Newsletter #12: Speak Out Now, While You Can, So That All Can
The Audacity: Creative Action Together | AudacityCAT.com | Newsletter #12 | 4-18-25
Contents:
Recap: What is The Audacity?
ACTION ALERT: Let's Fill Rockland's Chapman Park Saturday 4/19 at Noon
Different Dangers and a Shield for What's to Come
Meetings and Events and Actions this Week: Get Involved!
1. Recap: What is the Audacity?
So much has happened so quickly this year that it can seem hard to keep track of it all. For those of you who are new to The Audacity, here's a brief summary of who we are and what we're about.
The Audacity is a locally-grown, independent, grassroots group in Knox County that started with discussions around a kitchen table after the election in November and has grown to a group of nearly 1200 people who communicate online, plan in 8 active working groups, and bring multiple public events, actions, and meetings into being every week.
Our members range across the political spectrum, with many different understandings of the issues of the day, and deploying many different methods. What unites us, and how do we work together?
1. We have a mission: "Creative Action Together." This means we cooperate to stage artistic and other creative actions in public to respond to the crisis facing the nation.
2. When we act as The Audacity, we agree to a broad set of boundaries. Our actions are nonviolent. We are opposed to authoritarianism, bigotry, and corruption. We support diversity, equity, and inclusion. We stand up for democracy.
3. Within these boundaries, we embrace a diversity of approaches, methods, and philosophies in our words, our images, and our actions. We won't all agree in principle or in practice -- and we accept these differences rather than trying to shut them down. We all accept that others will do things we don't like, and that we'll do things that others won't like, because that's how art works and that's what democracy looks like.
4. As a matter of strategy to respond to the authoritarian threat, we're public and transparent. We are exactly what we say we are, and we're doing exactly what we're saying we're doing. That way we don't have secrets and nobody can betray anybody. When we show public courage, others feel like they can do it too.
5. Nobody is paid to make The Audacity work. We're all volunteers, and every one of us is responsible for making this whole thing work. We organize into working groups that come from the bottom up. When a person raises their hand and says "The Audacity ought to..." in one of our big meetings, and if the idea fits within The Audacity's boundaries, we turn that suggestion around and ask people to indicate whether they're willing to lead and organize and work to make it happen. If enough folks commit to it, it happens. If they don't, it doesn't.
6. You can join a working group by filling out this form online: https://www.audacitycat.com/join-a-working-group. You'll be contacted by a "wrangler" for the group: this is someone who commits to coordinate email communication for the group and make sure the group makes forward progress. Each working group should also send a representative to a monthly "coordinating circle" meeting, where all the representatives touch base, help one another, and figure out how to work together to reach common goals. Sometimes a working group fails at this point because nobody wants to take these leadership responsibilities; that's part of the process that indicates a lack of interest. That's okay; it's part of the grassroots sorting process. If you want a working group to exist and succeed, volunteer to lead! Email jamescook@audacitycat.com if you're interested.
7. My name is James Cook. I kicked off The Audacity and I act as its facilitator. I work with working groups, guide some whole-group meetings, and communicate with folks who have questions and ideas.
8. We share a lot of information in different ways:
a) our informational web page is at http://audacitycat.com
b) at The Audacity Space -- http://audacityspace.org -- anyone can register for an account and post artistic work, relevant news, and written perspectives
c) we maintain a calendar of local meetings and actions at http://audacitycat.com/events
d) follow us on BlueSky at https://bsky.app/profile/theaudacitymaine.bsky.social
e) follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61571976286825
f) connect with us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/theaudacitymaine/
g) subscribe to our growing collection of videos at https://www.youtube.com/@TheAudacityCAT
h) if you have any question or need, email contact@audacitycat.com and we'll answer your message or get your question to the person who can answer it.
2. ACTION ALERT: Let's Fill Rockland's Chapman Park Saturday 4/19 at Noon
As many of you know, there has been a call for a national day of protest tomorrow, Saturday April 19. There is no statewide gathering point, so please come to Chapman Park (corner of Park & Main streets) in Rockland at Noon on Saturday to demonstrate our opposition and continue to build the momentum generated on April 5.
We're going to do our best to make it a joyful place to engage in resistance. There will be a corner for folks who want to sing. We'll have a table for people to bring informational fliers and petitions and legislative actions. We'll have free buttons for you to put on your jacket and wear all week. We'll have sidewalk chalk for budding artists. We'll blow bubbles and have big beach balls for the kids to bounce. We'll hold signs for passers by. As the year builds toward summer, we'll move more and more toward making the Saturdays in the park feel like a street party for resistance.
You need to be there. Why? Read on.
3. Different Dangers and a Big Shield for What's to Come
Since Donald Trump declared and reiterated his plan to find a way to send American citizens to torture-filled concentration camps in El Salvador, I've had a number of conversations with members of The Audacity who are sharing their feeling of fear:
fear that we won't be able to stop the horrors already being inflicted on vulnerable people
fear that those horrors will soon be directed at activists like us
fear that there is no more rule of law in America to protect us
fear that without those protections, demonstrators will be targeted for violence
fear that in response to these threats, our own demonstrators will turn toward violence
Some of the folks who I talk with are responding to their fears by suggesting that we hide:
hide our social media posts so that we won't be targeted
stop taking photographs and videos of demonstrations to share online so that people can't be identified in them for later targeting
stop talking to friends and family about the horrors going on so that we won't be targeted
reduce visibility in general
The idea here is that a person who hides away, shuts up, keeps still, and stays out of sight will be protected by a personal shield of compliance. It's tempting to hide. It feels safe at a basic animal level. It's true that hiding at home behind a small personal shield of silence will make you a little bit safer... for a little while. But in the longer term, that strategy weakens you in the face of a much larger danger. Here's why:
hiding abandons the most vulnerable, least privileged people who the authoritarian bullies are already hounding and hurting: immigrants, people of color, journalists, students, teachers, old people, children, pregnant women without money for an abortion vacation, and so many more.
hiding turns the work of resistance from a massive collective effort where many people each do a bit help each other, to an exhausting personal effort by hundreds of millions of individual, isolated, lonely people who are all on their own.
hiding might provide immediate safety, but we live in a pervasive surveillance society where your resistance has already been logged. The history of authoritarian takeovers in China, Czechoslovakia, El Salvador, France, Germany, Myanmar, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, and countless other places demonstrates that once the most vulnerable are subdued, their attention will eventually turn to you, and when they find you behind your tiny shield you will be alone, as the ex-Nazi theologian Martin Niemöller discovered and shared in his famous postwar speech: "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me."
Donald Trump has shown again and again that with him there are no deals with him that end with people or institutions being left alone. There's only resistance or surrender. Once he has pushed a person into capitulating, he doesn't leave them alone. He keeps going once he's learned that they'll give in, until they have been so humiliated and blackmailed and threatened and frightened that they bend the knee, kiss the ring, and accept the collar. Watch his collection of once-brave opponents who have fallen in line. If you watch them carefully, you can catch them shuddering and flinching.
I know you're afraid. Every person I've met who is paying attention is afraid. Even the right-wing authoritarians who menace us are terribly, terribly afraid: indeed, robust and replicated research shows that right-wing authoritarians tend to be plagued by a sense of threat that generates fear, a fear they resolve through fawning worship of dictators and bullies.
I'm afraid too. I've lost many hours of sleep this week thinking about what may be coming our way. I've anguished over the thought that someone participating in an demonstration of The Audacity might get hurt by some angry bigot with a gun, or a truck, or a fist. Fear is hard. It's debilitating, it wears us down and it makes us feel like giving up.
But we can't hide, especially those of us who aren't immediately vulnerable. We give ourselves up to the little shield of fear, because there is a bigger shield of unity, and it works. You know this if you've come to the park for our Saturday sing-outs. You know it if you headed to Augusta for one of the big protests there this year. Unity takes away fear and replaces it with joy and strength and resolve. When we come together, they can't catch us. When we show up together, they can't stop us. And when we get big enough, the big shield we make when we come together will cover the most vulnerable among us, too. And then we prevail. That's the only way we'll prevail.
When you come to Chapman Park in Rockland this Saturday at noon, you'll see many people looking out for one another and building courage: sharing an uplifting or uniting song, answering questions, welcoming strangers in, and smiling, smiling, smiling at one another. We'll feel strong, strong enough to stand up for ourselves, strong enough to protect and advocate for others. Love, big love, will win.
4. Meetings and Events and Actions this Week: Get Involved
The Saturday April 19 noontime action is not the only way to get involved. Here are some more ways you can be active:
On Tuesday, April 22 from 4-6 pm, drop by the Ontheround studio at 166 Main Street in Thomaston and write letters to elected officials.
On Wednesday, April 23 at 4:30 pm, the Outreach working group of The Audacity is meeting at 90 Mechanic Street in Camden and welcomes members of The Audacity to join.
On Friday, April 25 at 7 PM, all those interested in forming an acoustic activist street band (also known as a Honk! band) for local actions are invited to meet at 52 Conway Road, Camden (the gray farmhouse on the small road next to the Camden Hannaford). Bring the instruments you want to practice with: brass, woodwinds, percussion, whatever you can imagine! For questions, email jamescook@audacitycat.com
On Friday, April 25 at 8 PM online, World Beyond War will present voices from South Korea describing the lessons they have recently learned on "How to Prevent a Coup." Register at WorldBeyondWar.org.
On Monday, April 28 from 5-6:30 pm, brought to you by Lincoln County Indivisible: a Save Democracy Town Hall in the Waldo Theatre, Waldoboro. Historian Benjamin Carter Hett will open the meeting. He has written books on German History and the Nazi rise to power, including The Death of Democracy. Senator Susan Collins has been invited to participate, although so far has not accepted. Attendees will read personal statements describing how the policies and actions of the current administration are impacting them. The statements will be delivered to Senators Collins and King, and Representatives Pingree and Golden. Email Jan John at janjohn1us@yahoo.com to reserve your free ticket.
The next meeting of the Dance Party working group (yes!) is coming up on Wednesday, April 30th @ 3pm at 137 Main Street in Warren. Drop by if you would like to organize through dance.
Even more is coming! For instance, the Theater working group of The Audacity is planning a skit to debut at the May 18 Sunday Stroll in downtown Rockland involving the characters of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and others who resist them. If you'd like to get involved, email theaterwrangler.audacity@gmail.com. And then there's a Maine Resistance Faire, and then a Maine Folk School weekend... stay tuned for more information.
Where our hearts are large, we'll find room to act for the good of ourselves and others. Be large -- and see you Saturday!
The Audacity: Creative Action Together
