Editors Note: Speech Delivered by Art Goodtimes at a March 22nd Protest in Telluride.
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book, Serviceberry, she has a maxim “All flourishing is mutual.”
For America to flourish and not just brag about its greatness we have to shoulder our responsibility as citizens of this nation and protect our democratic institutions that are under threat.
Today we are marching for peace and justice and the dream of America that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave us and which we San Miguel County citizens hope to keep alive for future generations.
As a registered Green, my values are even more radical than the progressive wing of the Democratic party as represented by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.
But we are not marching today as partisans.
This movement to protect our American democratic institutions
is a big tent.
We welcome not only radicals and progressives, but moderates and conservatives, Independents and Republicans, woke activists and religious traditionalists. All Americans have a stake in protecting our Constitution and our democratic principles.
To resist means to stand against something, but its Latin roots take us deeper into the resist dance.
Sistere in Latin means “to stand,” but the prefix re- comes to us from the Middle English through Norman Anglo-French from the original Latin, and means “back, again, against.”
So, resist has three deep meanings: to stand back, to stand again and to stand against.
In this moment we are being peppered with the scattergun pellets of terrible news from this current administration. The intent is to overwhelm and put us into frenzies of concern and anger, worry and rage.
Do not succumb.
In order to resist effectively we must first stand back and assess the rhetoric and lies and outrageous proposals. They are meant to confuse and keep us in state of perpetual turmoil.
Once we see how our existing democratic institutions counter these outrageous proposals, we will have a better handle on what actions will be needed to stop them.
Then it will be time to stand again. Then we can stand against whatever awful changes are starting to stick and aren’t mere disinformation to rile and dishearten.
Today’s march is just the beginning.
Marching in the streets of Telluride won’t change the direction of the country. But it will change us. Make us ready to act when action will be desperately needed.
Stand up and walk with us today in our dance of resistance.
We are in the first few months of this dangerous administration.
Time to step back and assess what is happening before we stand up again and stand against this very real threat to our Republic.
Let me end with a poem that appeared in Grand Junction’s The
Revolutionist in 2024, the Building Socialism anthology from the Bay
Area’s Revolutionary Poets Brigade in 2021, and the Earth First Journal!
in 1981:
Building Alliances
“There’s been too many ripoffs for too long”
-Leo Lyyoki (aka Navajo Sam)
If I had a hammer
& not the one that busted
in my hands as organizers are
busted for planting
trade union pegs
to stretch the corporate tent
A hammer that wouldn’t
buckle under
to repeated blows
Merciless sun baking sidewalks
Tools pushed to their limits
Snapping under pressure
If I had a hammer
forged of the Mother’s fury
yet tempered with love
for all her relations
two-legged four-legged
buried stone or spiraling seed
A hammer shaped to
the will of the people
Nothing could stop us
from driving a nail through
the heart of the wooden beam
to begin the reconstruction
Building alliances
powerful as the wind
that rips a roof to shreds
or sweeps a prairie clean
The Revolutionist 