Thinking Small.

Hans Fallada, a writer born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, in Germany in 1893, somehow survived life (if you can call it that) in Berlin during World War II.

His most famous novel, "Every Man Dies Alone," was not published in English until a few years ago. I believe I read it in one-sitting or two. "Every Man" tells a small story based on real events of Otto and Elise Hampel, elderly residents of Berlin during the war who decide they must resist the German state and nazism.

The Hampel's are named the Quangels  in "Every." They are old and creaky. They cannot blow up buildings, shoot state functionaries, or kill the police. They do not possess any power or strength at all. They are old, poor and living on the fringes of society. How can they battle the hegemony of almost-all-powerful state control and oppression-repression? How can weak fight strong?

Postcards.

--

In Adam Hochschild's book, "Bury the Chains," he recounts the story of the abolition movement that started in late-18th Century England. 

In England at this time thousands if not millions of people were addicted to a new drug. The drug was everywhere and almost everyone used it (they were addicted, after all) almost every day.

That drug was sugar. 

And it was grown in the most savage factories our planet has ever seen. The vast sugar plantations in the British-owned West Indies. Sugar plantations owned by British Lords that were worked by slaves. These slaves had a life-expectancy, due to the harshness of plantation conditions and the inhumanity of those who owned those plantations, of about seven years. They stole healthy young people from Africa and worked and whipped them to death in mere months.

In 18th Century England, these plantation owners were the Buffets, the Bezos, the Musks, the Gates, the Ellisons of their day. 

How do you fight their power? 

When etchings (the news footage of the day) started coming back to England from Barbados, from Jamaica, and from other sugar islands. "The Guardian" in an article on current tourism in Barbados wrote:

In the past...sugar in Barbados has been responsible for great human misery. The island was settled by the British in 1627 and rapidly turned into a landscape of sweeping sugar-cane plantations, planted, cultivated and harvested by forced labour. By the 1660s it had become the jewel of English colonies; one commentator referred to it 'as the richest spote of grounde in the world' because of the fortunes that could be amassed. 

How do you fight this power? 

Wealthy women in England knew they had no way to "frontal attack." But a small group of them did something small and profound.

They stopped scooping sugar into their tea.

They were society women. The kind who set trends and who are emulated. First by other society people and then by many others. They were the taste-makers.

The small move of abjuring sugar started the British anti-slavery movement.

Just as stamping pennies in England like this, pressed the "patriarchy" to give women what should have been theirs all along: the right to vote.

Pennies circulate. Or at least they did. What better way to spread a simple message?

As amerikaka plummets into a white christian nationalist state, a state where those who wield power pay no taxes, a state that doesn't respect the sovereignty of other states, I wonder what we can do. 

What you and I can do.

Of course, vote.
Of course, speak out.
Of course.
Of course.
Of course.

But what small acts can we do that will have big impact? What small, daily behaviors can we begin that will have big impact?

We can't not pay tax like Thoreau did to protest Polk's Mexican war. Tax is taken from us automatically.

How do you fight their power? 

What small thing can we do for outsized impact?

That's our human brief.