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And then take action.
One of the first things we did was
adopt the Indivisible Guide as our playbook.
And we also talked about participating in protests
and marches, including the Women's March
and the Inauguration Day protest.
But let me pause a minute and talk
about the Indivisible Guide.
What is that?
The Indivisible Guide is a document
which three former congressional staffers put together
in December of 2016.
And they looked at the Tea Party as an example
of how to talk to members of Congress
and try to influence them for the issues that they wanted.
And these congressional, former congressional staffers
said, what can progressives do that
is similar to that approach, which was actually very
effective during the Obama era.
So they put together this guide still available online.
And we thought that that would be a good playbook for us.
And so we took that and set up meetings
with our members of Congress in this area.
It's District 17 and 19 specifically for our members.
We're based in Sunnyvale Mountain View, Los Altos,
Cupertino, with a sprinkling of membership in other cities.
So since that first meeting in early January,
Indivisible South Bay has grown to about 300 members.
We meet about twice a month in a local Sunnyvale church.
And we call on our members of Congress
to take stronger positions in defense of small D,
democratic values, and institutions.
And we also work to defend the most vulnerable members
of our society.
In each of these half-hour panel discussions,
we will highlight a different aspect of our group,
sharing ideas, stories, and best practices
with the overall goal of showing the public that
average citizens like us can take effective action
to enact true change in our society.
If this show makes you want to get out of your chair,
join with your friends, and take action
to create positive, progressive change,
then we will have accomplished something.
Now I'll introduce our panelists.
I want to emphasize none of us has
professional political experience.
We're all volunteers from a wide variety of backgrounds.
My name is Lisa Farino.
I'm a former college instructor and current full-time mom who
also finds herself gratefully saddled with two very
active political groups, one being National Voter Corps
and one being this group, Indivisible South Bay.
Lynn Meyer is a full-time mom, but manages to find time
to serve as founder and president of a nonprofit
for local parents.
She's also the coordinator of Indivisible South Bay's Media
Matters Committee, which looks at issues related
to media disinformation.
Etan Fenson is a tech company president,
as well as a local activist extraordinaire,
involved in many causes fighting for immigrants' rights
against Citizens United with the group Move to Amend.
And he also serves as co-director of this group,
Indivisible South Bay.
Laurel Michael is a software engineer.
She's done most of the work to date
to put together our website and also collects
a mountain of information twice a week
to put out our action and events digest, which
is very helpful for all our members to have.
So in this show, we're going to give you
an overview of what we're up to as a group
as an example of what Indivisible chapters can accomplish,
even in blue districts like ours.
My first question to all of you, then, is a very basic one.
Why did you join Indivisible South Bay?
So I have two sons, as you know, one's two and one's four.
And it's really not an exaggeration
to say that after the election, I
was scared for their lives.
Candidate Trump showed that he had no concept of how serious
the threats that climate change pose
are national security, our economy,
and ultimately the habitability of the planet.
And his temperament was so whack-a-doodle, I was and still
am scared that someone's going to bait him
into a Twitter war that's going to end in a nuclear explosion.
It sounds crazy, but the fact that this man wouldn't release
his tax returns just made me so doubtful
that he had our nation's best interest in his heart
that I had to do something.
And when the Indivisible Guide came up on my Facebook wall,
I think a friend shared it, it really
was one of the first times that I saw hope after that election,
that there was something that we could do as average citizens
to provide a check against this administration.
Great, thank you.
Definitely a lot of things that are crazy.
It's like a new standard.
Yeah, I mean, for me, I had never been involved in politics.
I did not, I practically didn't know anything about it.
And it was something that I mostly relied on my friends
and my family who did know more to kind of ask them how
the election was going to go.
And if I should worry, of course, they're like,
don't worry at all.
And all the polls said not to worry.
And it was just really, really heartbreaking
seeing it happen, just watching as the states turned red.
And no one expected that.
But more so for me, it was as if the world was different
than I thought it had been.
Things changed so drastically.
I thought the world was moving in this progressive direction,
that everything was just going to get better and more equal.
And it really shattered my perspective of that.
And so because of that, I really, really
had to find a way to insert myself.
I had to do something.
I was going crazy.
And I too saw it on Facebook.
Some random person had liked it.
And I looked into it, and I just loved the clarity,
the strategy.
It was just amazingly well put together.
They told every single thing you need to do.
And that really, really spoke to me.
It was something I needed to do.
Interestingly, Laurel and I come at this
from different stages of life.
I've been around long enough to have mourned presidential
elections for many years, starting with Nixon in 68,
and in 72, Reagan in 1980, and W in 2000 and 2004.
I have to say that on the evening of November 8,
when it became clear that Trump actually
was going to win the election, I felt completely disoriented.
Having grown up in New York City, I
was very much familiar with Donald Trump.
And of course, as familiarity breeds contempt,
I was quite contentious.
And I have to say disoriented.
I was as disoriented as Laurel describes,
thinking that the world was just not
what I had expected it to be.
And when I came to the home of our godmother,
and I interacted with a bunch of people there
that I found to be really connected to,
it made me feel that there was some hope.
There was something that we could do.
And indeed, joining Indivisible at that point,
it changed me.
I would agree with all these comments.
There was shock and horror after November.
And also, the moment of coming together as a group,
I think, was really powerful, because we all
shared that feeling, and then moved into determined action
to take charge of the situation as much as we could.
And I think that was a really meaningful moment.
And since then, we've had a lot of those as a group.
We've just jumped into all kinds of protests, marches,
vigils, and then actually going to meet
with our members of Congress.
So the panoply of our work that we've done in the last six
months is really something to think about.
So that leads me to my next question,
which is, after six months or so of weathering
the quote unquote Trump era, how has your outlook changed?
Would you feel like this group is making a difference
in your outlook for the future?
I would say no doubt.
I mean, hope is slowly replacing fear for me.
I think that one of the recent developments that really has
made me feel like things are going to be OK
is the nomination of a special prosecutor.
That really was a moment where I felt like our democratic
institutions are working.
And I really felt that that was partly
because of groups like ours around the country putting
pressure on their congressmen and their representatives
in telling them.
I expect you to hold this administration accountable
because in a single party system that we have right now,
that wasn't a given.
And at least I had a lot of anxiety around that.
And it's been a challenge kind of fitting
some of the activities in my life.
But I would say that also the digest
that Laurel puts together, the diversity of events
and actions that you can take, there
are things you can do to make a difference.
Even small things, like the minute and 30 seconds
it takes to make a call a day, that's really helped me out.
Just shooting off one letter to your congressperson
or picking up the phone.
And then you do feel like, OK, phew.
Now I can relax just a little bit for a few moments.
Well, for me, mentioning the really extreme disorientation
that I felt, I would say through February,
my sense in being affiliated and involved in Indivisible,
particularly our group, I began to feel empowered.
And I've been an activist for a long time, a number of years.
And that feeling of empowerment is something
that feeds me, that nourishes me.
And I feel as if I have been fed and nourished
by my involvement with this Indivisible group.
I have to say, because I've had experience
with other groups and other activism,
our group in particular, the nature of our interaction
with one another, and with the various pieces of government
in the system that we do interact with,
have also been a part of that enabling that I feel.
So I feel much more optimistic than I did, much more
than I did on November 8th.
Of course, Trump is always making life interesting,
and not just Trump, but the entire panoply of people
that he's brought along with him.
So maybe we can talk about, just briefly,
Indivisible as a whole value system.
I touched on the fact that they're really bringing home
the message that we are standing up
for small d-democratic institutions and values.
Some people ask, is Indivisible too negative?
Because we're all about resisting Trump and the Tea Party.
Well, if you think about us as defenders
of those democratic institutions,
I would say probably not.
But what do you think?
How do Indivisibles values differ from those of the Tea Party?
Yeah, I mean, I think the values are very different.
For the most part, Indivisible is just
borrowing from a strategy, a recipe book that was put together.
But I don't really see much of any correlation in the values.
I think Indivisible is trying to restore balance.
We're trying to restore democracy
and put these things back in a place that really should
be there that have fallen out of place.
Just really allowing people the chance
to get involved and telling them to talk
to the members of Congress.
And I love that Indivisible, I think,
has done a really good job as a national effort
to not tell people what their values should be.
They're saying, in your individual groups,
you talk to your individual representatives, tell them
what you feel, and what you, as a group, want to represent.
But they're not necessarily telling us what to feel
all the time.
And I think they've done that very well.
It's also interesting to think about the small d democratic
of values part of it, because I think
some in the Tea Party would say, I'm standing up for,
I as a Tea Party member, I'm also standing up
for small d democratic values.
I think you're absolutely right.
I've got friends in Texas and in North Carolina
who are Tea Party members.
And I remember when President Obama was elected,
I think that they had some of that fear that I had
when President Trump was elected,
as far as the future that they thought
that their children or their grandchildren
are going to have just wasn't going to happen.
And I don't know if our value, I think that the,
I've been thinking a lot about the values thing.
I think that at the end of the day, our values are the same.
We want, you know,
safety for our family, we want economic prosperity
for the community, and we want to be able to pursue
whatever it is that fulfills us freely.
But we disagree very, very deeply on the how to do that.
And this is a great playbook.
Yes, the tactic is the same.
The tactics that I view as significantly different.
So for example, I have memories, particularly in 2010,
in the wake of the ACA, the town hall meetings
that members of Congress had,
that were just expressions of anger and hate,
and really a lack of, nobody really cared
whether what they were saying was true or not.
Remember death panels?
Oh yeah.
There was a sense of,
we will do whatever it takes to sabotage something.
I don't believe, certainly I don't feel,
that we are in the mode of sabotage,
and we're not in the mode of using whatever we need to say,
whether it's true or not.
So I think that, to my mind,
the values of indivisible are based on truth, on justice,
on, as Lisa has said,
promoting the institutions of democracy
and protecting the vulnerable among us.
And I think that's a significant difference
between us and the Tea Party.
And I think we might be willing to at least listen
to people from across the country
who have very different views than us,
like your relatives in those states,
to just have an open debate and a discussion.
We have an issue committee called Bridging the Divide,
which is very much a part of our core mission
as indivisible South Bay, just to bring that up.
So let's talk about what we've done, actually,
meeting with members of our members of Congress,
our members of Congress in particular,
in District 17 and District 19.
And 18.
And 18.
So what happened at those meetings?
I mean, I feel like that is such a core part of our purpose
to actually go to members of Congress
who are, yes, they're Democrats,
but they are perhaps not promoting forcefully enough
the idea that we must resist Trump's agenda
and the agenda of the Tea Party.
They are maybe a little bit going about business as usual.
And so what we did is we met
with Feinstein's State Director
in her San Francisco office,
and we had a very productive discussion.
He actually came to Sunnyvale and met with us.
And I think it was just the right environment
to have a genuine exchange of thoughts
about what we feel very strongly
that Feinstein should put front and center in her agenda,
which is defending our democratic institutions,
resisting a lot of what's happening right now in Congress.
And I think he got that message very loud and clear
from our group and took it back to her.
And now we've set up a possibility of exchange of thoughts
that will go on with other meetings in our group.
I think he also responded very positively
to our approach to him.
I would say that we were much more respectful
than he had expected,
because he had met with another indivisible group
prior to meeting with us.
And I think he was quite relieved
to interact with us the way he did.
And so he actually took in much more,
he was more receptive to what we had to say.
And I had the feeling,
I believe we all had the feeling
of leaving that meeting that we really did get through to him.
And that was a good feeling.
Right, and certainly with climate change,
one of our members is now talking almost weekly
with him and other people in Feinstein's office.
So that was a real breakthrough.
And Laurel, how did you feel about the meeting with Ro Khanna?
Yes, so I thought that was really cool.
I was very geeked to meet him.
But yeah, and I also live in Sunnyvale,
so that's my district.
But yeah, I thought it was really interesting
the way he approached it.
He kind of saw it as like sort of a strategy meeting
of like, hey, okay, you guys are the people I represent.
What do you think?
Like, what can I do?
And he took it very well.
We definitely found from the meeting
that we had different perspectives on some things.
We were enlightened to understand a little bit
that the way he'd been acting was coming from this idea
of trying to kind of emulate Obama
and how Obama had been and focusing on the positives.
And we were very clear with him.
We're like, we don't really want that.
We want you to talk about the bad things
that are happening right now
and draw the attention to those things.
And so we were able to actually say that to his face
and that was really exciting.
Yeah, I think he just did a really good job
of listening to us and trying to take actual feedback,
which I really appreciated.
Does anyone else want to speak to that?
Well, I would say that particularly the meeting
with Ro Khanna, the message that we had for him
was to connect the dots.
And to use his megaphone,
which certainly is a lot louder than ours is,
to not only to address issue by issue,
which I actually think he had done a fairly good job of,
but to connect those dots and to express
how they are all manifestations of the threat,
the threats that we are under.
And I got the sense that he really understood that.
With that said, I think that as time has gone by,
he has reverted back to perhaps being not as into
what he was and that just reinforces
we need to be on him and on the rest of our representatives.
Just one last note about Anna Eshoo,
who is my representative.
I think she really has responded in a very positive way.
And I am very grateful for that.
But there actually was a time,
the reaction to the missile strike in Syria
where I really did not agree with her statement.
And I thought it was counterproductive.
So I felt very obligated to write to her and tell her that.
And actually my interaction with her in that,
I felt very good about it
because I think that it will make a difference.
The more the rest of us do that,
let her know we support her, but she needs to step it up.
That's something that I've kind of been impressed with
generally when our meetings with these representatives
is that I had assumed living in a blue district
that they knew what I was thinking
and they were going to do what I wanted them to do.
And that's just not the case.
And it's not the case.
I think they do share my values.
It's just that their reality is not the one
that I'm living in.
And it really is important to reach out to representatives
to let them know what it is that's
off the top of your list of concerns.
That way they can reconcile that with the business
that they have to get done in Washington.
They may just not know exactly what we want.
I didn't really surprise at how much
they did not know what we wanted in some cases.
There was one thing that we brought up with Rokana
meeting about NASA, and it was something
that he literally didn't know about.
And so it was just climate change and it was so cool
that it was like we were able to enlighten him to this issue.
And things were happening after that.
Right, the reaction from the state director in Feinstein's
office was similar.
I didn't know that.
Show me more.
So I think this sort of ties into our next question,
which is often asked, why not just join the Democrats,
join the Democratic Party, and fight for Democratic candidates
that you believe in?
There are really strong spokespeople for our cause,
like I would say Anna Eshoo is a good example.
So why don't we just join forces with those people?
Why are we starting this indivisible movement?
What's that about?
I think we have a great service to perform for our society
in helping the Democratic Party address
its existential crisis, which I believe it's in the midst of,
and hasn't really sorted out.
We, as indivisible, not part of the Democratic Party,
have an obligation to pull the Democratic Party in a direction
where they stand a much better chance of being effective
in being a bulwark against the Republican juggernaut.
And I believe that the more we engage with the Democrats
in a constructive and collaborative way,
the more likely it is that they might realize,
hey, we have to behave perhaps a little bit differently.
We need to learn from our debacle of 2016,
and prior to that as well.
I think we have a great opportunity and a great obligation,
and I think we're doing it.
Yeah.
I may have mentioned this.
I can't remember.
But there are 6,000, at least, different indivisible chapters
around the country, and two in every single congressional
district in the country.
So just to remind people of that,
that shows that indivisible groups
are a force to be reckoned with.
I think in the Bay Area alone, there
are dozens, literally, of indivisible groups.
And so just that, the numbers of people that we have.
And I think the numbers say something.
It says that this is a different system
that we needed to develop.
It's something that's outside of these two parties that's
saying, how do we work with this two-party system
to kind of tell them what we need from them
and get things done?
There's a reason why this is so enticing to so many people.
Right.
It's been my impression that there's
a fracture in the Democratic Party between like Bernie
Kratzen, traditional Democratic supporters.
The Republican Party is fractured
between fiscal conservatives, evangelicals, and the Tea
Party.
And what I really love about indivisible
is that as scary as this moment is,
is that I hope it can be unifying,
and that people start to find the issues where they agree
and can build coalitions around those issues.
And you'll find allies in places you wouldn't think.
I love that at our meetings, there
are people who I'm pretty sure my ballot looks quite different
from at the end of the day.
But we will find a way to work together
on the things that really matter to us,
like a single-payer health system or immigration rights.
Yeah, I think that there are signs that indicate
that we're making progress.
I think locally, at least, the community that we live in,
we're blessed.
And I think the local Democratic Party
has an element of understanding that they
do need to reach out to us.
And I think that we are on the right path.
Having said that, it's worth noting
that we're not walking on lockstep as indivisible groups.
We found that even within our groups,
there's a difference of opinion in how much we should join forces
with the Democrats as a party versus kind
of continuing to keep our distance.
So that's attention that will have to be worked out
over the next several months as we approach
the next elections.
It's a very important issue.
OK, well, thank you, everyone.
Thank you very much.
That's all the time we have for today's show.
For more information about our group, please contact us.
You'll see our Facebook and website information
on your screen, or email us at steering at isb.groups.io.
From all of us at Indivisible South Bay,
stay strong and stay connected.
Thanks for joining us, and see you next time.
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