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# 2025-05-26 - You Are More Powerful Than You Think by Eric Liu | |
A friend sent me a copy of You Are More Powerful Than You Think by | |
Eric Liu. It is about power in a civic sense. For power in a | |
self-help sense, see Sage Liskey's zine below. | |
You Are A Great And Powerful Wizard by Sage Liskey | |
What follows is the full text of the prologue, about 1000 words. I | |
call this powerful writing. | |
* * * | |
Picture a ripe, red tomato. Perhaps there's one in your kitchen. If | |
it's nearby, hold it. Feel its heft. Consider its origins. | |
There's a fair chance it was picked in Florida, home to a | |
$600-million tomato industry; and if so, a fair chance it was picked | |
in Immokalee, in the sweltering southwest of the state, where much | |
of the industry is concentrated; and if so, a fair chance it was | |
picked by someone who not that many years ago was, in essence, a | |
slave. | |
Immokalee isn't a place most Americans have seen. But most Americans | |
have eaten the fruits of its vast harvest. And because the picking | |
of tomatoes can't be mechanized, that harvest has always been by | |
hand. By the hands of migrant workers, mainly from Mexico and South | |
America, who were entrapped in debt peonage, paid by the bucket and | |
not the punishing hours in the field, yet whose meager wages were | |
routinely stolen by their overseers, and who were pistol-whipped and | |
chained in locked containers if they complained. | |
These workers were the very definition of powerlessness. They had no | |
recourse. No advocates. No fluency in the language of their own | |
domination. They were socially dead to the rest of the United States. | |
And yet, starting in 1993, they came alive. A few of them began to | |
meet secretly in a local church. They resolved, together, to act. | |
First they organized community-wide work stoppages, then hunger | |
strikes, then mass marches hundreds of miles long. They became the | |
Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The press took notice. The workers | |
fought for better pay, and after five years, they finally got a raise | |
from the growers. They fought for such small dignities as shaded | |
rest areas. They earned the currencies that people crave once they | |
achieve subsistence: respect and recognition. They were /seen/. | |
And they didn't stop there. Once they escaped invisibility, they | |
were determined to undo the bigger system of involuntary servitude. | |
They worked with prosecutors to build cases against their traffickers | |
and captors. Those investigations and convictions freed over 1,200 | |
farmworkers from captivity and forced labor. | |
They didn't stop there either. They realized that the machinery of | |
their exploitation was powered by supermarket and fast-food chains | |
that buy produce in mass quantities and create pressure to drive | |
costs down. So in 2001, they organized the first ever farmworker | |
boycott of a fast-food company, against Taco-Bell; four years later | |
Taco Bell's parent company agreed to raise wages and reform its | |
supply chain. With this victory came more allies, more assistance | |
from more experts of all kinds. | |
And they didn't stop there. They pressured McDonald's and Burger | |
King to agree to the same terms. They organized the Fair Food | |
Programs, through which these restaurants and retail chains would buy | |
only from growers who paid a fair wage and abided by a code of | |
conduct stricter than federal law. The buyers agreed to contribute | |
some of the same pittance they once squeezed from the workers--a | |
penny per bucket--to a common fund for worker health, safety, and | |
education. Wal-Mart, with its market-moving scale, joined in 2014. | |
over $10 million has been paid into the fund in its first seasons. | |
The pickers of Immokalee fought for a fair chance, and they're still | |
fighting. | |
So if you sometimes wonder whether you have enough clout to make | |
change happen--how /you/ could ever be seen or heard, or have your | |
demands answered--then just think of them. If people who started | |
where /they/ started could learn power and transform their lives | |
together, can't anyone? If /they/ did it, shouldn't /everyone/? | |
Now think about where /you/ work and live and ask yourself: Who runs | |
this place? | |
It's not that simple a question. There are certain public offices | |
you can identify: mayor or city manager, council members, or | |
commissioners. Widen the lens. What businesses dominate the local | |
economy? Now wider still. Where are the arenas where deals are | |
made, and to whom are they open? Who are the fixers and the | |
enforcers? Are there groups or blocs or interests that always seem | |
to get their way? Who /really/ runs this place? | |
Once you have a sense of an answer, ask another question: How could | |
it be different? | |
This brings us to what I call the Pottersville flip. In Frank | |
Capra's classic film /It's a Wonderful Life/, George Bailey gets to | |
see what life would be like if he'd never been born. In this | |
counterfactual world of Bedford Falls--an idyll of trust and mutual | |
aid and democratic pride--becomes Pottersville, a race-to-the-bottom | |
grid of slums, trashy bars, and pawnshops all owned by the richest | |
man in town, Mr. Potter. | |
Many American towns in the three generations since /It's a Wonderful | |
Life/ have become a lot more like Pottersville than Bedford Falls, in | |
the sense that wealth and clout have consolidated into the hands of | |
one or a few. But wherever your town might fall on the Bedford | |
Falls-to-Pottersville spectrum, imagine flipping places. | |
Imagine, if you live in a place where you and your neighbors have | |
been crushed by the unseen force of someone else's wealth an wants, | |
what it would be like to be Bedford Falls. Or imagine, if you live | |
in a place where civic health is high and opportunity abounds, what | |
it would be like to descend into Pottersville. | |
Now run the same thought experiment for the other places in your | |
life: Who runs this company? This campus? This state? Who, if you | |
want to change custom or culture or policy, do you have to see, win | |
over, pressure, shame, praise, or /be/ to get the change you want? | |
Who runs this neighborhood, this party, this club or association? | |
Who decides who gets what? What counts as a fair chance? | |
To ask the question is to begin to change the answer. | |
The immigrant pickers of Immokalee may never have seen or even heard | |
of /It's a Wonderful Life/. George Bailey is probably not part of | |
their cultural vocabulary. But they've definitely done the | |
Pottersville flip. They imagined the opposite of helplessness and | |
the inverse of invisibility. They seeded the change they needed. | |
They are harvesting it now. | |
Go back to that ripe, red tomato, whether in your mind's eye or on | |
your kitchen counter. Appreciate the world of possibility within it. | |
And let it be a humble reminder to you: | |
You're more powerful than you think. | |
See also: | |
Review by Ame Sanders | |
tags: article,inspiration,political | |
# Tags | |
article | |
inspiration | |
political |