at Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
783 W. Highland Avenue
Elgin, IL 60123
This special meeting will be an opportunity for our members, friends, and allies to come together to explore how we can constructively and vigorously act in response to the election results of November 8th.
We will have four very brief speakers to get us started with some focused ideas, but we will save 90 minutes for open discussion.
- Vince Hardt will talk about how progressives might take over Democratic Party organizations, especially at the local level, and work to make the party more responsive to human needs and less controlled by corporate interests.
- Earl Silbar will discuss the centrality of social class and the potential to organize our resistance movement around that recognition. He will also discuss the potential for and difficulties facing a working class based socialist party.
- Traci Ellis will talk about how we can protect populations that are vulnerable to attack under the new regime: the undocumented, Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans, Jews, Women and others.
- Deni Mathews will talk about how, in the face of the climate crisis which threatens human civilization itself, we can and must act to protect the natural world under the new administration.
We face attacks on everything we value. We anticipate attacks on the press, on civil rights and civil liberties, as well as on vulnerable groups and individuals. We anticipate increased militarism and war, attacks on organized labor and workers, attacks on the natural environment. Economic inequality will likely get worse, and corporate power, (already extreme) will continue to grow. It is time to gather our resources, renew our outreach to our fellow-citizens, and re-commit ourselves to fight for peace and justice at home and abroad. Let us rise to that call.
If you care about peace and justice, please join us for this conversation.