Update: Scroll to the bottom of the post for the latest.
This blog is currently participating successfully participated in the nationwide general strike in protest of the United States government’s actions against refugees and immigrants. Access to our archives has been was temporarily suspended and has since been restored.
We do not apologize for this inconvenience.
All complaints should be directed to the United States government.
Read more about the strike here:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/15/day-without-immigrants-will-shutter-dc-businesses-/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/politics/immigration-restaurant-strike-trump.html
Update:
The day is over, and access to our archives has been restored. The Day Without Immigrants strike made headlines nationwide, and shut down a good portion of my local area. It is heartening to see people participating in collective action in meatspace in addition to online action.
Perhpas surprisingly, the hit counter actually reached a record since launch over the past 24 hours. I’m not quite sure what to make of this. We received a great deal of positive feedback during this time, which is much appreciated.
The biggest complaint of this strike, aside from those disagreeing with the cause, and the idea of collective action in general, was that it was poorly organized, poorly publicized, and done on short notice. In a sense, this is good news. It demonstrated the ability for quick reaction, and provides feedback for future action; most notably, the planned general strike for International Women’s Day on March 8th.
There have been talks of further strike action on Friday and continuing into the weekend. I applaud this effort, although I fear that attempting to extend this largely spontaneous effort will overtax the limited economic resources and political will of those who are perhaps sympathetic, but not necessarily committed enough to risk their livelihoods. Better in this case, I believe, to play the long game.
One more thing; amid all the demonstrations and media coverage, the super-PAC behind the presidential administrations quietly released a “Media Accountability Survey”. The questions are, of course, horribly biased, and it seems reasonable to assume that this will result in an accordingly biased result. Therefore, there has been an effort by some social media circles to spread publicity of the survey to ensure that it receives a wide sample size. For those interested, the link is below.
https://action.donaldjtrump.com/mainstream-media-accountability-survey/
