Daily Engagement is a new, brief, daily feature on Flavorwire. It’s aimed at helping people feel somewhat less helpless and hopeless (or at least in control of their helplessness and hopelessness) in the midst of a political news cycle that’s been doling out daily affronts to human decency.
Every day, we’ll post one easy thing that people can do to continue to resist the current state of politics under the Trump administration, focusing on the creative ways (we are a culture website after all) that citizens are finding to resist.
As Donald Trump seems intent to march us toward apocalypse — or at least an apocalypse for everyone who isn’t a billionaire able to create a wall of hundos to soak up the rising and, at that point, who knows, radioactive tide — there’s at least another plan to march toward… well, at the very least, the annoyance and size-obsessed insecurity of Donald Trump. The recently announced People’s Climate March on Washington, D.C., will aim to extract the issue of environmental justice from beneath the sediments of apathy and obfuscation that politicians and constituents alike have laid atop it.
Given Trump’s egregious and direct antagonism towards climate research — via the silencing of governmental organizations like the EPA, whose main aim is to address minor issues like the potential mass extinction of the human race — it’s time to mainstream the fuck out of environmental justice. There’s no reason the Climate March — about an issue that impacts the whole world, and particularly, at least in the immediate, the poor — shouldn’t be at least as massive an event as the Women’s March, particularly since there’s so much time to plan ahead: the event will be held on April 29.
If you’re anywhere near D.C. or are rich and not an asshole, or you have some extra cash to throw towards going to the capital, pencil the date in your calendar, and pester your friends and relatives to do the same. The People’s Climate Movement (which formerly organized the People’s Climate March on the night before the UN Climate Summit in 2014, an event that saw a turnout of 400,000) has created a website for the march, where you can also sign up to join the movement and be part of a “country-wide arc of action” leading up to April 29. As the Women’s March did with reproductive freedom, the Climate March looks to be taking climate change as its framework, but also simultaneously opening itself up to various protest-worthy topics. Per the website:
This new administration is attacking the hard-won protections of our climate, health, and communities, and the rights of people of color, workers, indigenous people, immigrants, women, LGBTQIA, young people, and more. If the policies he proposed on the campaign trail are implemented, they will destroy our climate, decimate our jobs and livelihoods, and undermine the civil rights and liberties won in many hard fought battles.
The website also lists the nine key points of the people’s climate platform — the first of which is “directly and rapidly reduce greenhouse gas and toxic pollution.”
Also, start keeping an eye on a separate march that already has amassed a huge following before even announcing its date: the Scientists’ March on Washington. And for more reading on why this is all so crucial, check out Tom Hawking’s recent essay on the apocalyptic, climate change-accelerating drive of Trump’s capitalism.