe in a higher power and I like to honor the fact that many others do has a tremendous opportunity to take the lead and make a difference right now so many people think that we are hypocrites that we don't care and if you read whether you're reading the Quran the Bible whatever particular thing you're reading all of those disciplines call for you to act on love to be a voice for the oppressed to help the incarcerated and so forth so I think the faith community and non-profits together have a tremendous opportunity to kind of rebuke all the stereotypes that are being put out there I'm not very happy with elements of the faith community who have who seem to just be having this kind of empty faith where they're doing the opposite of what their own words their own readings tell them what to do but I think they have a tremendous opportunity and also I just want to reiterate the power of love I do believe in the power of love action and strategic vision and purpose not that lawly love where we don't talk about truth and we don't acknowledge that we have differences and all that I'm talking about that love that takes strength and purpose and putting aside our fears to say you know I may be nervous of you because my mind's conditioned to think people who look like you are bad and I need to work on that but I want to work with you because I know that this is fundamentally wrong and it's going to take nonprofits working together with the faith community to start to put a dent in this and with individuals like yourself who really really care about what's happening in our communities systemic change is insidious and very hard to change and when I look at what's going on right now and I think about with my grandfather my dad and others before me and what they were dealing with it's just a shame that in 2017 we're still dealing with this but I believe that like Martin Luther King says you know justice arcs up even if you can't sense it and we still have a responsibility to try even if we're not making any difference that seems to be happening but that love is critical that love and self-care so I'm going to encourage you to do something regardless of what that is so yeah I do believe that faith-based and NGOs do have a role to play in you know part of making that that safety net that there is a food bank in Sacramento a rosette food bank that was created to be able to provide a lot of food for needy Muslim families but they also make a point to reach outside the faith and to supply to others because that is not only important you know to supply them but to show you know that we do work across that but I think what's important to know is that that they're they're part of the solution we can't look to them as the solution is oh we can count on the NGOs to take up the place where the government goes up because not everybody is involved in a faith not everybody's involved in an NGO some of these faith-based approaches have been exceedingly have been very successful in their in their areas so what that can also do is to actually bring a model to local government and to say what worked for that and I know we have some good programs here in Yolo County that works with local agriculture to feed and really capitalizing on the system that's in place so I think my bottom line statement is yeah we have a role because we can lead the way focusing on our specific needs and provide that information but I think it's a partnership with the larger government I don't think we can give them a pass on that I think I'm thinking along similar lines so definitely a role to play faith-based community has been playing a role right in this country and certainly in this community and trying to to bridge that gap to provide that safety net where our government has never ever fully obviously taking care of every one of its citizens or residents at the same time though I get nervous with with the narrative anywhere near to say that the faith-based community is their job to do this because much of the framing that is out there you know to justify cuts to social services says that it isn't the role of government it isn't the role of you know your tax dollars but it should be faith-based community it should be families it should be the parents that are taking care of those kids or it should be the the adult children that are taking care of of their older parents or whatever it might be right so it's the narrative out there is to try to put that responsibility back on the community and often it's just it is a justification for dismantling further our social safety net that we have right institutionally so it's very so that knowing that knowing that it makes me nervous to talk about but I one other thing I'll add is I was talking earlier about inclusivity and I and just to be clear I wasn't just thinking about like-minded folks but reaching out to like-minded folks across race and ethnicity and age and so forth socioeconomic status but also reaching out to others that don't right that aren't necessarily at least that we think aren't like-minded and I think that's absolute critical because ultimately to get change you have to change the voters right that voted one way if it's the way that you didn't want them to vote whatever the case so whatever the issue is and so you have to reach out and you have to change minds and you have to break down the narratives that are out there and I think the faith-based community is an absolutely critical part of that an actor in that because they hopefully are right working with folks across ideologies and political affiliations and social locations and so forth and so they can come together and say we should be helping right or fighting or this is why this is wrong or this is why this is critical that we take a stand so I think that's something that's always on my mind when I think about the faith-based community it's just an important very powerful player in that and while we're passing the mic here to Kate, Sasha has also indicated he's interested in answering the question as well so since democracy winters is this network of volunteers I can't speak as much to the faith-based or to the the NGO nonprofit but our approach in terms of concern about federal programs and regulations and protections that are threatened that's where we actually most closely follow the indivisible playbook and many of you are probably familiar at this point with the indivisible guide whether you've read it or gone to their website or you've just heard the word indivisible an awful lot in the last few months and this this for us has been very helpful with that for ideas for how to interact with our elected federal representatives so with with representative Garamendi and with Senator Spinestein and Harris and it has for us it's been good tips about how to effectively talk with them who do you call about which issue when do you do it what's what are the important pieces of language to get into that conversation and and also things but you don't have to just call or email you can go to their office whenever you want and a number of us are in the last few months who knew you go in and it's really it's an amazing moment of democracy to walk into your congressman's office and they greet you by name because you've actually interacted with them before and so for us it's establishing those those paths of communication and then getting information from people who know more than we do about what to do once we've established those lines of communication and I guess all I'd like to add is I'm not particularly religious but I do come from a long line of famous rabbis and I know that rabbis and imams and pastors have spoken out over the centuries about poverty but I also get worried and you talk about this when we sort of say oh it's just the responsibility of the faith-based communities and we can we can ignore our secular responsibility as well when I was growing up I had a postcard and I can't remember who the pope was from but the postcard said when I give food to the poor they call me a saint and when I asked why the food why the poor have no food they call me a communist and I do worry that if we just think about salvaging from the wreckage as a sort of active charity you know religious mitzvah but if we just regard it as a sort of charitable good deal that we're missing the structural problem here nobody talks about funding the air force or funding the navy through church sales we just don't talk that way we don't say oh if you want a new airplane to bomb somebody in the middle east go and you know have a church sale but we do say you know if you want to fund schools adequately or if you want to keep the poor people fed have a bake sale and I think we've got to think a bit more systemically about what's going on here and the very final thing I say is you know obviously faith-based is a part of it and individuals are a part of it but I think state and local government at the moment have a huge role to play we saw this last week with Jared Brown he did something marvelous federal government abdicated all the responsibility for the environment and Brown essentially said all right we're confiscating the environment but no we're in charge now and I suspect over the next few years we see this again and again and again that combination of faith-based groups other groups and state and local government is going to say you can't do it give it to us we'll do it you can't get people health insurance we'll go for single payer you can't get people food we'll set up our own nutritional programs so that's just my theory that it's sort of all over the top thank you very much thanks to everyone for being on this platform before we go to the sort of last portion of the event today so we'll take just a couple of questions you got a question right here from Fred go actually do Alan first I think it's similar that the deep solution of problems is the values that we have to have a deep discussion with our community and also understand people on the other side when we run for fair value there's a lot of conflict it needs to be darkening there's a session about it's a much changed value so we really never have a deep discussion about values and I think it's a really deep discussion of the importance of it for example the value of the oil are we loyal and I think that's important because basically the quote is that we have to have loyalty to the institutions basically we're working that way we're defending the institutions we're defending the constitutional values which are all being threatened I've heard the cast of American flags on the farmers market and the mayor actually would not take the full uncomfortable with it because it was a symbol what are we loyal to there and let me question also the loyalty like we get this discussion why should I vote because it's not going to make a difference but it's a good comment and I heard a little bit this person saw it on the station I heard Sandy talk about we've been fighting this thing for years and a lot of years taken in efforts and I think that should I think it's a the question is how does a loyal and no person feel loyal and commit to our even if both much less participate in all the other activities to change the system yet we hear that that silo on that station doesn't pay and the other we're going to have a discussion about values and status values and our views and it's overdue when are we going to have a discussion about values in the Davis community so that's the question I didn't want to take a staff with that question I think it's a good point by the way I want to get rid of I do think it's made a difference my ancestors have made a difference I'm going to say that first and foremost so I'm not saying it didn't but I do think it's important to have a discussion about values but when you come to that table you need to be prepared that people's value system is based on their generational history and what's happened to their particular group of people so they may not mesh with yours so having this discussion is critical and what whose values are the ones we're supposed to adhere to are they yours are they mine are they the group that's coming together but yes I want to agree with you it's important to have fundamental discussions about values and what they mean and why one person may have this set of values and another person may have another and the reason why I have my values is no less important than the reason why you might have your values and you need to listen to that that's how we're going to grow we're talking about courageous conversations that we are not having across race, across sex, across gender across a variety of values that people have that's part of the challenge of what's going on so I think that's a good point he wants to answer that and then we've got we'll do time for one more question they saw a group's question I think Mr. Curtis is back there and then we'll go on to the wrap up yeah I think it's very important as well and I can see you feel very passionately about it and you should actually I will say you mentioned something else that I had said about young people I'm saying young people are feeling disconnected and feeling like why should it matter and we can't blame them for that because of so many things that are going to place upon them that make them feel that way but that we hopefully right should be reaching out to young people to change that so in terms of values I think I mean I agree with you just to take an extend what you said a little bit further we have to have that conversation it is just comforting uncomfortable conversation period and it will be for many folks and I bet you and it has to be carefully facilitated lots of ground rules but I think it is really really important but I think you also have to be very very aware that there's going to be what you think are the values of Davis are not necessarily going to be the values that come up you know there's going to be a a spectrum of things that I think we like to think about ourselves and our community and this is a wonderful community and generally our inclusive community but there are there's a lot of variation I think in terms of how people view the world that we may not always be aware of and reaching beyond our community and reaching to other groups right and to find common ground I think it's very very important and we can talk all we want inside Davis and we have a lot of powerful folks in Davis that do reach out and do amazing things but we have to be talking to others and in this state of California we like to say that we're a blue state but we're really shades of blue and communities of red and we're doing a very good job of reaching out to those communities of red really right and I think that's part of the discussion is finding common ground and learning to work together not just because of what's happening nationally but also to to create a better community communities across our state but it's going to be difficult people are going to also they find things that they don't like about their community when they hear it thank you very much Dan what we have a question from back here and then we're going to wrap up and go to the next segment my question actually came mostly from to you Sasha but I welcome anybody to respond my wife and I walk through Samson this is very several neighborhoods and you know for Hillary and I think just after the election this really hit me that Hillary had a great economic message talking about gender pay equity and minimum wage and child care but it might take on an issue to not talk enough outright about jobs with a green job that initiative that was great but I don't think it was enough and I can't help but think that if you had a shade come out for a Marshall plan for capillation and Rust Belt and the communities that are starting to like stop whether we might be living in a very different world right now because I think you great hope for people I think that combat is the thing that we're doing Sasha Sasha All right um I I'll take a crack at it but with the caveat that I never was and never will be a spokeswoman a spokesman for Hillary Clinton so with that caveat I don't disagree with anything you said I think she ran a very cautious campaign and she shied away from big picture systemic solutions she actually had a lot of very sort of interesting technocratic solutions that were carried in her website but in an age that was been defined by emotion which is what the election became she was not necessarily the most effective candidate that's just my impression that's you know I actually also spend quite a bit of time on you know and that was my impression that she wasn't emotionally connecting in a way that needed to be sort of part of the discourse in 2016 in terms of big and bold I think you know I'm half English like Robin England and I've been actually fascinated by what's been unfolding in England the last week because at that time I called him his electoral suicide he was way too that way his proposal so way too big and bold nobody's going to work for him he's going to be a poor majority of 200 at the end progressive politics for a century and I'm really not that's not how hopefully that's how everybody I know I know a lot of people in politics in England that's how they're talking about it and in the end all of that acquired knowledge turned out to be nonsense and Corbyn came with then a whisker of bringing down the Conservative government I wish that whisker that you know half of which there wasn't that whisker there but I think that the message there is you can go bigger and bold because a year earlier Britain voted for Brexit and everyone said that's the Donald Trump moment in England and a year later he used the Jeremy Corbyn's politics of progress and inclusivity and tolerance actually coming near to political power so I would agree with you on that very clearly you have to say that since you mentioned the British election and it looks like guess who was a big player young people just going to say that since I said that you know I was talking about how low the participation is here historically in the US and it was low for the Brexit vote there was a lot of blaming young people why didn't because it clearly they felt differently but they didn't vote they voted but they just voted in low numbers now it looks like that there is up to maybe 20 it's as exit polls are difficult right after the fact but up to maybe 20% of points jump from where they were with the Brexit vote and then the vote last week so that's really powerful I just wanted to give the credit that the youth vote can have a huge impact but they connected it to something that was real and tangible and they were mobilized and they're like oh we want and we need to make this different as well and they were mobilized and outreached you by by the the labor campaign and like Corbin as well so and I just wanted to say wanted what Sasha just said so when we get to the level that we are with for lack of a better word for the sake of time where we're in a crazy state of being nothing is predictable so trying to be rational with people that you think if you present events and everything that they're going to change things and understand and feel differently those rules don't apply when we're at this state of emotional upheaval I want to say that to you so you'll have moments of what to you seems like sanity and the moments that how in the world can we even be thinking about this that's all typical of a chaotic environment in system and countries which is the world to see it right now so there's just not a lot of predictability I wanted to say that except love with that we will we'll move on to the next portion of our program that's one more big round of applause for the folks to now do two things first of all stand-ups stretch a little bit you can visit supervisor Don Saylor he's already found a snack and drink table over there in the corner and then also make sure you visit all of these different around the room there are a bunch of different booths from environmental organizations this is here from fool davis and culture co-op give us news of all this shit if you will about the resolution resolution center empower yolo or be visible yolo ACLU form on speakers saying the love is here since our new project many many groups so come on and sit down and take a chance and isn't in line so thank you very much