Keep Fighting for Democracy
In this episode of Our Future Now!, National Children’s Campaign co-founders Natalie Mebane and Jonah Gottlieb are look back over the first season of Our Future Now! Reflecting on some of the themes that permeated season 1 and highlight some of the moments that made season 1 so impactful.
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In this episode of Our Future Now!, National Children’s Campaign co-founders Natalie Mebane and Jonah Gottlieb are look back over the first season of Our Future Now! Reflecting on some of the themes that permeated season 1 and highlight some of the moments that made season 1 so impactful.
Visit vote4ourfuture.org to learn more about how Zero Hour and the National Children’s Campaign are galvanizing Americans to vote on behalf of our nation’s 74 million children, who deserve bold climate action and environmental justice.
Guests and Episodes: (List is organized into order guest appeared in the episode)
● Dr. Mills – Back to School with COVID?
● Mustafa Ali – COVID-19s’s Connection to Environmental Injustice
● Destiny Hodges – Creating Black Spaces in the Environmental Movement
● Cherrell Brown – Defund vs Abolish the Police
● Devin Del Palacio – The BLM Movement to Transform this Country: Defund & Reinvest
● Tom Steyer – Why Tom Steyer is Mobilizing Millenials & Gen Z for Biden
● Antonique Smith – Vote for Love, Vote for Our Future
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Learn more about elections in your area and apply for your absentee ballot
Get involved with the National Children’s Campaign
Natalie Mebane: Our Future Now is produced by Goal 17 Media, storytellers for the common good.
Jonah Gottlieb: You need to be organizing. You need to stay aware, stay engaged, stay involved, and make sure that whatever happens in this country, you are making your voice heard, and you are doing everything you can to create the world that we all deserve to live in.
Natalie: Hi, I’m Natalie Mebane
Jonah: and I’m Jonah Gottlieb. We’re founders of the National Children’s Champain. Welcome to the season finale of Our Future Now
Natalie: You know, over the course of this season, we have had a variety of themes. We’ve talked about everything from coronavirus, to fighting for the environment and climate, to fighting against police brutality and for liberation as well as why it’s so important to vote and why we have to fight for democracy.
Jonah: Having a podcast, where we’ve been able to talk about all the issues that are impacting our world and tell our listeners how they can mobilize and take action to make a difference has been really cool, especially considering everything that’s gone on this year, because we have this time capsule. If we can look back through all our episodes of everything that’s gone on in the year 2020.
And so today, as we wrap up season one of Our Future Now we’re going to take a look back at some of the most iconic moments of season one that really showcase all the issues that we talked about over the course of this year.
Natalie: Jonah, one episode that really stands out to me when we talked about, we were talking about coronavirus was the one with Dr. Mills, where she really goes into how America let this happen.
Dr. Mills: We had no control over a pandemic occurring. We had control over the fact that we don’t believe in science in this country. We elected inept and impotent leaders and we didn’t do what needed to be done. So the first couple months, okay. We’re learning, we’re figuring it out after that. This was all on us. And if the schools wanted to be able to open if parents and legislatures and governors wanted schools to be open, we definitely could have had schools open on time, on schedule, no concern…
Natalie: Jonah, everything Dr. Mills said in that clip was absolutely true. This was not so much a natural disaster as it was complete lack of leadership in this country. As she said, we could not have prevented necessarily having a pandemic, but we could have dealt with it in a way that.
All our schools could have been opened. Our businesses could have been running and thriving. And I think that the, the really the tough lessons there from Dr. Mills telling us exactly where we missed the ball. We didn’t listen to doctors. We didn’t listen to scientists. Our leaders did not listen to the experts.
And that’s why we’re in this situation today.
Jonah: Absolutely people say that hindsight is 2020. And looking back, it’s easy to say. You know, we should have done this, or we should have done that in regards to the coronavirus, but there were folks like Dr. Mills who were sounding the alarm from the beginning, and yet our elected officials just refuse to listen to them because they refused to make the hard choices and stand up for the American people when it’s difficult to take a stand
Natalie: you know, Jonah, another episode. That I always felt like stood out to me and was very much connected to what Dr. Mills said was the episode of new Mustafa, Santiago Ali. He was talking to us about how the communities that are ready most impacted by pollution are also most impacted by a Corona virus. And that these issues actually go hand in hand.
Mustafa Santiago Ali: We know, a hundred thousand people are dying prematurely from air pollution every year in our country. We know millions more are getting sick. And we know that disproportionately as communities of color, lower wealth communities and indigenous folks, they are the sacrifice zones, the dumping grounds, where we place everything that nobody else wants.
You know, they’re causing cancer. Clusters are causing liver and kidney disease.They’re causing heart diseases and they’re also causing lung diseases. And we know that these chronic medical conditions make folks more susceptible to COVID-19, to the coronavirus…
Natalie: You know, Mustafa was saying in that episode that fighting for environmental justice is also fighting for health, it’s also fighting for the health of these communities who are also impacted even more when a pandemic hits.
And I remember we also had a guest Jonah Destiny Hodges from generation green, and she said that it’s not enough to just fight for environmental justice. You have to also fight for environmental Liberation
Destiny Hodges: White supremacism is the reason that we have the climate crisis.
And I say white supremacism because I do not accept that white people are Supreme. Um, but that is the reason that we’re in this whole mess….I think it’s extremely important to have that. That frame of reference to have that centered in the work for the environment and the work for climate. And again, environment for me is in no way, limited to the natural and for black people, it has never been limited to the natural because our environment has been plagued with white supremacists and with racism with corporate capitalism, um, you name it..
Jonah: I think that Destiny put that really well, because she talked about how the issues that people face are compounding…your environment. Isn’t just nature, but it’s everything that affects you in your life. And so to solve the compounding issues that are harming people in this country, we have to be fully fighting for liberation on all fronts. After the murder of George Floyd, we talked to Cherrell Brown about defunding and abolishing the police and like Destiny.
She told us about the history of the issues that are impacting people’s lives today and took us to the formation of the first police forces.
Cherrell Brown: If we see what the solution is right there, and we’re not investing in that, can we think about the other reasons why folks might want to keep them around, again, linking back to fossil fuel companies and wall street about the idea of protecting property, right? George Floyd was killed over a $20 check essentially property, right?
the DNA of police, really the purpose of one, protecting property, two make a complaint workforce, three, catching slaves. So what does it mean to think you can reform something that is institutionally, inherently and systemically about those things?
Jonah: Defunding the police is about more than just taking money away from the police departments, but it’s about reinvesting it in ways that will help communities. When we had school board member, Devin Del Palacios on the podcast, we talked to him about what his school district in Arizona would look like If he had the billions of dollars that was being given to the Phoenix PD,
Devin Del Palacios: we could meet every student’s individual needs. We can actually pay our staff. We can actually hire more educators. We can hire more educators that reflect the community that we serve. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Literally schools can make or break an entire community. Right? You have a bad school district. No, one’s going to want to purchase homes.
No businesses are going to want to set up shop.You won’t have the workforce, right. To help develop that community. So good schools matter.
Jonah: Exactly.And at the same time, we know that we can’t vote out all the problems that the people of this country are facing.
We talked to Tom Steyer about the importance of this election and the importance of saving our democracy and how young people can make their voices heard and achieve the changes that we need to see in this world. If we can have real influence both over this election and over the next administration.
Tom Steyer: If the Biden campaign thinks the reason they got elected and won is because a bunch of young people who care about climate voted for them, they have to deliver. If they think that the reason that it’s a secret and no one knows that those people voted and the reason they won is that a bunch of suburban Housewives flipped from being Trump voters to Biden voters, then they think they have to deliver for them. They got to know that it’s young people who care about the following things who made them win. That changes everything.
Jonah: We have the chance right now to create the country we want to see and to build a better world for every single American. So we need to do everything we can, and we’ve been doing everything we can to make sure that we win this election and save our democracy.
Natalie: Jonah, I think Antonique Smith’s episode really embodied that, she really gave a great overview and vision of the world that we all deserve and the world that we need to fight for.
Antonique Smith: All of the issues that we are all so passionate about right now is dependent on voting. Talk to people in your lives, talk to your family and your friends and help them get on the right page. We need to vote for love. We need to vote for unity. There’s a lot of hate going on and there’s a whole party that are just spewing a lot of hate right now. And so I implore you to vote for love, to vote for our future.
Jonah: Every week we give you guys an action item. And so we’re going to give you one that will just be something you need to be doing until you hear from us next, which is you need to be mobilizing. You need to be organizing. You need to stay aware, stay engaged, stay involved, and make sure that whatever happens in this country, you are making your voice heard and you are doing everything you can to create the world that we all deserve to live in.
Natalie: Thanks for listening to this episode and this season of Our Future Now we will be back in early 2021. For updates on Our Future Now you can follow Goal17 Media on all platforms @goal17media. To stay in touch with us during the break, you can follow me @Kalalight on Twitter, and you can find Jonah online @JonahGottlieb on all platforms.
If you missed any of the episodes we referenced today, you can go listen to them. Right now, links to every episode discussed can be found in the show
notes.
Jonah: Our Future Now is produced by Goal 17 Media, storytellers for the common good, a monumental thank you to everyone. At Goal 17 Media into our media partners, Parentology.
We want to give a special shout out to our producer, Sean Fox. Who’s been making us sound good since episode one. Be sure to subscribe to Our Future Now on your favorite streaming platform and share this episode with your family and friends on social media. Until next time, be engaged, stay mobilized and keep up the fight.
Jonah: I’m Jonah Gottlieb
Natalie: and I’m Natalie Mebane.
Jonah: And we’ll see you next year on Our Future Now.
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