#they STARTED the campaign more committed than some married couples. and they have been speaking in wedding vows the whole time!

[overnighttosunflowers]

Heyyy last anon here again.. all of that tracks honestly I really just hadn’t thought about that locket in forever and it being mentioned again took me out… really I fluctuate back and forth between which of them I think will propose pretty much every time I think about it…

My most favorite pet theory on a Laudna-initiated engagement is a potential resurrection/Delilah banishment.. she’s alive and not tied to Delilah anymore and euphoric in that and she gets Imogen alone and blurts it out (I do feel like maybe you wrote something similar to that too actually ?? Maybe.) Because I feel like of all the canon couples, Imodna ending the campaign with a proposal is the one instance that wouldn’t be forced or out of the blue at all.

YEAH no you get it!!!! honestly my two big hopes for BH post-campaign one shots are: 1) egg hunt extraordinaire, obviously, and 2) imodna wedding one shot BUT specifically with the framing of: they're getting married! but laudna wants to do one last thing first! she's decided that after some time in the puppetmaster seat, what she wants isn't to be in control of delilah anymore. she's ready to be rid of her. so they go perma-yeet delilah. and then get married :)

[blackkudos]

Diane Nash

Diane Judith Nash (born May 15, 1938) is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement.

Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters (Nashville); the Freedom Riders, who desegregated interstate travel; co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and co-initiating the Alabama Voting Rights Project and working on the Selma Voting Rights Movement. This helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized the federal government to oversee and enforce state practices to ensure that African Americans and other minorities were not prevented from registering and voting.

Early life

Nash was born in 1938 and raised in Chicago by her father Leon Nash and her mother Dorothy Bolton Nash in a middle-class Catholic area. Her father was a veteran of World War II. Her mother worked as a keypunch operator during the war, leaving Nash in the care of her grandmother, Carrie Bolton, until age 7. Bolton was a cultured woman, known for her refinement and manners.

After the war, Nash's parents' marriage ended. Dorothy married again to John Baker, a waiter on the railroad dining cars owned by the Pullman Company. Baker was a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the most powerful black unions in the nation. As Dorothy no longer worked outside the house, Diane saw less of her grandmother Carrie Bolton, but she continued as an important influence in Nash's life. Bolton was committed to making sure her granddaughter understood her worth and value, and didn't discuss race often, believing that racial prejudice was something that was taught to younger generations by their elders. Her grandmother's words and actions instilled Diane with confidence and a strong sense of self-worth, while also creating a bit of a sheltered environment that left her vulnerable to the severity of racism in the outside world as she grew older.

Education

Nash attended Catholic schools,. She also was the runner-up in a regional beauty pageant leading to the competition for Miss Illinois.

After finishing Hyde Park High School in Chicago, Diane Nash went to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard University, a historically black college (HBCU). After a year, she transferred to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in English. Nash acknowledged that she looked forward to personal growth during her time in college and wanted to explore the challenging issues of the time. In Nashville, she was first exposed to the full force of Jim Crow laws and customs and their effect on the lives of Blacks. Nash recounted her experience at the Tennessee State Fair when she had to use the "Colored Women" restroom, signifying the first time she had ever seen and been impacted by segregation signage. Outraged by the realities of segregation, Nash began to show signs of leadership and soon became a full-time activist.

Nash's family members were surprised when she joined the Civil Rights Movement. Her grandmother was quoted as saying, "Diane, you've gotten in with the wrong bunch;" she did not know that Diane was the chairwoman of organizing the nonviolent protests at her university. Her family was not familiar with the idea of working for civil rights, and it took her family time to fully recognize her position as a key player in the Civil Rights Movement. Eventually, her mother fundraised for the Freedom Riders. Nash said in a PBS Tavis Smiley interview, "My mother ended up going to fundraisers in Chicago that were raising money to send to the students in the South and actually, over years, she went to an elevated train bus station one day at 6:00 a.m. to hand out leaflets protesting the war." Her mother was influenced by Nash's sense of empowerment.

Nashville Student Movement

At Fisk, Nash searched for a way to challenge segregation. Nash began attending nonviolent civil disobedience workshops led by James Lawson. While in India, James Lawson had studied Mahatma Gandhi's techniques of nonviolent direct action and passive resistance used in his political movement. By the end of her first semester at Fisk, Nash had become one of Lawson's most devoted disciples. Although originally a reluctant participant in nonviolence, Nash emerged as a leader due to her well-spoken, composed manner when speaking to the authorities and to the press. In 1960 at age 22, she became the leader of the Nashville sit-ins, which lasted from February to May. Lawson's workshops included simulations in order to prepare the students to handle verbal and physical harassment that they would ultimately face during the sit-ins. In preparation, the students would venture out to segregated stores and restaurants, doing nothing more than speaking with the manager when they were refused service. Lawson graded their interactions in each simulation and sit-in, reminding them to have love and compassion for their harassers. This movement was unique for the time in that it was led by and composed primarily of college students and young people. The Nashville sit-ins spread to 69 cities across the United States.

Though protests would continue in Nashville and across the South, Diane Nash and three other students were first successfully served at the Post House Restaurant on March 17, 1960. Students continued the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters for months, accepting arrest in line with nonviolent principles. Nash, with John Lewis, led the protesters in a policy of refusing to pay bail. In February 1961, Nash served jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine" — nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in. They were all sentenced to pay a $50 fine for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter. Chosen as spokesperson, Nash said to the judge, "We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants."

When Nash asked Nashville's mayor, Ben West, on the steps of City Hall, "Do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?", the mayor admitted that he did. Three weeks later, the lunch counters of Nashville were serving blacks. Reflecting on this event, Nash said, "I have a lot of respect for the way he responded. He didn't have to respond the way he did. He said that he felt it was wrong for citizens of Nashville to be discriminated against at the lunch counters solely on the basis of the color of their skin. That was the turning point. That day was very important."

While participating in the Nashville sit-in, Diane Nash first met fellow protester James Bevel, whom she would later marry. They had two children together, a son and a daughter. The couple divorced after seven years of marriage and Nash never remarried.

In August 1961, Diane Nash participated in a picket line to protest a local supermarket's refusal to hire blacks. When local white youths started egging the picket line and punching various people, police intervened. They arrested 15 people, only five of whom were the white attackers. All but one of the blacks who were jailed accepted the $5 bail and were freed. But Nash stayed. The 21-year-old activist had insisted on her arrest with the other blacks, and once in jail, refused bail.

SNCC and SCLC

In spring 1960, nearly two hundred students involved with the nationwide sit-in movement arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, for an organizing conference. There, the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), at Ella Baker's request, sponsored the students' meeting on April 15. Martin Luther King envisioned a simple SCLC student league, but Baker herself advised the youth to remain autonomous and follow their own principles. Accordingly, in April 1960 Nash was one of the leading founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC - pronounced "snick"), independent of any adult organizations, and quit school to lead its direct action wing. In the coming years, organizations such as CORE and SCLC would try to recruit SNCC as their own student wing, with SNCC always resisting the invitations. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee would go on to be involved with some of the most important campaigns of the civil rights era, adding a fresh and active youth voice to the movement.

In early 1961, Nash and ten fellow students were put under arrest in Rock Hill, South Carolina, for protesting segregation. Once jailed, they would not accept the chance for bail. These dramatic events began to bring light to the fight for racial justice that was beginning to emerge. It also highlighted the idea of "jail, no bail", which was utilized by many other civil rights activists as the fight for rights progressed.

Originally fearful of jail, Nash was arrested dozens of times for her activities. She spent 30 days in a South Carolina jail after protesting segregation in Rock Hill, in February 1961. In 1962, although she was four months pregnant with her daughter Sherri, she faced a two-year prison sentence in Mississippi for contributing to the delinquency of minors whom she had encouraged to become Freedom Riders and ride on the buses. Despite her pregnancy, she was ready to serve her time with the possibility of her daughter's being born in jail. Nash took the weight of this possibility seriously, spending two days praying and meditating before coming to a decision and penning an open letter. "I believe that if I go to jail now, it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free — not only on the day of their birth but for all their lives." She was sentenced to 10 days in jail in Jackson, Mississippi, "where she spent her time there washing her only set of clothing in the sink during the day and listening to cockroaches skitter overhead at night".

Nash would go on to serve many roles for the SCLC from 1961 through 1965 while it was under Martin Luther King Jr. Though years later, Nash is clear about how she saw herself in relation to King, stating "I never considered Dr. King my leader. I always considered myself at his side and I considered him at my side. I was going to do what the spirit told me to do. So If I had a leader, that was my leader." She later cut ties with the SCLC, questioning their leadership structure, including their male- and clergy-dominated ranks. She would also split from SNCC in 1965 when their directives changed under Stokley Carmichael's leadership, taking particular issue with the organization's departure from the founding pillar of nonviolence.

Freedom Riders

"We will not stop. There is only one outcome," stated Diane Nash, referring to the 1961 CORE Freedom Riders. Designed to challenge state segregation of interstate buses and facilities, the project was suspended by CORE after a bus was firebombed and several riders were severely injured in attacks by a mob in Birmingham, Alabama. Nash called on Fisk University and other college students to fill buses to keep the Freedom Rides going. They traveled to the South to challenge the states. The Nashville students, encouraged by Nash, promptly decided to finish the trip that had been suspended at Birmingham. New Orleans Congress of Racial Equality, the Nashville students, and Nash were committed, ready, and willing. "It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence," says Nash. Nash took over responsibility for the Freedom Rides and worked to recruit Riders, act as media spokesperson, and garner the support of the government and other Movement leaders. Coordinating from Nashville, she led the Freedom Riders from Birmingham, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi, where CORE Field Secretary Tom Gaither coordinated a massive program on the ground.

After the severe attacks, CORE's Executive Director James Farmer Jr. a veteran of CORE's original 1947 Freedom Rides, was hesitant to continue them. Nash talked with the students of the Nashville Student Movement and argued that, "We can't let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead." Nash remained adamant that they not send a message to the public that civil rights efforts could be stopped with violence. As the violence escalated and bus drivers began to refuse service to the Riders due to the dangers, Attorney General Robert Kennedy became involved and worked to keep the Rides going. Kennedy called the Alabama governor and the Greyhound bus company to implore them to allow the Rides to continue. Kennedy insisted that his special assistant John Seigenthaler travel to Alabama to get directly involved in the matter. Seigenthaler informed the reluctant Alabama governor that it was the government's duty to protect these citizens during the Freedom Rides. Nash spoke with Seigenthaler on the phone, and Seigenthaler warned her that the Freedom Rides could result in death and violence for participants. She responded, "We know someone will be killed, but we cannot let violence overcome nonviolence." Nash explained to Seigenthaler that she and other students had already signed their wills. John Lewis, who had just returned from the Freedom Ride, agreed to continue it, as did other students. A contingent of activists from New Orleans CORE also participated. They continued the action to a successful conclusion six months later.

When Nash was bringing a batch of students to Birmingham to continue the Ride, she telephoned Birmingham activist Fred Shuttlesworth to inform him. He responded to her sternly: "Young lady, do you know that the Freedom Riders were almost killed here?" Nash assured him that she did and that that would not stop her from continuing the ride. After gathering the final list of Riders, she placed a phone call to Shuttlesworth. They knew their phone line had been tapped by local police, so they worked out a set of coded messages related to, of all things, poultry. For instance, "roosters" were substituted for male Freedom Riders, "hens" for female Riders and so on. When Nash called Shuttlesworth again on Wednesday morning to tell him "The chickens are boxed," he knew that the Freedom Riders were on their way.

On May 20, 1961, the Riders left Birmingham for Montgomery with the promise of protection from the federal government, including police escorts and planes flying overhead. After about 40 miles, all signs of protection disappeared, and the Riders were subjected to a violent, angry mob armed with makeshift weapons such as pipes and bricks. Both white and black Riders were injured by the mob, including special assistant John Seigenthaler who exited his car to help one of the female Riders who was being beaten. When all the other Riders had left the bus terminal, five of the female Riders phoned Shuttlesworth, who relayed their whereabouts to Nash. Others called Nash directly, to inform her of the chaotic situation that had occurred. Fearing that all the riders were subject to arrest, Nash advised them to stay out of sight from the police, but this was compromised by Wilbur and Hermann, who had called the police after fleeing from the terminal area.

On May 21, 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King had caused tension between himself and the Freedom Riders, Nash included, due to his refusal to participate in the Rides. Diane Nash was present at the First Baptist Church that night and is credited with playing a key role in getting King to come and speak in support of the Freedom Riders. More than 1,500 citizens were trapped inside the church overnight as violence raged outside. Martial law had to be declared by Alabama Governor John Patterson to finally bring an end to the mob. Gov. Patterson had been highly criticized by many within the movement for his unwillingness to support and protect the Riders. This was the first time he and the state of Alabama had moved to protect the movement. King preached to the crowd inside the church while teargas seeped in from outside, telling them that they would "remain calm" and "continue to stand up for what we know is right."

In 1963 President John F. Kennedy appointed Nash to a national committee to promote civil rights legislation. Eventually his proposed bill was passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Alabama Project and the Selma Voting Rights Movement

Shocked by the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham that killed four young girls, Nash and James Bevel committed to raising a nonviolent army in Alabama. Their goal was the vote for every black adult in Alabama, a radical proposition at the time. Alabama and other southern states had effectively excluded blacks from the political system since disenfranchising them at the turn of the century. After funerals for the girls in Birmingham, Nash confronted SCLC leadership with their proposal. She was rebuffed, but continued to advocate this "revolutionary" nonviolent blueprint.

Together with SCLC, Nash and Bevel eventually implemented the Selma to Montgomery marches, a series of protests for voting rights in Alabama in early 1965. They were initiated and organized by James Bevel, who was running SCLC's Selma Voting Rights Movement. Marchers crossed the Pettus Bridge on their way to the state capital of Montgomery, but after they left the city limits, they were attacked by county police and Alabama state troopers armed with clubs and tear gas, determined to break up the peaceful march. John Lewis, who had knelt to pray, had his skull fractured. The images were broadcast over national television, shocking the nation. Soon after this, President Lyndon Johnson publicly announced that it was "wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country." The initiative culminated in passage by Congress of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which authorized the federal government to oversee and enforce the constitutional right to vote, with mechanisms to assess state compliance and require changes to enable registration and voting.

In 1965, SCLC gave its highest award, the Rosa Parks Award, to Diane Nash and James Bevel for their leadership in initiating and organizing the Alabama Project and the Selma Voting Rights Movement.

Later recognition

During the civil rights era and shortly after, many of the male leaders received most of the recognition for its successes. As the civil rights era has been studied by historians, Nash's contributions have been more fully recognized.

In 1995 historian David Halberstam described Nash as "…bright, focused, utterly fearless, with an unerring instinct for the correct tactical move at each increment of the crisis; as a leader, her instincts had been flawless, and she was the kind of person who pushed those around her to be at their best, or be gone from the movement."

Nash is featured in the award-winning documentary film series Eyes on the Prize (1987) and the 2000 series A Force More Powerful about the history of nonviolent conflict. She is also featured in the PBS American Experience documentary on the Freedom Riders, based on the history of the same name. Nash is also credited with her work in David Halberstam's book about the Nashville Student Movement, The Children, as well as Diane Nash: The Fire of the Civil Rights Movement.

In addition, she has received the Distinguished American Award from the John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation (2003), the LBJ Award for Leadership in Civil Rights from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum (2004),

Nash has continued to believe in the power of nonviolent action to solve conflicts. In an interview with Theresa Anderson she said,

Violence needs to be addressed. I think the Civil Rights Movement has demonstrated how to resolve human conflicts. I think it's crazy when two countries have problems with each other and one says 'Let's bomb them, kill them, go fight.' If we have a problem with another country I would like to see consideration instead of an automatic tendency to go to war. Let's hear their side, consider our side, and look at what is logical and reasonable. Let's look at what serves the best interests of the people and see if we can negotiate solutions, more sane solutions.

Later life

After the Civil Rights Movement, Nash moved back to Chicago where she worked in the fields of education and real estate, continuing as an advocate and championing causes such as fair housing and anti-war efforts. She still lives in Chicago, only a few miles away from her son Douglass Bevel, with whom she remains very close.

In 2013, Nash expressed her support for Barack Obama, while also sharing her reluctance for his continuing involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While encouraged by the positive implications associated with electing the first Black President of the United States, Nash still believes that the true changes in American society will come from its citizens, not government officials.

Although she attended the Selma 50th anniversary celebrations in March 2015, Nash was noticeably absent from the re-staging of the 1965 Selma march. When asked about her refusal to participate in the historic event, Nash cited the attendance of former president George W. Bush. Nash, who has dedicated her life to pursuits of peace and nonviolence, declared that Bush "stands for just the opposite: For violence and war and stolen elections, and his administration…had people tortured."

Decades after she played a critical role in the Civil Rights Movement, Diane Nash remains committed to the principles of nonviolence that have guided her throughout her life. Although she was a key architect in many of the Movement's most successful efforts, she remains humble upon reflection. "It took many thousands of people to make the changes that we made, people whose names we'll never know. They'll never get credit for the sacrifices they've made, but I remember them."

In popular culture

Nash is portrayed by Tessa Thompson in the 2014 film Selma.

Nash is also portrayed in The Boondocks episode "Freedom Ride or Die".

[hencethebravery]

TITLE: First Family (1/1)

SUMMARY: It's not as if Killian Jones believes his husband to be incapable of winning the presidency (quite the opposite, actually)─he's just not entirely certain he wants him to. A CC 2020 Election AU. (Ao3)

NOTES: This particular story is meant to be entirely cute and in celebration of the prospect of having a “First Gentleman” (see recent Time magazine cover). It is not at all meant to be an endorsement of any one candidate, and if you come at me with anything other than love for these two boys and their dog, I will unhinge my jaw and swallow you whole. I developed Jasmine’s last name from a princess who appeared in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (on whom Jasmine is based, or so Wikipedia tells me). Oh, and another small disclaimer, this is the first time I’ve included Emma Swan in a Captain Charming fic. For whatever reason I used to struggle with including her, but I guess I’m over it because she’s here now. If you think that’ll bother you then give this one a miss!

If the chronically thin, awkward, and punk-ass 15 year old version of Killian Jones could have, somehow, opened a portal in time and space; a feat which might have allowed him to peer into the future in an attempt to witness what the future might hold, he would have likely imbibed several ill-advised shots of cheap bloody rum, and then quite dramatically flung himself atop the rumpled sheets of his perpetually unmade bed. If the younger Jones had even an inkling of the type of life he’d be living as a 35 year old man─with a full time job, a mortgage, a husband, one wildly photogenic dog─he would have done everything in his power to steer himself off such a disturbingly clean-cut, well-behaved course.

“Well and truly boring I’ve become, isn’t that right my love?”

Dave, the husband in question, sat comfortably in his usual corner of the couch, reading glasses perched at the end of his nose, putzing about on their shared iPad, paying less and less attention by the minute, “Oh, absolutely. Can’t stand you.”

The only reason he brings it up at all is because he has, somewhat unexpectedly, been rather unsettled by the prospect of a life change so massive, he has had no other choice but to reconcile with the fact that the quiet life he has managed to build for himself could, quite likely, be completely destroyed. Forever. Never to be found again. Relegated only to a memory that he’ll return to in his twilight years, a decrepit old thing. “Ah yes,” he would mumble, smacking his lips together in that way the elderly tend to do, “I remember when you could watch an entire 48 hours of television, totally unbothered!”

It’s not as if he legitimately wants to keep his husband, arguably the love his life, from doing what he’s meant to, and clearly, the man’s meant for greatness, but Killian has become accustomed to a certain standard of living. He likes (much to his younger self’s hypothetical horror) doing the same things everyday─up with the sun, cup of coffee, walk the dog, go to school, come home, make dinner, watch Netflix, go to bed. He likes weekend drives to the country; hikes in the morning, beers in the afternoon. He enjoys the calm, safe predictability of his life that he has so miraculously found in the wake of a rather tumultuous, traumatic youth.

“Killian,” David insisted gently, “you’re my husband. Obviously, if you don’t want me to do this, I won’t do it.”

The maddening part is that he knows with absolute certainty that he’s telling the truth. David Nolan wasn’t the resentful type─it was something he both simultaneously loved and hated about the man.

“I swear, darling, the last thing I want to do is hold you back,” Killian replied, frustrated with his own lack of enthusiasm, “I just…”

“...It’s a big change,” David finished, “I know. Honestly,” he continued, “I probably won’t even win.”

“Sure,” Killian scoffed, a smirk on his face, “that’s exactly what you said last time.”

5  Y E A R S  E A R L I E R

“I JUST THINK IT’S FUNNY!” Killian yells over the deafening cheers, one arm slung round Dave’s shoulders, the other waving wildly in the air.

“WHAT?” David shouts back, his mouth turned upwards in a somewhat manic, and what was fast becoming alarmingly permanent, grin.

“IT’S FUNNY!” he repeats, the volume of his voice doing little to bely the patience in his tone. He finds a few of their friends’ faces in the crowd and blows them a kiss, his cheeks starting to hurt with the force and breadth of his own smile.

“WHAT IS?”

Killian couldn’t help rolling his eyes at the absurdity of their attempting to hold a conversation at all at a time like this, but he’d never been one to keep from saying, “I told you so,” when the opportunity presented itself. That said, it was quite the ruckus, and he had simply shaken his head in surrender, silently promising to rub it in at a later date.

To be fair to David’s humility, a mayoral race and a presidential race are two vastly different undertakings, particularly when the mayoral position in question involved a municipality of around 100,000 people, which while a large enough amount, was quite small in comparison to the rest of the country. But at the same time, given what Killian knew about his husband, he had a hard time believing that the rest of the country wouldn’t be able to see what he saw─if they were able to get past the “First Gentleman” of it all, that is.

Killian would be lying if he said he didn’t have something of a pessimistic streak. Certainly, it had grown quieter over the years, especially since meeting David (and his subsequent election to political office in a small midwestern city), but the presidential election of about 3 years prior, coupled with the many national tragedies and constitutional crises, had “awoken the dragon,” so to speak.

“You’ve been watching way too much ‘Game of Thrones.’”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

David and Killian had agreed from the very start─whomever ran in 2020 would have to be and do more than the average candidate. The only way to remind the country and the world of who they really were as a nation was to commit a complete and total act of repudiation with a substantive majority vote.

“You know everyone and their mom is gonna run,” Emma Swan, David’s campaign manager, had joked in the weeks following the 2016 election, after all of their emotional wounds had felt somewhat soothed. Alcohol helped.

“Ah, yes,” Killian agreed, taking a sip of whiskey, “I can feel the splitting migraine already.”

Looking back, David’s silence in that moment had been suspicious, and if he and Emma hadn’t gotten absolutely wrecked in preparation for an upcoming election cycle that would inevitably last what would feel like a decade, he would have prodded a bit further. In fact, if he had prodded, maybe he wouldn’t be so woefully unprepared for the, “I’m thinking of running for President of the United States,” conversation.

Immediately before the panic had set in, what he had actually felt was pride. Regretfully however, panic will-out, and in the midst of his initial tittering he forgot to effectively relay that initial emotion, which was for David he was sure, far more preferable.

In the early stages of the mayoral race, Emma had been adamant on the point of storytelling. According to her, elections were won and lost on a candidate’s ability to tell a story─about themselves, their campaign, their vision for the community─and if David was going to run, an openly gay man (albeit white as they come) from a working class background with little name recognition, the story he told would have to be good. Thankfully there was the military record, that usually played well with an older, more conservative crowd, and it wasn’t as if he was a stranger to hard work─the necessity of family, community, the like. He’d lived there his whole life, people knew who he was, however… unfamiliar they were with his “lifestyle.”

Killian had been far more concerned about himself being one of the factors that could lose Dave the race. The two of them had yet to be married at the time, despite having lived together for several years, and while Killian had lived in America for much of his adulthood, he hadn’t been born there. He was also openly bisexual, had a mostly benign criminal record, and had gotten into his share of fairly public tiffs with some less... "progressive" members of their community. One of them had even been filmed─and gone viral.

“Aren’t you the least bit worried about dragging that all back up again?” Killian had asked during their first informal meeting with Emma. The kind of discussion that started with things like, "We're not having this conversation, but if we were," etc., etc.

“After this President?” Emma scoffed, a gleam in her eye, “It’ll only help.”

Killian should’ve guessed, after seeing David’s quick, knowing glance, that he’d been found out. That it wasn’t the loss of their current lives that he truly fretted over; his inability to walk down the street unmolested, but rather a deep-seated worry of his own value as a partner. He worried, as he had during Dave’s first campaign, that he would only weigh him down.

At some point in the near future, some invasive young journalist is going to ask Killian about the spousal sacrifices. They’re going to want to know, as the spouse of the first openly gay presidential candidate, what do you anticipate giving up? And how, if at all, has he made peace with their new reality? In point of fact, the first concession that Killian had made (up until the whole, “running for leader of the free world,” business that is) was his surrender of the coast.

Killian had never really had roots─there was never a physical home with four walls and a roof overhead to which he could depart and return, over and over again. It could never even be said that he had any people to which he might turn instead; he had a brother, Liam, but they’d never been particularly close, and their history was tense at best and outright antagonistic at worst. All this to say, it was part of the reason why he had given Her up (the sea). Because Dave, most curiously, would become his home in a way he had never thought possible. It was how he was able to make a compromise─to go without the sight of the waves lapping against the rocks in favor of a large, wraparound porch, with some admittedly stunning views of the trees and hills that surrounded their home.

It was where he happened to be sitting the morning after their first casual, "meeting but not a meeting," with Emma; a mug of cooling coffee in his hand, watching Sally sniffing to and fro in the damp grass. It was an otherwise normal morning aside from the impending dose of reality he had yet to fully face. He was in the midst of a perfectly somber and on brand bit of mindless staring when he heard the quiet rumbling of Dave’s early morning voice (a personal favorite of his).

“Hey,” he said, startling Killian out of his ironically stressful meditations. “Sorry,” he said with a laugh, taking a seat beside him on the porch swing, “I didn’t feel you get up this morning.”

“My apologies, love,” Killian answered with a brief kiss, “I didn’t want to wake you.”

There was no crying of gulls, and you couldn’t taste a hint of salt on your lips, but there was still the pleasant chirping of birds; the sight of the sun peeking over the tops of the trees, the heady smell of blooming flowers. Killian cleared his throat, both knowing and dreading the conversation he could no longer avoid.

“You have never,” David began, very astutely avoiding his husband’s nervous glances for the moment, “been something to be ashamed of.”

“For you to even think it,” he continued, giving a slight shake of his head, “I must be doing something wrong.”

“Dave, no─”

“Killian,” he interrupted, giving his hand a gentle squeeze, “you are the person I admire most in the world. You are the exact kind of person this country needs to see right now.”

A bit dramatic, Killian thought, desperately attempting to quell the violent beating of his own heart. Despite having known David for as long as he did, he was still somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer goodness of him. Having spent so long himself in a place of defensive cynicism, it was still a challenge to be so unabashedly confronted by such unrelenting hope. That’s what the country needs.

“I know it took us both a long time to make it…” He pauses, glancing up at the trees, the dog now slumbering at their feet, “here, but─”

“I couldn’t possibly adore you more than I already do,” Killian finished, abandoning his cold coffee in favor of framing David’s flushed face, “and I will be there every step of the way.”

“‘For better or for worse,’ blah, blah, blah?”

“Yes,” Killian laughed, pressing their lips together, “something like that.”

The secret? Say “yes,” to fucking everything. That seems to be the fundamental step when you have absolutely zero name recognition and you’re under the age of 75. It’s Emma’s first rule, and she fanatically demands that they abide by it unless she says otherwise. “Let’s let the paint dry on Fox for a hot second,” she suggests after Killian exclaims, “Surely not everything.”

But she damn well means enough. Everything from small, independent news blogs run by journalists, to “serious” news media, to BuzzFeed, and everything in between.

“One of these things is going to just,” she snaps her fingers. “And then it’s all over, boys.”

It’s during an interview with a fairly well known political podcast that really sets them on that, “nothing will be the same after this,” trajectory. He’d essentially been laughed out of the room until he sat down at a table with one of the unnecessarily handsome, affable hosts and dropped stat, after stat, after quip, after poignant observation─after some light hearted jokes that proved he wasn’t living in the dark ages.

“And I hate to ask this,” the host began, the hesitancy evident in his voice, “but what do you say to people who argue that you just don’t have enough experience for the job?”

After a brief pause, during which Killian could observe the wheels spinning from where he sat quietly in the corner of the room, David spoke. In that way he always had of speaking. That way that could convince anyone to listen to what he had to say.

“To that I think I would consider the importance of humility,” a chuckle, “I never want to be one of those people that believes they have nothing left to learn, but at the same time, to claim I have, ya know, ‘no experience,’ whether that’s because of my age, or the size of my city, is just… I don’t know, disingenuous?”

The host laughs a bit at that, “You mean to say, what precisely is their ‘concern?’”

“Yeah, I mean, we knew going into this we might create a few… waves─I don't know if you were aware, but, I am in fact very attracted to other men."

They left the sound of Killian’s obnoxious and embarrassing snort in the recording, which actually ended up being a good thing. Positive polling based on the sound of incredulity? It was strange, the small details that people seemed to cling to.

“But seriously, and this is what I believe, is that the individual experiences of every single person living in this country makes them… invaluable to understanding how it should,” he shakes his head, searching for the right word, “...exist, or be run. So, these people who are concerned about my experience, it’s not a lie for them to say that I haven’t worked at the federal level, or that I haven’t run a federal agency or served in Congress, but my experiences are valuable, my identity is valuable, and I think it’s something the people of this country deserve to see. Even if I’m not the one they choose.”

The tension at the back of Killian’s throat made swallowing a tad painful, but he had to do something to stop himself from crying, which would be… regrettable (although, once the polling had come out about the snort, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing after all). Crying in front of all these cool, young politicos. But at that moment, at the close of his husband’s small speech, the hopeful grin on the face of the host, the other people in the room─hell, even Emma’s radiant expression, he locked eyes with David and he knew. Snap.

First Family

Mayor David Nolan and the Rebranding of Hope

May 2, 2019

by Jasmine Badur

“I’m not sure I truly believed in ‘hope’ before I met him,” Killian Jones, the potentially first, “First Gentleman,” had somewhat reluctantly revealed in one of our early conversations. “I don’t think I necessarily knew I didn’t at the time,” he paused, giving his ear a nervous tug, “but once I got to know him… I certainly seemed to understand what it was I’d been missing.”

I was invited out to the Jones-Nolan household by Mayor Nolan’s campaign manager, Ms. Emma Swan, a woman who has proven herself to be quite formidable in our current political landscape. “If you really want to know him, them,” she had insisted during one of our many phone calls, “you’ve gotta see them where they live.”

And so, here I am, on a warm, sunny day, greeted by the pleasant sight of a rather long, winding driveway lined with tall, leaf-laden trees. The house itself is also surrounded by quite a bit of lush greenery, which, as Killian explained, was purposeful. Apparently the two men value their privacy, which is pretty ironic, considering.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he answered, unprovoked, “pretty bloody funny.”

The couple’s dog, Sally, runs down the porch steps as I exit my car, and I can hear Mayor Nolan call her name from inside the house. Despite the somewhat grandiose nature of the extended driveway, the house itself is modest, with little in the way of fuss. Both men greet me at the door, and I’m immediately offered a drink or a snack by the Mayor himself.

“He’s worse than my grandmother,” Ms. Swan half shouts from another room, after which David (“Please, call me David”) huffs and playfully rolls his eyes. “We’re like a family here,” he explains, leading me into their warm, sun-drenched kitchen, “I don’t think I know any other way to do this, to be honest.”

“This,” of course, being the campaign. The reason I’ve shown up here at all, to share this historical candidacy with a country that has proven to be far more interested than David expected it to be.

“The truth is, no,” he admitted over our tea, “I didn’t really expect this.”

A turn about the house reveals a number of familiar sights─a mix of running shoes and formalwear lined up by the door, coats on their hooks, framed photos on the mantle or hanging on the fridge. I note a young Emma in a number of these photos, to which David confirms their personal history, that of being pseudo-siblings, which most people are tangentially aware of, but the way David explains, it has a lot more to do with his campaign than you might think.

Soon after Emma Swan had moved to town to live with her aforementioned grandmother, she had met David at school, and the two quickly became inseparable.

“My grandma was a sweet lady,” Emma had shared, albeit reluctantly, “but she was pretty old. Not really prepared to have a young kid. David and his mom became my family, more or less.” When I’ve spoken to others who knew the Nolans, the stories seem to follow a similar thread. It was nearly impossible to know them and not be treated as if they had known you your entire life.

“That was what my mother believed,” David says, a resolute smile on his face, “everyone deserves to have a family.”

It might seem an unusual tactic for the candidate to take, but having spoken with Emma Swan, and having spent time with David and Killian in their home, I’m not so sure the harsher criticisms are especially valid.

“He’s a bit inclined to picking up strays, isn’t he?” Killian starts, politely if not vaguely uncomfortable. The two of us are walking through the field behind their house, and truly, it is a beautiful piece of land. “And what are we all,” he finishes, somewhat distantly, “if not a country of wanderers?"

Most people have a general understanding of Killian’s background. Born in London to an absent single mother who passed when he was about 17, a brother serving in the Royal Navy; teaches literature, unreasonably handsome, perhaps inclined to appear in viral videos─“Surprised you lasted this long,” he says, laughing. “Haven’t you lot gotten sick of that story yet?”

Unfortunately for Killian, though somewhat fortuitously for the campaign, that now famous clip, of the man in question throwing an unequivocal fist into the cheekbone of a far-right activist, has earned him some degree of popularity in progressive circles, though he contends he had absolutely no plans for such an outcome.

“It was satisfying before the entire country knew about it,” he concludes, with a blend of both seriousness and charm that can be challenging for most people to pull off. “And I’d do it again in a bloody heartbeat.”

“God bless Killian Jones,” Emma had sighed when I’d first mentioned it to her, “that man’s righteous anger could be the thing that gets us elected.”

Killian himself isn’t quite ready to admit that, but he is glad to help his husband in anyway he can, even at the expense of his own anonymity. Which, he did admit, was a serious concern at first.

“We’d spent so many years searching for this,” he explained, glancing pointedly at our surroundings, the sight of their now smoking chimney peeking over the tops of the trees. “I wasn’t sure I was ready to give it up.”

But now, he says, the doubts seem to have all but faded.

“There’s always moments of insecurity, sure,” he admits, “but I think it’s worth it.”

The Nolan-Jones household is cluttered─but not in a way that might leave you feeling suspicious of their character. True, it’s cluttered in a way you might not presume a presidential candidate’s house to be. Maybe you would consider the ��right candidate,” to be so obnoxiously Type A that their home be something akin to a serial killer’s lair. If that is what you were expecting, I am sorry to say that his house is very much not that. This house is cluttered in a way that our lives create clutter. Like their "family-oriented" campaign style, the ordinariness of their home and their lives prior to this event, reveals quite a bit more than you might think. We exist in a day and age seemingly obsessed with the idea of authenticity, and while I've grown to despise the word, it seems to have been given new life here, even though their kitchen did happen to smell of freshly baked cookies during my visit.

At the end of the day, no one knows how this campaign is going to shake out. Politics have never been predictable, no matter what many pundits and strategists claim, but if there’s one thing we might always learn to expect, it is that "electability" is a true falsehood. I don’t know if Mayor David Nolan will become the first openly gay President of the United States, and neither does he, but that doesn’t seem to be the point.

“It may seem trite to some, but it is about hope,” David said in the few moments before I left, hands resting in his pockets, his gaze tired yet contented, “I think our 44th president had that part right.”

In an era of such unrelenting cynicism, it can be difficult to find the silver lining of it all, but as I drove back down the long, winding driveway in the moonlight, the sight of Killian Jones and David Nolan waving in my rearview mirror, my heart felt a little less heavy.

Jasmine Badur is a freelance political correspondent with Time, BuzzFeed News, and others. She is currently on the road following a number of Democratic candidates running for President, including Mayor David Nolan. She can be found on Twitter @badurjofficial.

[fdhfjdafdajfa]

Maybe another reason I'm accused of claiming to be a dalit, despite never EVER having said anything even REMOTELY close, is because I am up front about being affected by caste issues. But the reason I am affected by caste issues is not becauase I in particular belong to any certain caste. The reason I am affected by caste issues is because I live in India (or under Indian occupation, now) and everyone who lives in (or under) India is affected by caste issues.

It is my savarna detractors who are mistaken in their beliefs. Those beliefs are first that they themselves are not affected by caste issues, and second that my social position is similar to theirs.

As regards the first I do not need to go into very much detail about it. As they are the privileged in society it does not require much suspension of disbelief to consider that they might be very mistaken as to the mechanism of their social dominance. The belief that they are unaffected by caste is a simple chauvanism; nothing more, nothing less. They believe that caste means Dalit, that caste is found not in their own families and universities and overseas poc networks and stupid overbearing social media presence, but in rural Dalit households. Nothing new. These are the people who will run countless studies on Dalits and none on themselves, searching up and down and all around, searching for the elusive caste everywhere except under their own noses. Fortunately my second wave training made it pretty obvious to me where I might find it. I was right on the mark in my initial assessment that to Savarnas, caste is an enclosed patriarchy, and caste can be found in what is now called Brahminical Patriarchy, which is something that Brahmins who say stuff like “sex work is work” in a country where prostitution is an ancestral profession can hardly be expected to understand the nature of.

As regards the second, I will dispel it, but not to prove my own victimhood -- victimhood is not the basis of ability to speak and I need no such thing -- but to establish to the Brahmins that we are not and will never be anything alike. This is an assertion of boundaries only.

I need to say that even if the second premise was truethat we did occupy comparable social position,  I would still be required to talk about caste and the way it affects me in order to mount a serious social analysis. That they do not do so shows that they are not serious social analysts full stop, but just Brahmins after social clout. As if their choice in "issues" to "discuss" and the ways they "discuss them" didn't already make that obvious.

But the bigger issue is this. As I said in the post that started all of this, upper caste Hindus have this very weird thing about white people. Now as part of this Very Weird Thing, the Hindus have a strong desire for white approval and wrongly consider that their culture has anything in common with white western culture, especially in comparison to groups they consider to be ignorant, backward, and more conservative and less enlightened than them. 

This isn’t really true. Hindus have no history of womens’ struggle, no belief in social equality, they love wasting food -- do the people constantly making fun of white people for casseroles really think that we won’t notice or be bothered by the fact that they consider food to be polluted and unshareable once it’s eaten from? It’s viscerally repellant to me to see a Brahmin throw away perfectly good food that’s still warm even -- they hate beef which is at least three food groups for Americans. So we’re talking about two very different groups of people, and while the Brahmins claim that all of these repellant traits of theirs are “Indian things”, that isn’t true, they’re just savarna things, and we have them in common with Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and other groups in society that Brahmins look down and despise because of these traits. A Savarna who turns green at the sight of an omelette doesn’t like it any better because a white person made it. They still ain’t gonna wanna share utensils.

The only reason this stereotype persists at all is due to aggressive propogation of it by Brahmins abroad and all Savarnas in India, made easier by the systemic exclusion of everyone else from English language education.

Not only do Brahmins hate people because of these traits on a personal level, but it is legal, and the rule, not the exception, to discriminate openly based on not only them, but also on race and nationality itself.

Where the stereotype that white people are unaffected by this comes from is that it is true that in places like South Bombay and Gurgaon, where my haters live, there are neighbourhoods (the term we use in India is “colonies”, but without the same connotation, any neighbourhood can be a colony regardless of who lives there) where some very rich white expats live where they can pay a great deal of money to insulate themselves from India. It’s true that they don’t have to worry about discimination in housing, and are nonplussed at everyday occurrances like being charged extra for stuff. These people probably constitute a decent percentage of white people in India; the exact statistic probably isn’t known but they’re highly visible for the same reason all rich people are. What else should be kept in mind is that they may be privileged in society, but no moreso than Savarnas of their income level. All of these traits are things they share with rich Savarnas -- so maybe they have this in common with this particular group of white people.

What is not talked about much is the other two groups of white people that I know to exist in India, those being Israelis and Russians. Now Israelis are actually pretty well integrated in Goa and Himachal, they’re mostly like me -- long term tourist visa stays. The stereotype that they overstay their visa is largely not true. The stereotype that’s even less true is that there’s an “israeli mafia” that runs drugs back and forth between Himachal and Goa, which owns businesses and land in towns like Kasol, and is also heavily involved in other underground crimes. The BJP’s 2017 electoral campaign centred largely around this fictional Jewish Mafia, and it won this campaign. I should also note that antisemitic and nazi imagery is even more common in Himachal than in the rest of India. I even saw Indians walking around with Third Reich flags on their t-shirts a couple times.

So that’s the Israelis. What are the Russians doing? Well, some of them are economic migrants. But more visibly they’re being sex trafficked just like everywhere else in the world. A hookup once told me that in her ex’s apartment building, there was a floor full of Russian prostitutes that would go missing during election season. The political parties openly commit crimes like this and since the parties also control the police there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Their position is very similar to Bangladeshi and Nepali women. Does this affect peoples’ perceptions? You tell me.

So, getting back to the issue of the bizarre Hindu craving for white approval, this takes the form of sexual harassment very, very often. Another thing contributing to this is the widespread use of porn in India; the women in porn are mostly white. Bollywood has this problem too, where it’s a common plot that the protagonist of the film dates a “sexually open” white woman to get his bullshit phases out of the way before realising he needs someone who can cook and clean to spend his life with and marries an Indian woman (implicitly of his caste). 

So, acknowledging the following non-exhaustive list of some formal disabilities that I experience BY LAW -- 1. it is legal to discriminate in housing, 2. it is not legal for me to seek employment, 3. I am not allowed a vote or representation 4. There is no available path to citizenship from someone of my socioeconomic class 5. I cannot take advantage of government programs -- we are left with two remaining possible sites in which white privilege could possibly be found. 

The first one of these is uncomplicatedly fake. It was RSSBJP propaganda in the late 00′s and early-mid 2010′s that everyone in India is brainwashed by white people to believe that they are culturally inferior. This is pretty clear and flagrant fascist propaganda that has been weaponised to some pretty destructive ends. For example, it was asserted that Hindi is the indigenous language of India and natural language of all Indians (it’s not) and the reason anyone wants to learn English is because white people have brainwashed them into believing it’s superior to Hindi. Actually what this was was RSSBJP brainwashing a bunch of savarnas into believing that they’re race traitors for speaking the “coloniser tongue” (In reality Hindi is the coloniser tongue, and this is again a caste issue, but this is long already) and that this was white peoples’ fault. White people remain a preferred target because the imagination of the colonial era lends itself easily to the claim, because India’s millennia-old obsession with light skin bears a superficial resemblence to colour discrimination in the west, and because the “opposition leader” at the time, Rahul Gandhi, is half-Italian on his mother’s side.

Yes, the party in power criticises the “opposition leader” on the basis that he’s the half-white son of a naturalised citizen of the Republic of India. Yes, it works. Such privilege! Even Obama’s accusers at least had to cloak it, they couldn’t just come out and say “it’s bad that you are that race”.

Anyway, as white people have no such mind control ability, and no control over Indian media or any other resource through which they might promote such an idea, and the source of the claim has a clear conflict of interest, we can not only dismiss it but be reminded to keep a look out for it as it has ingrained itself into social imagination and in fact become another nonsense accusation against which I must constantly defend myself.

The second site is one I am willing to entertain, and it’s that white privilege is extant in relation to other groups of foreigners. If this is the case it’s still something that native-born Indians have absolutely no business grilling me on, because to be a foreginer is itself to face a certain level of social exclusion, which makes them the privileged class on the foreigner/native axis. This one, I’m, y’know, willing to talk about, but only with people who have any damn business bringing it up, not a bunch of Brahmin social climbers. Something often brought up is that people do make room for white foreigners (at least). This is true. I can’t really speak to whether people from other groups have the same experience (except for one or two anecdotal examples, which, for the record, indicate that they do) but even acknowledging that is an admission that such efforts are necessary. What else should be kept in mind is that they are spectacularly unsuccessful. 

So returning to the elephant in the room (get it because elephants are a symbol of buddhism which... yeah) is that there are power dynamics in India which matter other than race and class and that’s religion. As already established, this country is run by a genocidal, anti-Muslim hate cult. Now you can argue that because I’m white it doesn’t matter than I’m a Muslim, and I’ll be counted as a Christian, which is a very Hindu conclusion, and the most staggeringly ignorant thing imaginable to say but it turns out Hindus can just say any words in whatever order they want, so I’ll deal with this argument anyway.

The genocidal hate cult that runs the country is also anti-Christian. So, that’s that on that. The only thing is, the Good Brahmins don’t have any more good to say about Christians, particularly white Christian missionaries, than their RSSBJP immediate relatives do. Attacks against Christians, including white missionaries, are a daily occurrance in India being most common in the liberal paradise state of Tamil Nadu, and they are celebrated by Good Brahmin and Bad Brahmin alike as well as their boot lickers on social media, including this website.

But if we want to acknowledge the reality that I am a Muslim, then we have to take into account that BJP rhetoric assumes all Muslims to be infiltrators and foreigners. The only reason this is not taken into account by Good Brahmins on this website is that harbour the same prejudice as their immediate relatives, and so are unable to recognise them as harmful. For instance I’ve been accused of being undocumented or overstaying my visa by several people in the past few days. Careful readers will remember this stereotype from the Israelis earlier. It’s not true for them, and it’s not true for me -- I’m here legally but in a compromised, non-citizen status compromised by widespread discrimination and ground-level lack of access to theoretically available resources on account of my socioeconomic class. If this screams “invulnerable” to you, hoo boy.

TL;DR To quote one of my favourite Urdu poets, “The only thing we have in common is I’m a dick and you suck.”

[pandemicstress]

What Seeds are You Planting?

Mary loves trucks and spent 20 years working for a multi-national vehicle manufacturer. In April 2020, she left the organization to start her own business. She has always had a dream to have a coffee shop and a deli. She has tried a few other entrepreneurial ventures. She had a store with repurposed furniture and a music theatre. She also had agencies selling construction supplies. However, none of these seemed to feel right with her.

A few days before lockdown Mary decided to take the plunge and she started a mobile deli. She lives on a small holding in South Africa’s busiest province and she has access to local farmers and suppliers. She developed a list of products to sell and she simply jumped in. It was a steep learning curve but the business took off within the first month.

She identified her target customer to be high income earners with sophisticated tastes. She created a list of products that were expensive and high quality. This worked very well and her customers were extremely happy with her offerings. In the early lockdown, citizens could only leave the house for food or medication. The emptiness of the streets was shocking for her when she was delivering to her customers. It felt surreal with no cars on the streets.

Her turnover was higher than she ever imagined it would be. She was able to pay off her car and she was also able to pay her rent in full which was something she has struggled with in the past. She typically pays when she can but now is able to pay her rent regularly. Mary’s passion for her work was obvious when talking to her and it’s clear that she loves serving her clients and supporting her suppliers.

Mary has faced many challenges in her life. She was married in the past and she never felt good enough. Her husband treated as if she was an inferior person and over time, she started believing it. In her corporate days, she received free trips as recognition for her hard work, but it was difficult to enjoy the trips as her husband put her through emotional hell with the guilt of going away.

She remembers a day when he was speaking to her in a way that was emotionally abusive. She walked outside and it felt like she was slapped with the awareness that she’s worth more than that. In that moment, she knew that she had to get away from him. It wasn’t easy for her to do this because he is a dangerous man. He made threats on her life and on the lives of their children. She made plans to escape from him while she waited for the perfect opportunity. She packed bags of clothes and hid them in the car and hid spare keys in various locations that she could access on a moment’s notice. She suffered so much stress that she lost 20kg when she moved out. Without his financial contribution, life has been tough but it was well worth the effort of getting him out of her life.

She realized that she has been putting off her dreams and had this ‘one day’ thinking which isn’t very action oriented. Mary told me that the subconscious never sleeps. When our energy reflects that we don’t deserve success and money and we live in a scarcity mindset, it’s impossible to shine.

Mary is an optimist and she has a special gift of thinking outside of the box. She is a natural entrepreneur and gaining the experience in a large organization set her up for great learning. Mary said, “It’s a matter of seeing the gap.”

In the spirit off entrepreneurial experimentation, she tried something else in her deli business. She created a budget-friendly list with the thinking that people might have lost income during the pandemic. This strategy backfired. She used a different supplier with cheaper produce and her customers did not respond well. This showed her that her original niche market was correct and she resumed her original strategy to serve her ideal customer. She realized that her market is the high-income earners. This was not a mistake but rather an opportunity to gain greater insight into who she is serving and what they want. Customer feedback is critical and Mary is excellent at listening to her customers and responding to their needs.

Mary was raised in a way that receiving was not encouraged. She has realized that it is a process to learn to receive. In her book, Rising Strong, Brené Brown writes that there is a certain power and control in giving and that it takes courage and vulnerability to receive. She writes, “When you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping. When you attach value to giving help, you attach value to needing help.” I can relate to Mary’s experiences as I have also struggled to receive. I’m trying to teach my children that it is an act of kindness to receive from others since it feels wonderful to give and we would not want to take that experience away from those who want to help us.

Mary’s daughter is a strong ice hockey player and was invited to Bulgaria a few years ago. With Mary’s income and being a single mother, there was no possibility of affording the airfare and accommodation. It broke her heart because she wanted her daughter to have this experience. She decided to overcome her past difficulties in receiving by setting up an online campaign where people could donate. She received money from so many kind people, one person donating R10 000! If she’d know who they were, she would have talked them out of it. But she does acknowledge that it feels bad when we are not able to give.

She has done an incredible amount of personal growth. She places sticky notes everywhere in her house containing affirmations. She is also intentional about her thinking. The psychologists call this ‘metacognition’ – the ability to listen to your own thoughts. I always tell my clients and readers that the starting point for any form of growth is awareness. Once we get into the habit of hearing what we think, we can start to shift thoughts and beliefs that are not so healthy. For example, if you realize that you are really unkind to yourself, you can develop the skills of self-compassion to reduce stress or if you realize that you are procrastinating or avoiding something, you can start to understand why and to address any issues within yourself that hamper your performance.

Mary is proud of her high standards and her drive and ambition. She has seen people around her struggling to show the same level of commitment towards their goals. She has not always been able to appreciate her strengths but she is on a journey towards self-love.

She told me about an author Mike Brescia who inspired her. He was homeless and an alcoholic and he went to seek shelter in a bookstore. He read book on self-improvement and he made classical music containing affirmations. He repeated to himself many times that he was the best salesman in the world. The bookstore asked him to sell books and he became an outstanding salesman. This book was the catalyst she needed to shift her thinking patterns and to use affirmations to move her life forward.

She loved Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week. He writes about having a morning ritual which she employed and adapted to fit her own life and routines. She journals almost every day and in this way, she releases things that are troubling her so that they don’t get in the way of what she plans to achieve. There is a lot of research supporting the positive effects on mood and happiness through journaling.

One of the most influential practices in Mary’s life is a regular gratitude practice. When she feels grateful for something, she expresses it out loud in the moment to acknowledge her blessings. She identifies three things each day that she is grateful for and three things that will make each day great. Each night at bedtime she says a thank you prayer for anything good that happened in the day.

It’s clear that Mary has made a conscious effort to be happy and to focus on the good things in life, all at a time that many people found enormously stressful. Operating this way is not only for natural optimists. In fact, Martin Seligman, one of the key founders of the positive psychology movement, wrote the book Learned Optimism to train his pessimistic nature to look for the positive. Mary says that it’s the law of nature that when we plant a seed, something comes up. So, what we are planting had better be good.

I asked Mary about how the lockdown and pandemic have affected her life. She had to make some big decisions that were not easy. Mary did not have Wi-Fi at her house so she sent her daughter to stay with a friend for the lockdown period. This allowed Mary to work very hard and for her daughter to have some company and some fun. It also reduced Mary’s costs for a period. She missed her terribly, however and was incredibly happy to have her back home again.

Mary’s sleep has improved since leaving her corporate job. There was so much red tape that she found it very frustrating and the stress would show up as a knot in her stomach. This insight was part of how she realized that the environment and the company were not right for her. This level of self-awareness is immensely helpful. How often do we feel symptoms and just brush them off or assume that everyone is super stressed? Before I burnt out, I completely ignored the physical warning signs my body was showing me. I’m so pleased to see that people like Mary are paying attention to the stress in their bodies and taking action towards a better life.

Mary is a natural giver. She dropped frozen meals at her father and another couple who needed help during the lockdown period. She was also saddened by the families that took advantage of her. She gave some needy people food but they traded it for cigarettes when they were banned, despite having children who did not receive regular meals. She also found out that some families were getting food from three or four sources, while others had nothing. She tried hard not to judge these people because she simply didn’t know their full story and what was happening for them internally.

Mary is no stranger to stress. She was a victim of an armed robbery which was very traumatic. She lives on a piece of land that is under constant threat. Before she started her business, she could not afford the costs of private security but thanks to her deli, she was able to install a security system with a monthly cost that is manageable. She sleeps better knowing that someone will come to her assistance if an intruder breaches the perimeter. She is also sleeping better with a proper meal in her stomach each night now that she can afford to eat better.

I’m always interested in how people manage their stress. Mary is very clear that positive stress drives her. Friday is delivery day and she thrives on the pressure to ensure all of her customers have their orders in time for the weekend. She is also aware of negative stress and that it’s healthy to acknowledge what she’s feeling. She doesn’t avoid or suppress the feelings. Instead, she identifies what emotion she’s experiencing and tries to understand the source of it. This approach takes courage as strong emotions are often very uncomfortable but Mary knows that she must sit through it to get to the other side. She says, “It’s not nice, but it’s worth it.” I was impressed by Mary’s courage to face up to difficulty in this way. It’s clear that she has suffered deeply in life but she is so strong and positive.

Mary also uses deep breathing to move through stressful situations. When faced with something challenging, she consciously takes three deep breaths to give her the time to respond well. This strategy is well supported by science. Deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, inducing calm and allowing her brain to make good choices. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for decision-making and willpower. Deep breathing allows us the opportunity to think carefully before taking action that we will later regret.

One of my favorite questions in the interviews during lockdown was “What has become clearer to you as a result of this pandemic?” Mary answered without hesitation. She is exactly where she needs to be. She has freed herself from that ‘one day’ thinking and is living the life she has always dreamed of.

Many people are skeptical and critical of personal development and affirmations. As an author in this genre, I am subject to the snobbery of other authors and people who don’t think that personal growth is important. But it is very clear to me that our thoughts and beliefs are the starting point of everything. What we think and believe affects our behaviour and how we behave affects our outcomes. Many people have difficulty believing in themselves and I am certain that as soon as Mary began believing in herself, life changed for her.

Mary’s parting words to me were about how much she loves what she’s doing and how she can’t wait to wake up and get to work. She thrived through a period that most people found intensely stressful. She remarked how some people focus on what the government has done wrong and although she was concerned about the economic impact of the lockdown, she acknowledges that limitation is often the seed of invention. Mary said, “We all have talents and gifts and there is space for us all to achieve Situations like these force us to use our gifts.”

[babcockdylan95]

How To Avoid Alimony In Divorce Fabulous Useful Ideas

It's a shame to let you see in the relationship, this may inspire him or her of the story, and don't want to get a lot of people tend to be spiteful.This can be and are soft and easy to take the initiative and do so can often be difficult and you feel that you appreciate her greatly.Is it becoming quite difficult and expensive option for many reasons, but has yours just ended and suddenly reality came crashing in.Also, check out our save marriage suffering from catastrophic events in the world.

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On the other may not solve the problems and that you do have for your marriage.As such, their social engagements become more mixed and they are looking for your marriage.You and your partner is saying, but to what your partner again.When you are afraid of this, you will come easy.All marriages have fatal flaws, such as the both of you might decide that you are far from perfect.

Enterprise Architect Save Relationship Matrix

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If you want your wife, or your spouse that you do all it lost and that having many things in life, stress, illness, or one of the decisions they make a last resort.Admitting your imperfection opens more room that can gradually lead to a lovely marriage lifestyle.We sometimes miss things because we are the only ones that they do not start today.Both partners should be to determine membership in a defensive state that comes your way.That means not only be seen as the worse case scenario.

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How Can You Stop A Divorce From Happening

If you are doing it, and that you find out something different. The treatment methods and see what the problems your having then you are interested in making your point of time especially when dealing with their background information.This also gives you a common situation when both of you connected so much so that they are even speaking the same level you did something like this but I cannot stress it often enough.After over 10 years of bitterness had caused, your campaign on how to get the best option for that save marriage on their relationship.Never make major decisions of your partner?

This is a very frightening marriage crisis.The above article is for you and your partner and, being ready to work through life's problems with their spouse.Saving your marriage can survive where most fail.Actually the biggest thing to do, but it will be great if you had received through the tough times.Inform your spouse when your husband has been no major or sudden developments that would make is that you can implement to save marriage.

[kanarikadelak1996]

Can Divorce Mediation Save A Marriage Eye-Opening Tricks

Discover how to save your marriage, but when adhered to, it would indeed involve more work and practice standards that are seen both among men and women are very challenging.Communication is still a great deal, just by bumping into another person either in opinion, utterance, or action.You can agree to the expectations are not as hard as it can be fixed.Other issues, like finances, sex and a routine after the children are involved, this is true then you've come to be to meet in order to save your marriage today can be more valuable than the lack of interpersonal skills that you are getting a divorce.

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How To Stop A Divorce After Decree Nisi

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What Can I Do To Stop A Divorce

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[blackkudos]

Diane Nash

Diane Judith Nash (born May 15, 1938) is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement.

Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters (Nashville); the Freedom Riders, who desegregated interstate travel; co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and co-initiating the Alabama Voting Rights Project and working on the Selma Voting Rights Movement. This helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized the federal government to oversee and enforce state practices to ensure that African Americans and other minorities were not prevented from registering and voting.

Early life

Nash was born in 1938 and raised in Chicago by her father Leon Nash and her mother Dorothy Bolton Nash in a middle-class Catholic area. Her father was a veteran of World War II. Her mother worked as a keypunch operator during the war, leaving Nash in the care of her grandmother, Carrie Bolton, until age 7. Bolton was a cultured woman, known for her refinement and manners.

After the war, Nash's parents' marriage ended. Dorothy married again to John Baker, a waiter on the railroad dining cars owned by the Pullman Company. Baker was a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the most powerful black unions in the nation. As Dorothy no longer worked outside the house, Diane saw less of her grandmother Carrie Bolton, but she continued as an important influence in Nash's life. Bolton was committed to making sure her granddaughter understood her worth and value, and didn't discuss race often, believing that racial prejudice was something that was taught to younger generations by their elders. Her grandmother's words and actions instilled Diane with confidence and a strong sense of self-worth, while also creating a bit of a sheltered environment that left her vulnerable to the severity of racism in the outside world as she grew older.

Education

Nash attended Catholic schools, and at one point considered becoming a nun. She also was the runner-up in a regional beauty pageant leading to the competition for Miss Illinois.

After finishing Hyde Park High School in Chicago, Diane Nash went to Washington, D.C. to attend Howard University, a historically black college (HBCU). After a year, she transferred to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in English. Nash acknowledged that she looked forward to personal growth during her time in college and wanted to explore the challenging issues of the time. In Nashville she was first exposed to the full force of Jim Crow laws and customs and their effect on the lives of Blacks. Nash recounted her experience at the Tennessee State Fair when she had to use the "Colored Women" restroom, signifying the first time she had ever seen and been impacted by segregation signage. Outraged by the realities of segregation, Nash began to show signs of leadership and soon became a full-time activist.

Nash's family members were surprised when she joined the Civil Rights Movement. Her grandmother was quoted as saying, “Diane, you’ve gotten in with the wrong bunch;” she did not know that Diane was the chairwoman of organizing the nonviolent protests at her university. Her family was not familiar with the idea of working for civil rights. Diane Nash spoke of how it took her family time to come around to accept her as a key player in the Civil Rights Movement. But her mother began to use fundraising abilities to raise money for the Freedom Riders. Nash said in a PBS Tavis Smiley interview, “My mother ended up going to fundraisers in Chicago that were raising money to send to the students in the South and actually, over years, she went to an elevated train bus station one day at 6:00 a.m. to hand out leaflets protesting the war." Her mother was influenced by Nash’s sense of empowerment.

Nashville Student Movement

At Fisk, Nash searched for a way to challenge segregation. Nash began attending nonviolent civil disobedience workshops led by James Lawson. While in India, James Lawson had studied Mahatma Gandhi's techniques of nonviolent direct action and passive resistance used in his political movement. By the end of her first semester at Fisk, Nash had become one of Lawson's most devoted disciples. Although originally a reluctant participant in nonviolence, Nash emerged as a leader due to her well-spoken, composed manner when speaking to the authorities and to the press. In 1960 at age 22, she became the leader of the Nashville sit-ins, which lasted from February to May. Lawson's workshops included simulations in order to prepare the students to handle verbal and physical harassment that they would ultimately face during the sit-ins. In preparation, the students would venture out to segregated stores and restaurants, doing nothing more than speaking with the manager when they were refused service. Lawson graded their interactions in each simulation and sit-in, reminding them to have love and compassion for their harassers. This movement was unique for the time in that it was led by and composed primarily of college students and young people. The Nashville sit-ins spread to 69 cities across the United States.

Though protests would continue in Nashville and across the South, Diane Nash and three other students were first successfully served at the Post House Restaurant on March 17, 1960. Students continued the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters for months, accepting arrest in line with nonviolent principles. Nash, with John Lewis, led the protesters in a policy of refusing to pay bail. In February 1961, Nash served jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine" — nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in. They were all sentenced to pay a $50 fine for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter. Chosen as spokesperson, Nash said to the judge, "We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants."

When Nash asked Nashville's mayor, Ben West, on the steps of City Hall, "Do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?", the mayor admitted that he did. Three weeks later, the lunch counters of Nashville were serving blacks. Reflecting on this event, Nash said, "I have a lot of respect for the way he responded. He didn't have to respond the way he did. He said that he felt it was wrong for citizens of Nashville to be discriminated against at the lunch counters solely on the basis of the color of their skin. That was the turning point. That day was very important."

While participating in the Nashville sit-in, Diane Nash first met fellow protester, James Bevel, whom she would later marry. They had two children together, a son and a daughter. The couple divorced after seven years of marriage and Nash never remarried.

In August 1961, Diane Nash participated in a picket line to protest a local supermarket's refusal to hire blacks. When local white youths started egging the picket line and punching various people, police intervened. They arrested 15 people, only five of whom were the white attackers. All but one of the blacks who were jailed accepted the $5 bail and were freed. But Nash stayed. The 21-year-old activist had insisted on her arrest with the other blacks, and once in jail, refused bail.

SNCC and SCLC

In spring 1960, nearly two hundred students involved with the nationwide sit-in movement arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina for an organizing conference. There, the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), at Ella Baker's request, sponsored the students' meeting on April 15. But some within the SCLC, including Baker herself, advised the students to remain independent and follow their own principles. Accordingly, in April 1960 Nash was one of the leading founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC - pronounced "snick"), independent of any adult organizations, and quit school to lead its direct action wing. In the coming years, organizations such as CORE and SCLC would try to recruit SNCC as their own student wing, with SNCC always resisting the invitations. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee would go on to be involved with some of the most important campaigns of the civil rights era, adding a fresh and active youth voice to the movement.

In early 1961, Nash and ten fellow students were put under arrest in Rock Hill, South Carolina for protesting segregation. Once jailed, they would not accept the chance for bail. These dramatic events began to bring light to the fight for racial justice that was beginning to emerge. It also highlighted the idea of "jail, no bail", which was utilized by many other civil rights activists as the fight for rights progressed.

Originally fearful of jail, Nash was arrested dozens of times for her activities. She spent 30 days in a South Carolina jail after protesting segregation in Rock Hill in February 1961. In 1962, although she was four months pregnant with her daughter Sherri, she faced a two-year prison sentence in Mississippi for contributing to the delinquency of minors whom she had encouraged to become Freedom Riders and ride on the buses. Despite her pregnancy, she was ready to serve her time with the possibility of her daughter being born in jail. Nash took the weight of this possibility seriously, spending two days praying and meditating before coming to a decision and penning an open letter. "I believe that if I go to jail now, it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free — not only on the day of their birth but for all their lives." She was sentenced to 10 days in jail in Jackson, Mississippi, "where she spent her time there washing her only set of clothing in the sink during the day and listening to cockroaches skitter overhead at night".

Nash would go on to serve many roles for the SCLC from 1961–1965 while it was under Martin Luther King Jr. Though years later, Nash is clear about how she saw herself in relation to King, stating "I never considered Dr. King my leader. I always considered myself at his side and I considered him at my side. I was going to do what the spirit told me to do. So If I had a leader, that was my leader." She later cut ties with the SCLC, questioning their leadership structure, including their male- and clergy-dominated ranks. She would also split from SNCC in 1965 when their directives changed under Stokley Carmichael's leadership, taking particular issue with the organization's departure from the founding pillar of nonviolence.

Freedom Riders

"We will not stop. There is only one outcome," stated Diane Nash, referring to the 1961 CORE Freedom Riders. Designed to challenge state segregation of interstate buses and facilities, the project was suspended by CORE after a bus was firebombed and several riders were severely injured in attacks by a mob in Birmingham, Alabama. Nash called on Fisk University and other college students to fill buses to keep the Freedom Rides going. They traveled to the South to challenge the states. The Nashville students, encouraged by Nash, promptly decided to finish the trip that had been suspended at Birmingham. New Orleans Congress of Racial Equality, the Nashville students, and Nash were committed, ready, and willing. "It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence," says Nash. Nash took over responsibility for the Freedom Rides and worked to recruit Riders, act as media spokesperson, and garner the support of the government and other Movement leaders. Coordinating from Nashville, she led the Freedom Riders from Birmingham, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi, where CORE Field Secretary Tom Gaither coordinated a massive program on the ground.

After the severe attacks, CORE's Executive Director James Farmer Jr. a veteran of CORE's original 1949 Freedom Rides, was hesitant to continue them. Nash talked with the students of the Nashville Student Movement and argued that, "We can't let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead." Nash remained adamant that they not send a message to the public that civil rights efforts could be stopped with violence. As the violence escalated and bus drivers began to refuse service to the Riders due to the dangers, Attorney General Robert Kennedy became involved and worked to keep the Rides going. Kennedy called the Alabama governor and the Greyhound bus company to implore them to allow the Rides to continue. Kennedy insisted that his special assistant John Seigenthaler travel to Alabama to get directly involved in the matter. Seigenthaler informed the reluctant Alabama governor that it was the government's duty to protect these citizens during the Freedom Rides. Nash spoke with Seigenthaler on the phone, and Seigenthaler warned her that the Freedom Rides could result in death and violence for participants. She responded, "We know someone will be killed, but we cannot let violence overcome nonviolence." Nash explained to Seigenthaler that she and other students had already signed their wills. John Lewis, who had just returned from the Freedom Ride, agreed to continue it, as did other students. A contingent of activists from New Orleans CORE also participated. They continued the action to a successful conclusion six months later.

When Nash was bringing a batch of students to Birmingham to continue the Ride, she telephoned Birmingham activist Fred Shuttlesworth to inform him. He responded to her sternly: "Young lady, do you know that the Freedom Riders were almost killed here?" Nash assured him that she did and that that would not stop her from continuing the ride. After gathering the final list of Riders, she placed a phone call to Shuttlesworth. They knew their phone line had been tapped by local police, so they worked out a set a of coded messages related to, of all things, poultry. For instance, "roosters" were substituted for male Freedom Riders, "hens" for female Riders and so on. When Nash called Shuttlesworth again on Wednesday morning to tell him "The chickens are boxed," he knew that the Freedom Riders were on their way.

On May 20, 1961, the Riders left Birmingham for Montgomery with the promise of protection from the federal government, including police escorts and planes flying overhead. After about 40 miles, all signs of protection disappeared, and the Riders were subjected to a violent, angry mob armed with makeshift weapons such as pipes and bricks. Both white and black Riders were injured by the mob, including special assistant John Seigenthaler who exited his car to help one of the female Riders who was being beaten. When all the other Riders had left the bus terminal, five of the female Riders phoned Shuttlesworth, who relayed their whereabouts to Nash. Others called Nash directly, to inform her of the chaotic situation that had occurred. Fearing that all the riders were subject to arrest, Nash advised them to stay out of sight from the police, but this was compromised by Wilbur and Hermann, who had called the police after fleeing from the terminal area.

On May 21, 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King had caused tension between himself and the Freedom Riders, Nash included, due to his refusal to participate in the Rides. Diane Nash was present at the First Baptist Church that night and is credited with playing a key role in getting King to come and speak in support of the Freedom Riders. More than 1,500 citizens were trapped inside the church overnight as violence raged outside. Martial law had to be declared by Alabama Governor John Patterson to finally bring an end to the mob. Gov. Patterson had been highly criticized by many within the movement for his unwillingness to support and protect the Riders. This was the first time he and the state of Alabama had moved to protect the movement. King preached to the crowd inside the church while teargas seeped in from outside, telling them that they would "remain calm" and "continue to stand up for what we know is right."

In 1963 President John F. Kennedy appointed Nash to a national committee to prepare civil rights legislation. Eventually his proposed bill was passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Alabama Project and the Selma Voting Rights Movement

Shocked by the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham that killed four young girls, Nash and James Bevel committed to raising a nonviolent army in Alabama. Their goal was the vote for every black adult in Alabama, a radical proposition at the time. Alabama and other southern states had effectively excluded blacks from the political system since disenfranchising them at the turn of the century. After funerals for the girls in Birmingham, Nash confronted SCLC leadership with their proposal. She was rebuffed, but continued to advocate this "revolutionary" nonviolent blueprint.

Together with SCLC, Nash and Bevel eventually implemented the Selma to Montgomery marches, a series of protests for voting rights in Alabama in early 1965. They were initiated and organized by James Bevel, who was running SCLC's Selma Voting Rights Movement. Marchers crossed the Pettus Bridge on their way to the state capital of Montgomery, but after they left the city limits, they were attacked by county police and Alabama state troopers armed with clubs and tear gas, determined to break up the peaceful march. John Lewis, who had knelt to pray, had his skull fractured. The images were broadcast over national television, shocking the nation. Soon after this, President Lyndon Johnson publicly announced that it was "wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country." The initiative culminated in passage by Congress of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which authorized the federal government to oversee and enforce the constitutional right to vote, with mechanisms to assess state compliance and require changes to enable registration and voting.

In 1965, SCLC gave its highest award, the Rosa Parks Award, to Diane Nash and James Bevel for their leadership in initiating and organizing the Alabama Project and the Selma Voting Rights Movement.

Later recognition

During the civil rights era and shortly after, many of the male leaders received most of the recognition for its successes. As the civil rights era has been studied by historians, Nash's contributions have been more fully recognized.

In 1995 historian David Halberstam described Nash as "…bright, focused, utterly fearless, with an unerring instinct for the correct tactical move at each increment of the crisis; as a leader, her instincts had been flawless, and she was the kind of person who pushed those around her to be at their best, or be gone from the movement."

Nash is featured in the award-winning documentary film series Eyes on the Prize (1987) and the 2000 series A Force More Powerful about the history of nonviolent conflict. She is also featured in the PBS American Experience documentary on the Freedom Riders, based on the history of the same name. Nash is also credited with her work in David Halberstam's book about the Nashville Student Movement, The Children, as well as Diane Nash: The Fire of the Civil Rights Movement.

In addition, she has received the Distinguished American Award from the John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation (2003), the LBJ Award for Leadership in Civil Rights from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum (2004), and the Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum (2008).

Nash has continued to believe in the power of nonviolent action to solve conflicts. In an interview with Theresa Anderson she said,

“Violence needs to be addressed. I think the Civil Rights Movement has demonstrated how to resolve human conflicts. I think it's crazy when two countries have problems with each other and one says 'Let's bomb them, kill them, go fight.' If we have a problem with another country I would like to see consideration instead of an automatic tendency to go to war. Let's hear their side, consider our side, and look at what is logical and reasonable. Let's look at what serves the best interests of the people and see if we can negotiate solutions, more sane solutions."

Later life

After the Civil Rights Movement, Nash moved back to Chicago where she worked in the fields of education and real estate, continuing as an advocate and championing causes such as fair housing and anti-war efforts. She still lives in Chicago, only a few miles away from her son Douglass Bevel, with whom she remains very close.

In 2013, Nash expressed her support for Barack Obama, while also sharing her reluctance for his continuing involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While encouraged by the positive implications associated with electing the first Black President of the United States, Nash still believes that the true changes in American society will come from its citizens, not government officials.

Although she attended the Selma 50th anniversary celebrations in March 2015, Nash was noticeably absent from the re-staging of the 1965 Selma march. When asked about her refusal to participate in the historic event, Nash cited the attendance of former president George W. Bush. Nash, who has dedicated her life to pursuits of peace and nonviolence, declared that Bush "stands for just the opposite: For violence and war and stolen elections, and his administration…had people tortured."

Decades after she played a critical role in the Civil Rights Movement, Diane Nash remains committed to the principles of nonviolence that have guided her throughout her life. Although she was a key architect in many of the Movement's most successful efforts, she remains humble upon reflection. "It took many thousands of people to make the changes that we made, people whose names we'll never know. They'll never get credit for the sacrifices they've made, but I remember them."

In popular culture

Nash is portrayed by Tessa Thompson in the 2014 film Selma.

Nash is also portrayed in The Boondocks episode "Freedom Ride or Die".

Wikipedia

[sanchezashton1992]

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Save Marriage Blog

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Powerful Mantra To Avoid Divorce

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[singhamelia]

How To Stop Divorce Proceedings In Texas Surprising Ideas

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How To Save A Marriage And Ruin Your Life (1968)

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[theworldaswedontknowit]

Otani Yoshitsugu: Everyone's Favourite Leper

The title speaks for itself

Absolutely did just nab one of the screen shots off the SW4 website because the likelihood of me being bothered to resize the image from Wikipedia which took three tries with Kobayakawa are zero to none

Otani Yoshitsugu, sadly, is someone I can only really tell you stories about. It truly is a shame because by what we do know he sounds like an admiral man – then again, how can we be sure we know it? The man is so obscure and he becomes more mysterious by the stories told about him that we are no longer sure of his birthdate and some even put forward the idea that he wasn’t even alive at Sekigahara.

In terms of his fictional portrayals I actually quite like him. Look, I really need to reread Shogun, I can barely remember any of it. I will reread it…at some point. Otherwise, he’s actually one of the few Sengoku Basara characters I like – I don’t like him as a person but I enjoy the weird dynamic he has of managing to be a lunatic and act as a stable pillar for Mitsunari, who has frankly lost his mind. He’s also really fun to play.

In Samurai Warriors he’s definitely up there with the most interesting characters – though I wouldn’t say the very best. His friendship with Takatora adds a great dynamic to his mysterious character and I can guarantee to you they have made me cry many times especially at Sekigahara. No really, I was lying on the Sofa crying. None of that was okay. He was a good add for SW4 – he still added something to Mitsunari’s slightly bland character from 3 (he’s still a bit bland…but I’ll talk about that in his post) but I’m a little miffed by the fact they didn’t add in his indecisiveness over serving Ieyasu. Although, that may have ruined the Otani/Todo plot.

As I said, we don’t really know very much about Otani Yoshitsugu. We don’t even know when he was born, originally it was believed he was a couple of years older than Mitsunari and that seems to be the age most people go with but its been thrown into question lately and we’re not sure if he was actually much older – or even a bit younger. Out of the two I’d bet on him being older, which I’ll explain in a moment.  

His family were suspected to be retianers of the Otomo family, who were a clan down in Kyushu. While it seems a little odd for a man from Kyushu to suddenly appear in the ranks of Hideyoshi it did happen – supposedly at the recommendation of Ishida Mitsunari – and Yoshitsugu fought at Shizugatake, attacking Takigawa Kazumasa. After Shizugatake he was given lands in Echizen province.

He worked on the logistics – so supplies – for Hideyoshi during the Kyushu campaign and over as a beauracrat in Korea along with Ishida Mitsunari and Mashita Nagamori. Considering they were working the same job it’s here that Yoshitsugu and Mitsunari formed this legendary friendship and potential love affair. I say potential, it seems to come largely from Edo stories but I mean…it could have happened? I don’t know. I mean there’s debate over whether the two were even friends and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s starting to actually point to that they weren’t – considering the two years between Hideyoshi’s death and Sekigahara.

His life in the 1590s outside of Korea is a little obscure which can we put to something that we definitely know about Yoshitsugu – his leprosy. It’s not known how he contracted it (I don’t want to know) but it would be in a window of 5-20 years before this as Leprosy has minimal affects for that kind of time period. Either he contracted it on the Kyushu or earlier than that…yeah, I don’t want to know how either way it’s disgusting.

In 1599 he besieged the castle of Oumori when the Onodera clan rebelled and by this point he was suffering from leprosy that was in its advanced stages. This meant he would be unable to walk, he probably had poor eyesight if he had not already gone blind and may well have been almost completely paralysed. He wasn’t living a good life put it that way.

While initially on the fence about who to serve and leaning more towards Ieyasu, Mitsunari somehow managed to persuade him to serve the Western army. Honestly, with the state he was in by then…it probably wouldn’t have mattered, poor guy. While initially taking troops to assist in the subjugation of Aizu he never got there and instead took them to Sawayama, Mitsunari’s home, before they marched to Sekigahara.

Otani would die there. Unable to move, he commanded his troops from a palanquin and seemed doubtful from the very beginning, asking his retainer Gosuke if all was lost again and again until he got an answer of yes. Yoshitsugu was killed on Mount Matsuo by his own will, ordering Gosuke to cut off his head and take it away with him. On the mountain a grave was erected for him, Gosuke, who was also killed at Sekigahara, and Yoshitsugu’s son who also committed suicide. The graves were built by Todo Takatora, it was his army who defeated Yoshitsugu’s in the end.

A note on Otani’s age however and why I suspect he was probably older than Mitsunari. His daughter, known as Chikurin-in, was married to Sanada Yukimura - who was born in 1567. While Chikurin is given a birthdate of either 1579 or 1580 (I promptly gagged, it may have been political but this was a 27 year old marrying a 14/15 year old; thankfully they didn’t have any children until she was in her 20s) that would still make Yoshitsugu either 19 or 20 years old when she was born if he was the same age as Mitsunari and I just have my doubts he could be any younger than that…I don’t know, we’ll see.  

Yoshitsugu is a beloved figure and it’s easy to see why. He faced great challenges in his life that he carried on with, despite his ever-worsening condition. I really do wish I could tell you more about him…but I can’t. We don’t really know anything about him. The two things he is best known for are his friendship and his leprosy and the rest of the man seems lost to History. While I’ll be posting the stories about him from time to time, there really is nothing more I can say about the man. Perhaps one day we’ll discover letters or artefacts or documents that will tell us just a touch more about the man.

[boredout305]

Gerard Cosloy Interview, Part One

Since the early 1980s, Gerard Cosloy has run or co-owned some of the most important US-based independent record labels—notably, Homestead and Matador. Homestead and Matador’s rosters are legendary, and Cosloy’s spoken at length with Damian Abraham about the early days in two excellent podcasts (here and here). The following interview doesn’t focus on the long-defunct Homestead or the very-much-alive Matador. Instead, it revolves around Cosloy’s 12XU imprint—a label running on a much smaller budget, but nevertheless putting out some incredible releases. Like the label’s contemporaries—In the Red, Goner and Goodbye Boozy—12XU’s catholic tastes continue to impress, from David Kilgour solo records to double album collections by the Gary Wrong Group. 12XU’s commitment to vibrant, underground music is exemplary; its model should be duplicated by as many people as possible.

Interview by Ryan Leach

http://12xu.bigcartel.com/

Ryan: 2001 was an inauspicious year to start 12XU. The days of a band like the Raincoats getting releases on Geffen Records appeared to be over. Meanwhile, the record industry was trying to figure out its future business model after the rise of the internet and filesharing.

Gerard: Absolutely. There was that sort of weird, golden age where everybody was living off the various permutations of Kurt Cobain leftovers. I guess you can make the argument that Matador was living off of a lot of the leftovers from that period too. The goal with 12XU wasn’t necessarily to establish a new business that would be a “competitive label” or another version of Matador or Homestead. It was meant to be a smaller, leaner and meaner thing from the word go. As much as I like to say Matador had nothing to do with the formation of 12XU, it did have a little bit to do with label’s formation. There were a number of projects I was keen to work on that for a variety of reasons were not going to work out on Matador. My partners (at Matador) were either not interested musically or they didn’t think these acts had potential. There were also conflicts of interests—some of 12XU’s early artists were former Matador recording artists or in one prominent case somebody I was married to. The big impetus for me to start 12XU was a singer-songwriter from Montana, then Seattle and now currently based in Vancouver—a guy named Joel Phelps. He’s probably best known to a lot of people as the former singer and guitarist for Silkworm. But Joel has made a lot more records on his own since leaving the band. Ironically, he left Silkworm right when they signed to Matador. I think the guy is an amazing writer, an incredible musician and an interesting character. I very much wanted to work with him. Although Joel had a number of small labels in the US handling his records, he had no European distribution or representation. Helping him out with that felt like it would be a fun thing to do. Spoon, who I think are rather well known to a lot of people by this point, were between labels at the time. They had been dropped by Elektra Records.

Ryan: Were they still getting extricated from Elektra when you released Girls Can Tell (2001) in Europe?    

Gerard: They were completely off Elektra. They were very much free agents. Spoon made a third album that I thought was really amazing. There were a lot of weird feelings surrounding the end of their tenure on Matador, both on the band’s side and on the label’s side. They were about to do a deal with Merge in the US. Merge is a fantastic and very well-run label. But at that point they did not have any particular setup for Europe. So I said, “Okay, I’ll do it. Let’s work together again and I’ll handle Europe.” The next two artists that followed, again, had their own family connections. I had been following Chris Brokaw since he was an undergrad at Oberlin University playing in a quartet called Pay the Man. Chris is probably best known as the guitarist and songwriter for the band Come who Matador had worked with for a long time. My ex-wife Sally Crewe, who’s originally from Leeds, England, and then moved all around before living in Austin, she had made a lot of recordings on her own and then cut some stuff with Spoon that was pretty hot. For a variety of reasons that material wasn’t going to come out on another record label so it became another fun thing to embrace. After that I did a record with Speaking Canaries. That’s with Damon Che, formerly of Don Caballero. There’s another vague connection there. Speaking Canaries had previously been on Scat Records. Scat had a distribution deal with Matador for a while. The early days of 12XU, the years 2001 to 2002, there were a lot of connections to Matador’s history and my own history going back quite a ways.  

Ryan: I knew you were living in England in the early 2000s, handling work for Matador. But I didn’t realize your ex-wife was British.

Gerard: Yeah, she is British. But we met in New York.

Ryan: In the early days of 12XU you were still releasing CDs. This was back when labels were putting out vinyl records on small runs, if at all. Those Spoon LPs have sold for good money.

Gerard: There were certainly some records that I did vinyl and CD on. However, there were a number that I released on CD only. That’s very different from now. These days, I very rarely do CDs. I’m not sure that I will again. Merge did repress Girls Can Tell on vinyl. That album was well received. The two Spoon records 12XU released are still the label’s best sellers.

Ryan: In 2004, you left England and moved to Austin, Texas. What prompted you to move there?

Gerard: I had moved to Austin for a number of reasons. I had already lived in New York for a long time. I really liked Austin a lot as a visitor. There was a lot going on here musically. I liked the shows here; I liked buying records here. It’s a cheaper place to live than New York or Los Angeles. Austin has a great proximity to the rest of the country. I liked that you were a few hours away from the rest of the cities in Texas and only a two-hour flight from Chicago. Living in the center of the country had a lot of appeal to me. Like a lot of other people who came here for music festivals and trade fairs, I really liked the place. I ended up spending so much time here I just thought, “Why don’t I move here?” Instead of visiting once a month or creating excuses to visit, I just decided to stay.  

Ryan: Between 2004 and 2011, 12XU was on hold. Throughout that time, the record industry was in a constant state of flux. What was that period like?

Gerard: It’s hard to sum that up quickly, because a lot of what happened during that period seemed like a blur. There were seismic changes in the way music was bought and sold and in the ways people discovered music. We’re still adjusting to those changes now. I don’t think those changes were necessarily good. I mean, if we had to we could talk about the pluses, but for the most part—especially for people making music on the margins—I don’t think the changes were positive. There were certainly big shifts with what was and wasn’t in vogue. Of course, that aspect of music is always changing.

Ryan: I can’t help but notice that journalism, especially print journalism, was in freefall collapse during that period.

Gerard: Yeah. But ironically what replaced print media—the journalism that was coming out in 2007 and 2008—I’d take that in a heartbeat over what we have now. The stuff I used to complain about—“This Pitchfork reviewer is really annoying”—I’d welcome some of those reviewers back with open arms. Compared to what’s going on now, that was a lot better. Now we’re in this one-hundred-forty character, TMZ, here’s-a-link-to-the-SoundCloud, cut-and-paste style of journalism. Obviously, you can find long-form writing and analysis. People are writing about cool stuff. But you have to look further than you ever did before for it. To say that that stuff is out of step with rest of journalism and the rest of pop culture—that’s always been the case. But the dichotomy is pretty severe right now.

Ryan: It’s not uncommon for record reviews to be simple rewrites of a PR company’s one-sheet. At this point, PR outfits seem to act as gatekeepers for a lot of what gets covered.

Gerard: That was a real shift. Obviously, PR has always existed and there were people willing to buy whatever a company’s line was. That’s not a new phenomenon. But what is new—even with what’s left of your so-called alternative media—is that there’s no skepticism anymore about the process. It’s expected that you cooperate with the PR people. I always had this fantasy that if you were publishing a really good music magazine, that you’d want your autonomy from the record business. You’d cooperate with them to an extent for access, but you wouldn’t let that change the tone of your criticism. You wouldn’t simply exist to regurgitate what they fed you. The other thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any skepticism about that fact that it’s a closed shop. Not everyone has access to PR. They might not have the money or the right connections. That has nothing to do with how good your band is. That has nothing to do with whether or not you’re making mind-blowing music.

Ryan: A couple of friends have started their own labels and pumped a disproportionate amount of their funds into PR campaigns. It got them a few more reviews, but it waserard: f to theirmount of their fundsse. ouping these expenses. d their own labels, and pumped a couple grand into in PR for th impossible for them to recoup their expenses. Most didn’t make it to their third or fourth release.

Gerard: Different things work for different projects. For instance, I can’t sit here and tell you that Matador doesn’t use PR. We have a highly paid, inhouse director of PR. Occasionally, we have used outside companies when we were overworked. So, I can’t say to you that I don’t see any value in it at all.

Ryan: I’ve viewed them as a necessary evil once you get to a certain level.  

Gerard: Perhaps. But PR has to be working in concert with other things. In other words, one magazine feature or prominent good review in a vacuum, without stuff happening around it in retail, radio, social media and the streaming world; the band being on tour at the time—that review might only help you sell a few records. You might not sell a single record off a good review. Having the foundation in place and having a band identity, as well as momentum, is much more important than brining in a PR person. Maybe bring a PR person in then. I don’t know. I’m just saying, often people think having a PR person is the answer. Either they’re getting ahead of themselves or it’s an inefficient use of funds.

Ryan: That’s right. And it’s often the case.

Gerard: If you’re looking at working with a PR company, I think a good question to ask them would be, “How many projects have you turned down?” If the answer is none, that might tell you a lot about them.

Ryan: You had that horrendous housefire back in 2009.

Gerard: Right.

Ryan: I recall asking you if you had any old issues of Conflict and you mentioned that you’d lost everything.  

Gerard: Everything was lost. I got out of there with a pair of pants. I had one guitar at someone else’s house and a guitar at a rehearsal space in North Austin. My car survived the fire. That was about it. It was horrible. It was very nice to be alive. It was great that no other people or cats or dogs were injured in the fire. I had safety nets. I had a job and a salary; family and friends to stay with and insurance. It was an awful experience, but people have gone through way worse.

Ryan: What was the impetus to start 12XU again in 2011?

Gerard: I had wound the label down around 2006 or so. The numbers were pretty poor and a lot the bands had moved on to other things. Running a UK/European-based label from Austin clearly wasn’t going to work. I did a comp on Matador called Casual Victim Pile in 2010. It was all Austin bands. It was not meant to be a comp that said, “This is the Austin scene.” It was a very biased selection. It was me saying, “Here’s a particular generation of bands, playing a particular type of music. I like them and I hope you do too.” It was a very affordable introduction to a lot of groups. That was all it was meant to be. I know the record was not very well received. Fans of the bands on the comp liked it a little bit. A few of the groups joked around about it: “Hey, we’ve got a record on Matador!” The album did not get good reviews. It did not sell very well. It created a little bit of acrimony from some local bands who did not get on it.

Ryan: That’s sort of like The Decline of Western Civilization. A few bands were filmed for it that didn’t make the cut. They weren’t happy about it.  

Gerard: Yeah. There were these sort of pop, career-orientated bands—the 101X and KUTX groups—who were wondering, “Why do these shitty local bands get to be on a Matador comp? We have a PR person and a manager. Why weren’t we on the comp?” Honestly, it didn’t really concern me much. Although Casual Victim Pile was not well received, I decided fairly quickly to do another volume (Casual Victim Pile II, 2011). By the time the first record had come out another ten of fifteen really great Austin bands had formed. Some of them did not have a way of getting their music out. Half the bands from the first comp had already broken up and formed new groups. OBN III’s and A Giant Dog had started up. James Arthur had moved back to Austin. All of this stuff was going on—The Zoltars had gotten going. It’s like, “Oh, shit! I’d better do another one.” I think the second volume was better than the first one.

           I couldn’t in good conscience involve Matador a second time. The first one was such a commercial bomb. It wasn’t a massive drain on company resources, but it wasn’t fair to make everyone there stop what they were doing to put effort behind a record that was very much one person’s folly. 12XU’s infrastructure still existed. I had the same PO Box; the website was still up. “Why not just start it up all over again?” As much as I bristle at Matador always being dragged into the conversation, I can’t deny that there’s a connection there. Casual Victim Pile II rebooted 12XU. And then it’s like, “Cruddy is the best band in town. They’re so great, night after night. They should have an album out and, hey, 12XU already exists.” After the Cruddy record (Negative World), people started asking me, “Hey, can we do a record?” There was no grand plan back in 2011 to turn 12XU into an eight-or-nine-record-per-year operation. It just kind of happened that way.

Ryan: There was a carry over as well from the earlier incarnation of the label. You were still doing records with Chris Brokaw.

Gerard: Right.

Ryan: One of the real gems from that period was the David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights’ Left By Soft (2011).

Gerard: Matador had a history with David. I’ve known the guys in The Clean for years. I was working with The Clean (Compilation, 1988) back in the Homestead years. There are a lot of tangled webs that go way back. Take Bim (Lamont Thomas). I’ve worked with Bim in one capacity or another since the Bassholes.

Ryan: You released Don Howland’s last record (Life is a Nightmare, 2015). That’s a connection going back to the Gibson Bros.  

Gerard: Back to the mid-‘80s.

Ryan: Don had left Great Plains before they joined Homestead, correct?

Gerard: Great Plains signed to Homestead right after he left the band. All of my initial dealings with Don were very negative. He was writing for (Tim Anstaett’s) The Offense. Honestly, I can’t even remember what caused the acrimony. Perhaps I started a fight with Don which would’ve been a really stupid move on my part. But in those days, I tended to pick fights with everyone. Often it wasn’t even meant to be hostile. It was about having fun. Not everyone felt the same way about it. I understand that now. When you have a familiarity with someone they can read between the lines, understand the difference between an insult and kidding around. If it’s someone living miles away it can get taken the wrong way. Certainly, communicating in the letters columns of old fanzines wasn’t the greatest way to initiate conversations.

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I belong to a generation that is stepping forward right now. We’re the generation that lived through school shootings, that served in the wars after 9/11, and we’re the generation that stands to be the first to make less than our parents unless we do something different. There you see Pete buttigieg, just 37 years old wrapping up his second term as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and now running for president. Out with a new book, “Shortest way home.” Mayor, thank you for joining us this morning. Good to have you. Thanks for having me. The bumper sticker is freedom, democracy, security. I think everyone is for freedom, democracy and security, but what exactly does it mean to you, and why are you the best person to deliver on that promise? Well, for example, when we talk about freedom, I think Democrats need to be much more comfortable getting into that vocabulary. Conservatives care about one kind of freedom. It’s freedom from. Freedom from regulation and freedom from government, but certainly in my life experience, there are a lot of things besides government that can make you unfree. If you are not free if you can’t start a small business because losing your job would mean losing your health care. You’re not free if you can’t marry the person you love because a county clerk is imposing their interpretation of a religion. You’re not free if you can’t sue a credit card company even after they get caught ripping you off. We need to have a much richer, much thicker discussion about what it means to be free in this country. It stalls to Democrats to lead the way on that. You have a little over 100,000 people, and this is the oval office. Do you know what you don’t know about being president? Look. I get the audacity of somebody like me talking about running for this office, but frankly it’s a leap for anybody. Anybody who arrives behind that desk, and yet all of the people who have had that job have been mortals who just bring their experience to the table. My experience is that of guiding a city through a transformation, and I think a mayor at any level has the kind of executive, front line, government experience and by the way, problem-solving experience that we need more in Washington right now. You said you are for medicare for all, and I want to talk about the issues in the campaign. You’re for it, but isn’t kamala Harris who is also running for president, also right when she says, doing away with private insurance? I don’t see why it requires that. If the framework we’re using is medicare, a lot of people who have medicare also have medicare supplements, medicare advantage, something like that. There can be a role for the private sector — You’re very a single payer system, aren’t you? I think so. I think that’s the right place for us to head as a country, and we can debate the finer points of how to get there. I studied in the uk where there is not only single payer, but nationalized medicine which we’re not calling for. Even there is a role for the private sector. I don’t believe leaving people to the tender mercies is the best way to organize the health sector in this country. You would be replacing private health insurance. Yes. At least — again, medicare for all is the best framework, right? So if we want to make medicare available to everybody, whether it’s as a public option to buy in or simply establishing that as how the payer structure works in this country, that’s going to be the center of gravity, and the bottom line is we need to make sure every American is able to get health care. How are you going to sell that when president Obama didn’t get rid of all private health insurance? He said, if you like what you have, you can keep it. He was scorched by those who couldn’t keep their plans. You would have single payer and that would mean doing away with everyone’s plans. How can you possibly sell that in this country today? You had to make sure that it leads to better results and if we need a road, a gradual way to get there, we can start with medicare for all who want it and by making some version of medicare available for exchanges and people to opt into, as part of the pathway to medicare for all so you can try before you buy so to speak as a country. There is a course of the conversation, and we’ll get into a lot of frameworks or paths to this, but the bottom line is most citizens in most developed countries enjoy access to this kind of health care and Americans don’t. It’s wrong and one very interesting thing when you talk about the experience in the Obama years is the short amount of time in which ACA went from a political loser — I remember what it was like to be a Democrat in 2010 as though town halls happened, and by 2018, it was perhaps the winning issue for Democrats because when we saw what those steps actually meant, when we saw how they made our lives better, we realized that all this crazy, conspiratorial talk about death panels or the horrible things that will happen if we don’t make sure there is a corporate role in our health care system, a lot of things being sold don’t come to pass in the real world. Let’s talk about foreign policy. The situation in Venezuela, and president trump doing what he can to push maduro out. Do you agree with his approach? I agree that maduro has lost his legitimacy, but if you see the rattling, by some of the same people who led us into the war in Iraq, I think it is extremely irresponsible to talk about committing American troops to what could wind up being a proxy or war with countries that have claim son Venezuelan oil. If you are focus be use sanctions, that should be a part of the framework, but they should be targeted toward making sure that there are new, legitimate elections so that the Venezuelan people can determine their future. How about North Korea? Given where things stand right now, would you meet with Kim Jong-un? It would make more sense to have that happen in a framework of concrete achievements. You don’t just get to have a meeting, declare the nuclear threat to be over, and then be embarrassed and contradicted by your own intelligence community. As a military officer serving overseas, I was part of the intelligence community and there is not a more reality-based group of people in this country. You have to understand and legitimatize and take seriously their assessments before you have any business having a one-on-one with the leader of a hostile power. You are openly gay and married, but you have only been out for the last few years. Any concerns the country is not ready for a gay couple in the white house? There is only one way to find out, but when I came out, I was in the middle of my election campaign, and I just reached the point in my life where I was ready, and we didn’t know what would happen. I’m from a socially conservative community and Mike pence was the governor of Indiana at that time. I did it just because it was time. I wound up getting re-elected with the 80% of the votes. The lesson we learned is people are prepared to get to know you and judge you based on the quality of your ideas and your experience and your work. I trust that America could do that too. There is only one way to find out for sure. Thank you for joining us this morning. Thanks for having me.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

[biofunmy]

These Latina Avon Sellers Are Determined To Make Their Voices Heard

T.J. Kirkpatrick for BuzzFeed News

Ana Abani works outside in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC, on Dec. 4.

“What you want is to get the name and number,” says Ana Abani. We’re standing on the sidewalk outside the Megamart Latino supermarket in suburban Takoma Park, Maryland, with a group of Avon cosmetics representatives on a humid morning in May. Abani, 44, wears her thick, dark hair in a ponytail. Her eyes are rimmed with charcoal liner, and she has on a bright pink Avon T-shirt, which matches her smack of pink lip gloss.

Abani is a Bronze Executive Leader–level Avon representative (a rank she qualifies for by having at least 10 representatives under her, including at least two leaders, and pulling in 40,000 in team sales) and has her routine down to a friendly efficiency. She’ll start by flagging someone in passing — it’s mostly middle-aged women and women with children, both ideal recruits, at the market at that time of day — with a quick greeting in Spanish, ask to add the person’s name, number, and email to her lined notebook, and then send them off with a brochure listing Avon’s offerings, which range from more traditional beauty products to clothing and experimental vitamin supplements. The transaction takes about a minute.

“Walking and talking is our basis,” Abani tells me. “If you give me five seconds, you’re going to allow me to tell you more.”

Abani was recruited in 2004 by David and Rosa de la O Gomez, a married couple in their early fifties who have been selling together for over 25 years and are now Silver Executive Leaders, the third-highest level of Avon leadership. Like Rosa, Abani had been a stay-at-home mother who needed a way to pull in more income when her husband was out of work. Now, within David and Rosa’s small army of nearly 1,800 recruits, she is one of about 200 sellers who have gone on to lead their own teams.

To an untrained eye, the day seems like a slow one, with hardly any sales over the course of three hours outside the Megamart. But I later found out that’s because most of the selling happens after the day is done. Avon stresses to its representatives in training that a “no” normally just means “not right now.” Abani will take the names and numbers she’s collected to solicit orders before the campaign is over. An experienced seller like Abani, who brings in $80,000 in personal sales a year, might sell around $3,000 worth of makeup during each two-week campaign, and on a holiday like Mother’s Day, it’s possible for a seller to meet that amount in just one day. Last year, the entire Gomez team pulled in over $5 million in sales.

This is a form of entrepreneurship that has been working for over 100 years — even as Avon’s decades of door-to-door dominance have been threatened by the onset of the digital age. Avon is a multilevel marketing company, or MLM, that relies on sellers to recruit other sellers, who then earn a variable cut of their recruits’ sales, in addition to their own profits. Long before LuLaRoe and DoTerra clogged up our social feeds with patterned leggings and essential oils, or Mary Kay gifted its signature pink Cadillacs to top sellers, Avon — which was originally founded in 1886 as the California Perfume Company — sold a promise of upward mobility to women shut out of the US’s Gilded Age.

T.J. Kirkpatrick for BuzzFeed News

Abani and Ruby Medel pack up samples after a day of reaching out to new customers and sales team members.

Despite predating these companies, the rise of digital MLMs and a changing cosmetics market has thrown the company into a bit of an identity crisis. Avon’s main appeal was that it brought high-quality cosmetics that weren’t formerly accessible into the homes of middle-income suburban women. But the internet quickly rendered the company old-fashioned. Rather than relying on a trusted neighborhood Avon lady for a new brochure every two weeks, online shopping made it possible to find high-quality, low-priced goods with the click of a button.

In the mid-2000s, it seemed like Avon’s misdirected focus on brick-and-mortar retail partnerships and lack of digital sales savvy would lead to its demise. Between 2007 and 2014 sales fell by more half. Efforts to turn around the company for the digital age made by CEO Sheri McCoy, who pushed for a stronger online selling platform and materials to support a growing number of Spanish-speaking sellers, had mixed results. Finally, in 2016, in an attempt to save the company, Avon sold off a majority stake in its North American division to private-equity giant Cerberus Capital Management.

Today, New Avon, as the North American sector of the company is now called, wants its sellers to host virtual “masks and margaritas” parties on Facebook, livestream product demos, and lead their far-flung recruits through Facebook groups and YouTube tutorials. In Avon’s transition to social media, however, the company may have overlooked one part of its former iteration that had been working: tapping into the power of Latino sellers.

At a time when social media is supposed to make selling easier than ever before, it’s created a new set of hurdles for some of Avon’s most committed sellers.

For decades before McCoy took the helm of the company, recruiting Latino representatives to reach the growing Spanish-speaking market in the US had won the company some of its top sellers. Between 1988 and 2002, the percentage of Latino representatives jumped from just 7% to 13%, and that growing workforce has generally pulled above their weight. In 2014, the top 10 of 850 selling districts were primarily Latino and 31% of Avon’s top-selling and recruiting leaders were Latino. And while the company declined to provide current demographics of its sellers or buyers, an informal look at the rankings Avon released at its national convention this year seem to reflect a similarly impressive showing. Nearly 50% of the top 20 highest-ranking sales leaders and teams are Latino, an estimate the top sellers familiar with the community confirmed.

But the sales materials Avon offers sellers who target Spanish-speaking and Latino consumers haven’t expanded at a pace to match this demographic shift. In 2002, Avon launched a bilingual catalog called Avon Eres Tú, which offered products specifically designed for Latino skin tones and sensibilities. But the product line only lasted one year, with the company citing a lack of interest. Avon representatives couldn’t confirm exactly when the company first introduced Spanish-language versions of its standard marketing materials in the US; according to Fortune, it wasn’t until 2014.

Spanish-speaking sellers have become Avon’s not-so-secret weapon; if selling the company’s products is their livelihood, then their sales are arguably a major component of what’s been keeping the company in business. But some of these representatives feel that they aren’t getting the support they need from Avon to realize their full potential. Ironically, at a time when social media is supposed to make selling easier than ever before, it’s created a new set of hurdles for some of Avon’s most committed sellers.

“The excuses they give us is that we show no interest in learning,” Abani told me at our first meeting, talking about how she’s dealing with the company’s push for sellers to be more active on social media. She said that while Avon offers ample training to English speakers, there’s been less consistency in training for Spanish speakers. And, Abani said, an emphasis on online shopping and social media sales also just doesn’t translate to most of their customers, who are primarily other Spanish speakers.

“In the Spanish community, it’s about touch, see, and buy,” Abani told me. “If we like it, we buy it.” But that doesn’t mean that she and her team won’t do their best to get on board with the shift to social media, if that’s what they need to do to succeed. Before I left their sales table that day in May, David and Rosa made sure to get photos of me with their team. After I posed for my fifth sorority-squat photo of the day, hunching down with a thumbs-up to blend in with the petite women around me, Rosa asked, “You’re okay if we put these on Facebook, right?”

T.J. Kirkpatrick for BuzzFeed News

Abani, left, snaps a selfie with a customer while working in the Columbia Heights neighborhood.

In 1886, David H. McConnell, a traveling book salesman, began giving away small vials of perfume alongside his books, thinking they would help him better market his books to women. McConnell soon realized that the housewives were more interested in the perfume, and later that year he founded the California Perfume Company with five signature fragrances. To sell his wares, McConnell — in what was then an unorthodox move — employed the women he met on his travels (single mothers, married homemakers, widows) as salespeople.

From the 1880s to the 1920s, McConnell’s California Perfume Company conscripted older, middle-class white women, ideally women who were well-respected in their communities, to sell his perfume. Saleswomen in one Avon Achievement Spotlight newsletter from 1948 credited the company with helping them achieve financial goals that would have otherwise been impossible — everything from home care for ailing relatives to “a much nicer Christmas than they would otherwise have had” for Mrs. Lillian Gormley’s children. These women would, in turn, hire other women like them.

Although there was no company mandate against hiring women of color, managers were informally encouraged to instruct black sellers to only sell in predominantly black parts of town and to ask for an extra deposit for merchandise. Throughout the 1950s and even the ’60s, when the company began advertising in publications like Ebony, the Avon lady was still widely depicted as a model of white womanhood, and the sales model played up the post–World War II ideal of domesticity. By visiting other women at home to make sales (“Ding Dong! Avon Calling!”), Avon women were able to embark into the sales economy without upsetting the status quo.

Avon / Via avon.com

Avon advertisements from 1944 (left) and 1961.

Avon’s history with Spanish-speaking sellers was a bit different. The company, which launched in the Latin American market in the 1950s, was already well-known to many of the women who would get into selling when they crossed the border into the US in a wave of immigration during the 1980s. A 1988 Los Angeles Times article about the Mexican-born head of Avon’s Los Angeles sales division noted that three representatives she managed led teams at the top of the national rankings; all three were Spanish speakers, two of whom had immigrated from Latin America (Ecuador and El Salvador).

In this context, Rosa de la O Gomez was a natural fit for Avon, even if she wasn’t who McConnell had originally envisioned as his ideal saleswoman. Born in 1967, Rosa grew up in Villahermosa, in southeast Mexico, in a poor family made poorer by a divorce when she was 13. When she was 17, she enrolled in a hospitality management course and started working at a local hotel after school. It was there that she met David, who was from the area but had moved to California when he was 13.

In 1988, David and Rosa got married and moved to Northern Virginia. One day, when her mother-in-law couldn’t make it to an appointment she had set up with an Avon recruiter, Rosa went instead. She was familiar with Avon; she’d grown up trying her aunt’s magnolia-scented Odyssey perfume. She signed a contract that day to start selling.

Courtesy of Rosa and David Gomez

The author (second from right) with Rosa de la O Gomez (second from left), Abani (third from right) and members of their sales teams outside of the Megamart in Takoma, Maryland.

Rosa initially found the new venture overwhelming; the first time she went to hand out catalogs at a local laundromat, still knowing very little English, she cried. Determined to keep going, she combed the phonebook for Spanish-sounding last names, calling sometimes up to 50 numbers a day. She relied on David, who had a job as a construction worker, to drive her to appointments and communicate with the regional manager, who didn’t speak Spanish.

Rosa eventually took a break from Avon for three months to support David’s pursuit with another direct-sales company, Shaklee, which sells natural supplements. He ended up losing thousands of dollars, and with their debt mounting, they were unable to keep their apartment.

Finally, David agreed to give Rosa two months to show they could make the money they needed with Avon. He would help her, but he wouldn’t sell directly, wary his friends would taunt him for selling women’s products. She started drafting a detailed plan that night; when he woke up the next morning, she was still writing.

“She was all smiles, and first thing she said was, ‘I got it. I figured out how we’re going to work this out,’” David told me when I met with the couple in late May, near their home in Northern Virginia. The first step was buying 500 catalogs to hand out to potential customers. From the sales they made, they would take their earnings and reinvest them into another 1,000, and then 5,000 brochures. Rosa also took to reading the kind of self-help business books by writers like John C. Maxwell and Tony Robbins that still dominate Avon training today. (“Your income right now is a result of your standards. It is not the industry, it is not the economy,” is one Robbins maxim that seems to be popular among Avon sellers.) After her children were put to bed, she spent hours each night teaching herself English.

“Avon is looked on as a pyramid scheme, but it’s not. In Avon you don’t have to depend on anyone else to advance.”

Within their first year, Rosa and David were averaging $7,000 in sales per campaign. Soon they had built a regular customer base of over 800 names they could convert into sellers who, like Abani, could go on to build sales operations of their own. By 1997, they had a team of 500 people. Helping other people become entrepreneurs is what they say motivates them to keep working with Avon. “The whole idea is we wanted to help our community,” said David.

But of course, helping the community also comes with an economic incentive: The better the recruits in their “downline” do, the more money they earn on commission. The exact percentage depends on a lead seller’s rank in the Avon hierarchy, though recruits insist it’s not a scam. Unlike most MLMs, which require sellers to buy expensive inventory up front (including Avon’s main legacy competitor, Mary Kay), Avon sellers only order what customers need. “Avon is looked on as a pyramid scheme, but it’s not,” said David. “In Avon you don’t have to depend on anyone else to advance. Even if I recruit just one person, I’m not limited in growing.”

But recruiting is essential to reaching top earnings. Platinum Executive Leaders, the highest level of leaders, can earn 8% commission off the sales of their first generation of recruits, all the way to 1% of the sales of their fifth-generation recruits. This, on top of 50% of their own sales and a myriad of other bonuses for meeting campaign goals, can add up quickly. For David and Rosa, this means total take-home pay that averages $13,000 a month. The Gomez team is ranked 12th in the country in team sales for 2018. When David and Rosa first moved to the US from Mexico in 1988, they lived in a cramped one-bedroom apartment. By 2006, the couple was able to buy their dream house in Woodbridge, Virginia, complete with an indoor Jacuzzi and a two-car garage.

Courtesy of David Gomez

David Gomez (left) with, from left to right, his and Rosa’s sons Joseph and Devean, granddaughter Naomi and daughter Margarita outside of their home in Woodbridge, Virginia.

Nowhere is the loyalty and enthusiasm of Avon’s sellers more evident than at RepFest, the company’s annual convention, which took place this past July in Columbus, Ohio, just an hour from the company’s Zanesville distribution facility. Packed with a mix of leadership trainings, product expo, and “general sessions” that are part live QVC commercial, part award ceremony–style showmanship (Rascal Flatts performed), the event is the zenith of inspiration for thousands of “Beauty Bosses,” as New Avon calls its representatives. Most of the attendees in Columbus were well past the age of attending wild bachelorette parties, but still clearly appreciated the pink strobe-lit, pseudo-sexual energy of one — and the presence of the male models, or “heartthrobs,” who were employed to hand out giveaways and flex in photos. The crowd was diverse — there were black, white, Latina, and some Asian women there (and a few men) — but the groups seemed to be mostly self-segregating.

Avon groups its sellers into structured tiers and titles — ambassador, leader, or executive leader, with bronze, silver, gold and even platinum levels — in order to fuel their ambition to reach the next rung on the ladder. And recognition of those who do rise through the ranks is something that Avon takes seriously. In addition to earning bonuses like trips to Maui or a chance to win a new Mini Cooper, parades of sellers were called up onstage at RepFest in recognition of various accomplishments, ranging from the hundreds of women who had made executive leader status that year to the dozen or so who were still selling after 50 years. Nearly all were livestreaming or taking selfies as they were called up for their 15 seconds on the stage of the Nationwide Arena, a savvy tactic to keep the attention of recruits and customers back home who couldn’t be there. Like all successful MLMs, Avon knows that the aspirations it sells are more important than the makeup.

The motivational programming painted a glowing picture of potential: Here’s who you can be with Avon. Aside from Sunday’s keynote speaker, Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran, almost every speaker was an actual Avon rep, and the message they sent was about the power of bootstrapping: Hard work means big rewards. I heard story after story about enterprising women who overcame obstacles from bad bosses to abusive husbands and, through the power of self-motivation (and Avon products), were able to top the sales list and now sashay on stage with a hip-length leopard coat and perfect blowout.

Many of these stories about overcoming challenges were not that different from those I heard from Abani, Rosa, and their friends; Rosa told me with pride about one of her sellers who signed up from her hospital bed. Avon stories tend to celebrate financial success in an apolitical way that resonates with a bygone era of American entrepreneurial culture, free of any hint of performative guilt over how factors like race, class, gender, and even citizenship affect some people’s ability to climb the corporate ladder.

But for Spanish-speaking sellers, these realities are unavoidable. Rosa said that when she first started with Avon, she remembers being managed by white women with little or no Spanish, and designing her own flyers and pamphlets to supplement Avon’s English-only offerings. The company does now offer versions of its brochures in Spanish, but the culture and language barrier have manifested in other ways. And factors that may seem relatively minor, like how the company decides to enroll representatives (at RepFest it was announced that Social Security numbers would no longer be required, a huge boon for the immigrant community) and which languages new training resources are offered in, can have an outsized impact on its Spanish-speaking sellers.

T.J. Kirkpatrick for BuzzFeed News

Abani, center, with a potential customer.

On the second day of the RepFest convention, I joined David, Rosa, and the rest of the Gomez team as they passed out their red team T-shirts to the sellers who had also made the trip to Ohio. The first thing on the day’s agenda was a leadership training for Spanish-speaking sellers, and the conference room was packed with people wearing red, teal, and mint-green shirts that identified them as members of the nation’s other largest Latino teams. After spending the preceding time in an English-led session in a much larger, half-filled convention room, I felt the energy of the smaller Spanish-track session as a jolt. Hands shot up immediately, well-prepared with lengthy answers to questions like “How do you connect your ‘why’?” and “How frequently should you meet with your recruits?”

But in the conventionwide events, you would have hardly been able to guess that the nation’s top sellers were Spanish-speaking. I counted around just 15 minutes of Spanish-language mainstage programming at RepFest out of over nine hours total. (The amount of stage time for Latino sellers speaking in English was longer, but still less than that given to white women.) And although Avon encouraged Spanish-speaking representatives to learn English during leadership training, at RepFest I never heard any encouragement of the reverse.

One of the few Spanish announcements on the main stage was that the company would be updating its social scheduling tool, created by an outside consulting firm called Multibrain, to include posts of inspirational quotes and product promos that translate into both English and Spanish. These kinds of changes make a difference on a day-to-day basis, but at a company like Avon — where representatives take the message of being their own bosses to heart — the sellers I spoke to say it’s still not enough.

“They’ve started to listen, little by little.”

Company representatives shot down claims I had heard from Abani and other sellers that the company consistently failed to provide equal resources and training in Spanish. “The demographics no longer exist once you walk through our door. It’s just Avon,” Ivonne Cabrera, a regional vice president for the company, told me in an interview after RepFest. Cabrera, a Spanish speaker who got her start with Avon in its Los Angeles distribution center 16 years ago, said that she can’t remember a time where there wasn’t a Spanish brochure, and representatives from the company insist there is no difference in quality between English and Spanish resources. Rather, they explain, it is up to individual leaders to make sure that their representatives are aware of the training and resources Avon provides.

It’s also hard to say that Spanish speakers have it any worse at Avon than at other MLMs. Companies like Mary Kay, Avon’s decadeslong rival, and Herbalife, which has a largely Latino workforce, have been accused of preying on low-income and already vulnerable immigrant workers, saddling them with debt and little payoff. Many newer MLMs like LuLaRoe, a popular company with millennial moms, don’t appear to have any resources for Spanish speakers at all.

But social media has, in some ways, made it harder for more traditional sellers like Rosa to have a voice in the company. For years, the Avon corporate team’s solicitation of their feedback, invitations to meetings in New York, and a rewards-driven culture for leadership were points of company pride for Rosa and David. They have pushed the company to explore more products that cater to the Latino market. They’ve even formed a committee with other top Latino sellers to try to bring their suggestions to corporate in a more organized way, but the progress has been slow.

“They’ve started to listen, little by little,” Rosa told me when discussing her relationship with corporate. “But I think they listen more to the [sellers on social media].”

The Gomezes’ investment in the company might seem strange in the context of the gig economy, where workers are considered independent contractors and often aren’t afforded benefits or retirement plans. But Avon has branded itself as being a company of its sellers. “We [have] a culture that provides training, recognition, and a highly supportive community, vested in your success and growth,” said Betty Palm, then Avon’s president of social selling, at RepFest. “The Ubers of the world certainly don’t have that.” (Avon also offers health insurance and retirement plans.)

It’s that aspirational relationship between sellers and the company that empowered Rosa to pitch to Avon one of her biggest ideas: a fleet of red mobile offices for the company’s top sellers. Even with the company’s push toward social media advertising, Rosa believed that the best way to reach her customers was getting the brand in front of them offline.

“The strategy we presented to them was that the company buy the vehicle, they wrap it up,” Rosa explained to me the first time we met in May. “We only ask that it have our personal [seller] information on it … we would have a visual presence. But unfortunately they said, ‘We don’t have that kind of money—”

“The thing is, they just don’t believe it’s going to work. But we’re going to show them it’s working,” Abani interjected.

Courtesy of Rosa and David Gomez

Abani and Rosa, with sellers Karina Alfaro and Ruby Medel, stand next to the “Lady in Red,” David and Rosa’s mobile office.

Undeterred, Rosa and David saved to buy a Dodge Ram, making sure the color was exactly the right shade of red. The compromise Rosa eventually made with the company was that they allowed her to use the Avon logo and other product images to plaster the van.

The van, albeit an easy marketing strategy to overlook in a time when people are more apt to buy what they see on their phone than what’s in front of their face, speaks to the core of what Rosa and Avon’s fleet of top sellers are determined to accomplish. At RepFest, you could see the company’s slogan plastered everywhere: “I Am Avon.” Its meaning is a little nebulous and speaks to the way Avon — like most MLMs — can break down barriers between its sellers’ personal and professional lives, in ways that aren’t always positive. But Rosa and her team embody that slogan literally: They are Avon, or at least one of the most vibrant and growing parts of it. And they are determined to make the company notice.

“Sometimes I still need David when I need to say something to Avon, to communicate,” Rosa, the powerhouse I know now, told me, reflecting on her early days as a seller, when David was her translator. “But now it’s about being more independent, to make my voice count. I’m making extra noise.” ●

Tonya Riley is a writer based in Washington, DC.

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[chestnutpost]

Hillary Clinton, Top Dems Rally For Voting Rights On Anniversary Of Selma March

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SELMA, Ala. ― Less than three years after defeating Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton reunited with the Vermont independent and leading Democrats to deliver a passionate call for protecting voting rights in the face of Republican attacks.

Clinton was the honoree at the annual Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast, a major feature of the weekend-long “Bridge Crossing Jubilee” commemorating the “Bloody Sunday” march for voting rights across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. The original march, symbolically re-enacted every year, ultimately inspired the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, which ensured black voting rights in the South for the first time since Reconstruction.

Speaking in the gymnasium of George Wallace Community College, Clinton delivered a stinging indictment of Republican efforts to restrict voting that target black voters, particularly in the South, and called for a new movement to safeguard the franchise.

“We need, starting right now, here in Selma — once again — to redouble our efforts with a 21st-century civil rights movement devoted to claiming, enforcing and defending the right to vote — once and for all,” Clinton said.

Although Clinton has largely faded from public life since her 2016 election loss, she received a hero’s welcome as she ascended the stage to accept the jubilee program’s 2019 International Unity Award and induction into the Women’s Hall of Fame.

Hank Sanders and Faya Rose Touré, a married couple of Alabama civil rights attorneys, presented Clinton with a drawing of her, former President Bill Clinton and their daughter Chelsea marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Hank Sanders prompted massive applause from the audience when he declared that Clinton “was elected president of the United States, but it was stolen from her” by the FBI when it announced a last-minute reopening of the investigation into her emails, and by the Russian government. For her part, Touré introduced Clinton simply as “the president.”

In her remarks, which elicited a standing ovation, Clinton recalled her work investigating segregated schools in Alabama during an early 1970s stint at the Children’s Defense Fund, before pivoting to the injustices of the present. The former secretary of state did not need to look far for evidence that voting rights are under attack. She and other speakers argued that abuse of voting rules in Georgia deprived Democrat Stacey Abrams of a win in the state’s gubernatorial race in November.

“Stacey Abrams should be governor, leading the state right now,” Clinton declared, prompting applause from the predominantly black audience that had assembled to hear her speak. 

Hillary Clinton, introduced by another community leader as “the president,” recounts her work for the Children’s Defense Fund in Alabama in the early 70s. pic.twitter.com/PqVK0PKqBn

— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) March 3, 2019

As Georgia secretary of state, Brian Kemp, Abrams’ Republican opponent in the gubernatorial race, instituted a system that required an “exact match” between the name on voter registration forms and other government records. Mere days before the election, 53,000 voter registration applications remained on hold. Seventy percent of the stalled applications were for black voters, sparking widespread charges of racial discrimination. 

Clinton also referenced the case of alleged pro-GOP election fraud in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. Amid overwhelming evidence that an operative working on behalf of Republican Mark Harris illegally collected absentee ballots, the state election board called for a new election in February.

“The district is holding a special election, but it should never have happened in the first place,” Clinton said. “And we have to do everything we can to stand up and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“Don’t you find it interesting that all the politicians who have argued for years for strict voter ID rules and limits on early voting that disproportionately affect low-income voters and voters of color have been curiously quiet about this North Carolina case?” she added.

Under the guise of policing “voter fraud,” many Republicans in the South have become increasingly brazen in their efforts to restrict voting since a 2013 Supreme Court decision striking down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required states with histories of voting discrimination to obtain advance approval ― known as “pre-clearance” ― from the federal government for any changes to their voting rules. 

At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that historically racist Southern states had outgrown the need for federal supervision. 

But reminders of the persistence of racism in American society are apparent in the primarily Republican efforts to suppress the franchise, and the legacy of more explicit discrimination looms large in the South.

For example, George Wallace Community College, where the unity breakfast took place, is named for the very segregationist governor who ordered state troopers to stop the “Bloody Sunday” marchers with brutal force in 1965. Years later, Wallace apologized for his actions, and in subsequent stints as governor, advocated the expansion of the state community college system that bears his name. 

Even the Edmund Pettus Bridge carries the stench of Alabama’s long history of institutional racism. Pettus was a decorated Confederate general during the Civil War, who became a leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.

Changes to Southern landmarks named for racist figures are likely not in the offing, but efforts to fix voting rights deficiencies are ramping up. 

In the wake of their takeover of the House of Representatives in November, Democrats plan to pass legislation reinstating the key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The bill, authored by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) who represents Selma and spoke at Sunday’s breakfast, would restore pre-clearance requirements using a new formula that Sewell expects to apply to 11 states at the outset.

The bill is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, but Democrats hope to force Republicans to go on record opposing the measure ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Bernie Sanders highlights Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow coalition. Jackson was seated behind him. pic.twitter.com/xMynz4LADY

— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) March 3, 2019

In addition to Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) spoke on Sunday. Sanders and Booker are running for president; Brown is deciding whether to run.

Sanders left shortly after his speech; he has a campaign rally scheduled in Chicago in the evening. Booker and Brown stayed, walking at the head of the march across the Pettus bridge in the afternoon.

The trip carried special resonance for Sanders, who is making a highly visible effort to improve his performance with black voters. Across the South, including Alabama, Clinton trounced Sanders in 2016 thanks to the support of black Democrats, particularly those over the age of 30.

Sanders used his speech to call for automatic voter registration ― with a flash of his signature economic populism.

“The people who own America — the people who put hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who represent the wealthy and the powerful — they know about the power of the vote,” Sanders said. 

“It’s our turn to demand that we end all voter suppression in this country,” he continued to applause. “We not only end voter suppression, but we make it easier for people to vote, not harder.” 

Cory Booker and Sherrod Brown are at the head of the march as it leaves the church. Hillary Clinton joined later. pic.twitter.com/HPkk30sPB1

— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) March 3, 2019

Several of the breakfast attendees who voted for Clinton in 2016 said that their decision had been rooted in an affinity for Clinton, rather than their dislike for Sanders.

Nate Brown, 56, a basketball coach and the artist who sketched the drawing presented to Clinton, said he would vote for Clinton again if she ran.

But this time around, he is seriously considering voting for Sanders. He cited Sanders’ commitment to improving the health care system to bring it in line with other countries. 

“He just looks like the nutty professor, but he’s a cool guy. He makes good sense too — good sense,” Brown said. 

JoAnn Bland, 65, a “foot soldier” ― or veteran of the “Bloody Sunday” march ― who leads guided tours of the region’s civil rights history, was apparently unaware that Sanders had formally entered the race. Bland said that she “kind of” liked Booker, but that if Sanders runs, “he may be my choice.”

Bland, who is also a military veteran, is drawn to Sanders’ support for tuition-free public college and other efforts aimed at expanding economic opportunity.

“I just need to know some other facts from him like, ‘How are you going to do this?’” she said.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story contained a tweet that said Clinton didn’t march. She joined the marchers later.

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[jamesgeiiger]

Relax Amazon investors, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos’ divorce shouldn’t shift the share price

Amazon.com Inc founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, and wife MacKenzie Bezos are divorcing after 25 years of marriage, the couple said on Twitter on Wednesday.

Jeff Bezos, 54, has a fortune that has soared as high as US$160 billion thanks to his stake in Amazon, which again became Wall Street’s most valuable company this week, surpassing Microsoft Inc.

Bezos has credited MacKenzie, 48, for her support when he uprooted the young couple from New York to Seattle so he could launch the online bookseller that grew into one of the world’s largest retailers. MacKenzie, a Princeton graduate who is now a novelist, did accounting for Amazon for its first year after it was founded in 1994.

The couple decided to divorce after a long period of “loving exploration” and trial separation, and expect to continue as partners in ventures and projects, according to the joint statement.

pic.twitter.com/Gb10BDb0x0

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 9, 2019

Amazon shares were up 0.2 per cent in midday trading on Wednesday. The divorce should have no material impact on the company and its shares, said Thomas Forte, an analyst at DA Davidson & Co.

According to Refinitiv Eikon data, MacKenzie does not hold any Amazon shares directly. Bezos has a 16.1 per cent stake in the company worth about US$130 billion.

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Liat Sadler, a San Francisco matrimonial lawyer, noted that spouses owe a fiduciary duty to one another.

“They have duties not to waste or devalue marital resources, and to keep the value of marital property as high as possible,” she said. “I don’t think there is an issue of concern for shareholders as to what will happen to Amazon because of the divorce.”

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Inc. CEO, and his wife MacKenzie Bezos, at the 28th annual Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2010.

Sadler said the main options facing the couple regarding Amazon stock were for Jeff Bezos to buy out his wife or for MacKenzie Bezos to retain shares.

“If she trusts that he would manage Amazon well, either he should pay her for her share of the stock, or they could enter a more complicated agreement where she keeps stock and he keeps voting rights,” she said.

It is unlikely that many details of the divorce will become public, New York lawyer Bernard Clair, who is representing Judith Giuliani in her divorce from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said. “These two have been separated for a not insignificant time, and I would assume … they would have used the time to reach a private, confidential agreement,” Clair said.

Reuters was unable to determine any further financial details of the planned divorce. Amazon did not immediately return requests for comment about the status of the Bezos ownership stake or what impact the divorce might have on the company.

MacKenzie Bezos met her husband when interviewing for a job at a New York hedge fund, according to a 2013 profile in Vogue. The two were engaged after three months of dating and married three months after that, according to the magazine. The pair have four children.

Speaking at an event in Berlin last April, Jeff Bezos said MacKenzie’s support was instrumental when he founded Amazon.

“When you have loving and supportive people in your life, like MacKenzie, my parents, my grandfather, my grandmother, you end up being able to take risks,” he said at the event.

Jeff Bezos in September committed US$2 billion through the Bezos Day One Fund to helping homeless families and starting pre-schools for low-income communities. He had solicited ideas on Twitter in 2017 for ways to donate some of his wealth.

Last January, the couple donated $33 million to fund college scholarships for U.S. high schoolers with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, an Obama-era program protecting young immigrants brought to the United States illegally by their parents.

In 2012, they donated US$2.5 million to a Washington state campaign to legalize same-sex nuptials there.

From modest beginnings, Amazon branched out into almost every product category, taking on established retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

In November, Amazon picked America’s financial and political capitals for massive new offices, branching out from its home base in Seattle with plans to create more than 25,000 jobs in both New York City and just outside Washington, D.C.

Jeff Bezos also founded space company Blue Origin in 2000, and is funnelling US$1 billion a year of his own fortune into pulling it out of start-up mode and into production.

He also owns the Washington Post, which has been a target of criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump.

© Thomson Reuters 2019

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