How Dare We?: Courageous Practices to Reclaim Our Power as Citizens

By Paul Cienfuegos

Do you care deeply about the state of our society and don't see yourself as an activist but want to do something powerful to make a difference? Or maybe you are an activist and are frustrated that your efforts aren't bearing fruit? This book is for you! No more pleading with government and corporate power-holders who don't

• Language: English
• Publisher: 100fires Books
• Release date: Dec 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798218127237

Paul Cienfuegos

Paul Cienfuegos is a leader in the Community Rights movement, which works to dismantle the absurdity of corporate personhood and other corporate constitutional so-called "rights" and assert We the People's inherent right to govern ourselves. He has led workshops and organized communities across the U.S. since 1995. Paul moved to Portland, Oregon in 2011 and co-founded the Oregon Community Rights Network in 2013. Paul is the Founding Director of Community Rights US: www.CommunityRights.US.

Book preview

Paul is one of those precious rare birds who believes in people’s ability to act as wise and mature beings and in humanity’s ability to create deep community. As a life-long learner, activist, thinker, and leader; Paul has created a tsunami of ripples and this book documents our collective struggles and offers a path for change.

— STANFORD SIVER, Ph.D., conflict psychology, former Director of Institute for MultiTrack Diplomacy, and co-founder of Deep Democracy Institute

"Paul Cienfuegos is the Thomas Paine of our time, sounding the alarm about threats to democracy, and reminding us that each of us together has the power to transform our lives and society. How Dare We? Courageous Practices to Reclaim Our Power as Citizens is an inspiring collection of must-read pieces as we work to protect what is vital and work toward deep democracy."

— CHUCK COLLINS, director at Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, co-editor of Inequality.org, and author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Save Trillions

Paul Cienfuegos is a master at explaining paradigm shifting concepts in a clear and comprehensible way. He then offers effective actions to address the most critical issues of our time. His passion for and commitment to citizen democracy is inspiring. His ability to bring people with disparate views together around shared values provides communities a path to reclaim the power We the People have.

— LYNDA MCCLURE, retired community and union organizer

Do your hopes and desires include making a positive change in the world? This book will inspire you and set you on a path that could save you years, decades, of futile floundering in the labyrinth we call the regulatory process, and give you shovel-ready ideas for creating meaningful and impactful participation in governance and community self-determination.

— ANN KOBSA, Ph.D., conservationist and subsistence farmer

In the almost 20 years I’ve known Paul Cienfuegos, he’s taught me a lot about what can be possible when ordinary citizens become vocal citizens, and towns we live in can change from towns to actual communities … Even so, this collection of essays and talks has grabbed me by surprise. Paul’s writing has pulled me in, engaged me in a way few writers do. I’ve learned critical bits of U.S. and corporate history that are not taught in school, but are so important to every single one of us who cares about how and where we live, who cares about environmental justice, about corporate privilege and government-corporate collusion that deny us, regular people, our constitutional rights … Stories seldom told or explained elsewhere, guaranteed to open your eyes and maybe even inspire you to take action. Thank you, Paul.

— SARA SUNSTEIN, somatic educator

Paul Cienfuegos is one of the very few speakers that we broadcast on Alternative Radio that offers concrete solutions. A remarkably large number of people respond positively to his analyses for that reason.

— DAVID BARSAMIAN, founder and director of Alternative Radio

Paul Cienfuegos has spent many decades working on a wide range of social, political and economic issues, during which time we have had many opportunities to work together. Such issues have existed for a long time and they are all intertwined. I especially like how Paul’s work shows no matter the single issue they all lead to a similar conclusion of working locally within our communities becoming strong as We the People. It all really comes down to that. The accessibility is excellent and the consolidation valuable for understanding where this is all going. Paul’s willingness to open his heart is a strong incentive for one to read to the finish. We do need to humanize ourselves; trust one another … This is a wonderful project. I am glad Paul has tackled it. Looking forward to more.

— NANCY HORTON, small farmer and homesteader for 45 years, mom and grandma, weaver, active citizen for 40 years

I have known Paul Cienfuegos for 40 years. He was fresh out of college when he experienced an early form of the experiential group process known now as the Work That Reconnects. Immediately recognizing its potential, he acquired the basics of its facilitation before leaving as planned for Scotland. There, in the workshops he began offering, local people felt free to speak out against their government hosting US nuclear missiles and planes, and letting their land be used as target practice and launching pad for President Reagan’s campaign against the Soviet Union. By the time I arrived two years later in 1983, Paul’s work had grown a network of active groups in towns across Scotland and England. Now, eager to host us, they were recruiting for workshops for us to co-lead. Our unforgettable two-week tour allowed me to see Paul with fresh eyes: I witnessed his efficacy as an organizer, his political smarts and natural warmth, his passion for empowering people, the deep well of his caring. Out of this caring, leadership grew from among the Scottish and English ranks and a national organization took form, called Interhelp UK. Over recent decades, these capacities of Paul’s are manifest in Community Rights US. This spunky organization shows communities (towns, counties) how to protect their natural resources from corporate exploitation by knowing and claiming rights they already possess. It is wonderful to know about, and sets me to thinking of the passion for democracy I experienced in Paul Cienfuegos 40 years ago.

— JOANNA MACY, author of World As Lover, World As Self

In our complex and fast changing world we need books that not only help us understand the connections between our different problems but also offer solutions that point us towards the future we deserve. Luckily for everyone who cares about making positive change, veteran community organizer and educator Paul Cienfuegos has distilled a lifetime of community organizing wisdom and grassroots campaigns into exactly such a book. He provides everything you need, to leave behind your inner underdog and start tapping into collective power. Don’t miss this important guide from one of our foremost experts on community rights and grassroots democracy.

— PATRICK REINSBOROUGH, founder of the Center for Story-based Strategy, and author of Re:Imagining Change: how to use story-based strategy to win campaigns, build movements and change the world

"I first met Paul 25 years ago when he came to our community to help us learn how the corporate stranglehold on all aspects of our lives was the primary issue to address. We had been addressing environmental damage in the typical whack-a-mole style, running from one problem to another, always desperate to raise more money to have a new legal challenge, constantly begging the regulators to see the damage that was being done to our environment and our communities. Paul opened our eyes and taught us the history we needed to know. He showed us how other communities had successfully prevented the corporate domination of their community.

We were specifically concerned with how we could prevent the corporate timber barons from controlling our local elections. We organized and successfully ran a ballot initiative that prevented financial contributions from outside corporations.

I have read many books written on the environmental destruction and injustice that we as citizens face. But they did not help me understand the big picture and give me concrete solutions I could apply to my community. Paul’s clear and concise book shines a light on the whole historical mess and shows us clearly the root of the problem. Identifying the root is essential to creating meaningful and lasting change. This book will help guide you to develop the strategies and solutions you need for your community to repel the corporate domination."

— GIL GREGORI, riparian restorationist and residential property manager

Community Rights organizer-teacher Paul Cienfuegos has arrived in town with a whole lot of very useful, often shocking information you didn’t know before and a big load of energy, ideas, experience and inspiration to get you using that information to make some true democracy in your community. But be ready to be influenced, deeply, by Cienfuegos’ teaching, and to find your commitment to life-centered change-making energized forever.

— MATT NICODEMUS, draft resister and war resistance organizer, co-author of The Graduation Pledge of Social and Environmental Responsibility, co-founder of the Graduation Pledge Alliance, and founder and co-coordinator of Sworn to Refuse

HOW DARE WE?

Courageous Practices

to Reclaim

Our Power as Citizens

Paul Cienfuegos

How Dare We?

Courageous Practices to Reclaim

Our Power as Citizens

© 2022 Paul Cienfuegos

Cover photo by David Clode

Contact: @DavidClode

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews with an accompanying credit that references the book title and author.

Author: Paul Cienfuegos

ISBN: 978-1-0879-3952-0

ISBN: 979-8-2181-2723-7 (e book)

To contact the author:

[e-mail]

100fires Press

100fires.com

We wish not to seize power, but to exercise it.

– Subcomandante Marcos, the nom de guerre used by the (once) main spokesperson of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

– Marianne Williamson,

A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

Dedication

I dedicate this book to the following beloveds.

My parents Elka and Myron, who always supported my life choices, even though it was clear that they had wanted me to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a math professor! Thank you for believing in me, through thick and thin!

Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar, and my first significant mentor. Through a masterful fluke of the universe, I found myself in exactly the right city, Philadelphia, on exactly the right day in 1982 to become a participant at Joanna’s first-ever intensive training for workshop leaders. She had only recently created a workshop titled Despair and Empowerment in the Nuclear Age. The workshop, and the social movement that followed, were all about helping people come to terms with their feelings of despair and rage and grief and sorrow about the dire state of our world, rather than going numb and avoiding the topic at all costs.

I literally drove straight from this training to the Boston Airport and flew to England, as an organizer for the British portion of The Walk to Moscow, offering this new workshop to anyone and everyone I met there. Long story short, I ended up living in rural Scotland for three years, led Joanna’s workshops dozens of times across Britain and France, and co-founded Interhelp-UK (with Mary Simister, Maria Brown, and many others) which continued doing great work for years after I returned to the United States. Joanna was instrumental in helping to train the Brits who carried on the work there.

Joanna became a lifelong friend and she and I are colleagues in what is now known as The Work That Reconnects. I do not believe that I could have personally sustained 44 years of work focused on social movement without having learned from her how to breathe through my pain for the world and share that breath with all of Mother Earth’s other breathers.

Act your age, Joanna was fond of reminding us, and by that she meant, when Joni Mitchell sang, We are Stardust, that Joni was literally correct. The very molecules of our bodies were birthed in the Big Bang that created the entire universe. So, we truly are 14 billion years old. Every one of us. Earth needs us to act our age, as wise and mature beings, now more than ever.

Jacqueline Mayrand, my best friend for many years, who has stood with me through many scary and traumatic life moments, who continues to dive deep with me into wild nature as often as possible, and who is equally capable of being held by me as we dance and cry and giggle our way through this miracle of life.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

An excerpt from the

Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Let’s Start at the Beginning. Shall We?

Our government doesn’t serve us… by design

All power is inherent in the people… but only if we act as if we believe it

Got property rights? You have the right to destroy planet Earth!

The right of local self-government: this is what democracy actually looks like

Common sense rules for controlling corporations

Taking our language back from corporate culture

Hidden in Plain Sight: how corporations exercise their constitutional rights under our very noses: a photography exhibit

Let’s start thinking about law in a whole new way

Chapter Two

Situation Urgent: Life in the Balance

We the People standing together to protect our climate: lessons from the community rights movement

Protecting the right of our rivers to exist, flourish and evolve by dismantling corporate rule, watershed by watershed

Salmon Coming Home: A Clayoquot Restoration Camp

The Democratic Logging Vision in Five Acts

Chapter Three

Thinking of Climbing Beyond the Outside of the Box? Let’s Go!

Imagining a city where renters and property owners enjoy fully equal rights under law

When will politicians start exercising their constitutional authority to rein in large corporations like Amazon?

The people of Vermont vs. Monsanto Corporation and our federal government: what should the people do when our rights are being violated?

A Community Bill of Rights for Portland, Oregon… or any community!

Enough Already! Proposal for an international campaign to end U.S. assaults on the world’s people and nature

Chapter Four

Mass Media: You Love It! You Hate It! You Want to BE It? We All Need It!

The people of Iowa vs. Dakota Access pipeline

OpEd: A National Emergency Requires a Bold Local Response. A corporate daily newspaper refuses to publish yet another timely guest editorial (cuz… ya know…)

Everyone lives somewhere so there’s no better place to challenge corporate media than in one’s own community

Chapter Five

There is No Time Not to Love

Some reflections on 20 years of activism, and an invitation

How to set up an economically dynamic sliding scale payment system for your events

Imagine if … The Great Turning Meets Community Rights (Thank you, Joanna Macy!)

Thoughts about breathing and not breathing during this time of escalating emergencies facing the entire planet, and where our energies can best be focused

Learning to see each other as We the People: a guided visualization

Appendix

About the author

About Community Rights US

Further reading

Gratitude and acknowledgments

Introduction

Ever since I was a teenager in the 1970s, a helluva long time ago, I have tried to live my life as if the world that I wanted to live in was already here. I was an unusual and very intense teenager, not a lot of friends, growing up in an all-white, culturally barren Albuquerque suburb in New Mexico that sprawled endlessly across the desert.

Yearning for a real sense of community around me that wasn’t there, I lived as best I could, as if that world had already arrived. That feeling has never gone away. Fortunately, over these many decades since I was young, I have learned a lot about how we humans could actually co-create that healthier society. I am hungry to share some of these stories and visions with you.

My primary goal with this book is to light a fire under you! To convince you that there are obvious achievable solutions for many of our society’s most (supposedly) intractable problems and that these solutions require us to re-imagine ourselves as part of an absolutely enormous body of humanity that I choose to describe as We the People, for that is where our ultimate power and authority resides.

We are the decision makers

that we’ve been waiting for.

We live in a profoundly alienating society. We are taught from a young age to define ourselves as consumers and workers, that our greatest power is to vote with our dollars, to ally with a political party, and distrust people from other political parties. This is no way to build a genuinely participatory society.

As I have said for many years, conservatives fear big government, while progressives fear the huge corporations that control our government. These two sides are a lot closer to finding common ground in this scenario than most people realize.

Our most important work at this time is to remember who we are. We are the decision makers that we’ve been waiting for. Not just as voters from opposing political parties. Not just workers and consumers. But as We the People, as citizens. At least on paper, our nation was designed as a democratic republic, though it has never functioned as one. It is time for us to stand up together and exercise our constitutional authority to govern ourselves, where we live, to make this democratic republic live up to the ideals that we were taught about in school.

The essays in this book are here to provoke you, to stretch you, sometimes way beyond your comfort level. The book is full of practical ideas that any caring person can run with. I guarantee you won’t be bored!

More than half of this book is written from the perspective of my decades of work in the community rights movement, where people from all ideologies and political parties have been working successfully together to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the communities where each of us lives. In our work, we are constantly having to remind ourselves that We the People are at the top of the decision-making food chain, at least constitutionally! We are sovereign people,