About a year ago, sometime between the feelings of depression that followed Trump’s election and his inauguration, an old activist friend – and occasional Capital & Main contributor – contacted me. Vivian Rothstein had traveled to the South to register voters during the civil rights movement, and she thought it was time again to focus on non-violence as a way of resisting what was floating to the surface in America. She meant not only white supremacy, but what many activists recognize in Trump’s authoritarian tendencies: a threat to democracy itself. Would I join a small group of people to offer trainings in nonviolent resistance, including civil disobedience?

I agreed, and teamed up with a few others who have spent most of their lives practicing some form of nonviolence. We shared Rothstein’s belief that training people from faith communities in the protest tradition was timely and could be effective political work. In the time since, we have developed a course and taught it in a handful of congregations – even to a couple of activist groups beyond the religious community.

What I did not expect from this experience was a re-immersion in the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. It turns out that preparing for and leading these trainings has become an on-going learning opportunity. We have re-read parts of King’s writing, like the “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” chapter from his first book, Stride Toward Freedom. We’ve watched documentaries about his life, as well as a great segment on the Nashville sit-ins from the PBS documentary series A Force More Powerful. We have dug into serious questions from participants in the trainings, like what about nonviolence and the Holocaust?

We’ve been guided to much of this material by Andy Moss, a retired professor who taught peace studies for many years, and we each bring our own life pathway to nonviolence and civil disobedience. When we read King’s “Pilgrimage” chapter, I recognized my own intellectual journey. He and I had read the same theologians and philosophers, gone through similar questions, rejected the same dead ends – but he was a decade ahead of me in this academic workout.

It also took me a few more years beyond his life before I was fully committed to a nonviolent way of working. Caught up in the fervor of the late 1960s, I could not grasp the totality of life that nonviolence meant. As one of our team members, Abby Arnold, puts it, nonviolence is “three-fold: a philosophy, a spiritual practice, and a strategy.” I got the thinking part. I understood the strategies too. It took longer to get the inside-out part.

A life committed to nonviolence goes deeper than political activism or social change. It requires an interior life seeking a well-spring of motivation beyond anger, rage, or raw power. It requires a consistency between the inside and personal and the outside and public parts of our lives. I’ve known activists who will walk a picket line for all manner of peace and justice issues, but whose own personal relationships are bitter crucibles of conflict, hostility, even violence.

Studying King emphasized another issue for Elissa Barrett, also part of the teaching team: reconciliation. When the Montgomery bus boycott ended in victory over segregation, King preached that blacks should not flaunt their success at white people.  Boycott leaders even printed and distributed leaflets to blacks using the buses again to curtail their glee. This resolve came from a belief that it’s not people who are evil, but a system that maintains injustice and in which white people participated. It was justice the boycott won, not a defeat of people.

In stressing this point, the team shares stories of polarization bridged through gestures of reconciliation that follows conflicts. When the first car wash in America agreed to a union contract for its workers, community advocates took the management a potted plant as an affirmation that a new relationship between workers and owners could grow in that place. We also leafleted local congregations to let people know there was now a place to clean their cars that treated workers fairly.

Of course many Americans did not think of King’s voice as reconciling. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, a reminder that his teachings on nonviolence were so powerful that some people thought he had to be killed. His murder took place in Memphis, where King had joined a campaign for the rights of sanitation workers to form a union and receive fair wages.

Now this administration threatens the very existence of unions. Low-wage workers feel the sting of flat or stolen wages, even as deportation hangs over many of their heads. Democracy itself may hang in the balance. In such times as these, we know of no more effective way to meet injustice than re-immersing ourselves in King’s life and teaching people resistance through nonviolence.

Working Californians’ biggest hope during Trump Year One: Sacramento’s Democratic supermajorities:

With a Democrat as governor and a legislature controlled by true-blue supermajorities, it seemed only logical for Sacramento to spearhead the Trump resistance. State Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) said as much the day after Donald Trump’s 2016 election, vowing to “set an example for other states to follow.” Twelve months later, a modest raft of new laws aimed at blunting the brazen bigotry of Trump immigration policies — including Senate Bill 54, de León’s hard-won sanctuary state bill — and checking the administration’s planet-killing orgy of climate deregulation.

Working Californians’ biggest disillusionment during Trump year one: Sacramento’s Democratic supermajorities:

The political journey between good intentions and the statute book was twisted even by Sacramento standards in 2017. Of the 2,980 bills introduced by state lawmakers, roughly 35 were drafted as “Trump resistance” measures. But by the time the dozen-plus resistance bills made it to the governor’s desk, they tended to be anodyne wisps of their original forms. Senate Bill 6, San Diego Democrat Ben Hueso’s effort to create a legal defense fund for undocumented workers scooped up in ICE raids, became so toothless that Hueso retitled his “Due Process for All Act” as the “Expanding Due Process Act.” A no-brainer by state senators Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) and Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) designed to force Trump to release his tax returns before getting on the state’s 2020 ballot earned a Brown veto. Most controversially, perhaps, Rendon tabled SB 520, a sweeping Medicare for All-styled measure by state senators Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) and Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), before it even received a hearing.

2017’s wannest excuse for a sanctuary state act:

It once virtually banned all state and local law enforcement cooperation with ICE agents. But the bill signed into law by Jerry Brown, which had promised to be the sharpest state rebuke yet to Trump’s mass deportations, now looked strangely familiar. That’s because to get the governor’s signature, the California Values Act had to first pass muster with the powerful California Sheriffs’ Association. The compromise gives ICE full access to prisons and jails, allows police and sheriffs to share databases and to detain and transfer people to ICE if they have been convicted of any crime from a risibly broad list of 800 “hold offenses” recycled from 2014’s California Trust Act. Those include the very serious offenses of “intentionally processing a milk product that is required to be pasteurized without pasteurization, manufacturing a milk product in an unlicensed plant, providing milk product for manufacture or resale to an unlicensed person, or falsifying records required.”

2017’s most unsurprising (if most ignored) Rx for national and California Dems:

Just over 46 percent of California’s registered Democrats turned out for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary. That’s nearly the same percentage that pre-election polling for the November vote indicated was motivated by anti-Hillary feelings — presumably disgust over four more years of the romance between Clinton-Obama “New Democrats” and Wall Street — rather than anything remotely pro-Trump. Unfortunately, that lesson was lost on state Democrats when they gathered in May and selected Los Angeles County Democratic chair Eric Bauman as state party leader — in spite of Bauman’s financial ties to Big Pharma. Progressive challenger Kimberly Ellis, who narrowly lost a vote plagued by irregularities, charged that a “clear conflict“ had developed among “those nestled in power.” That diagnosis was echoed in postmortems that urged the disentangling of Democrats — “ideologically and financially — from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of public needs.”

California’s most badly bungled headline of 2017:

The news in November was all about the great Silicon Valley sigh of relief that blew down from Palo Alto like a laissez faire Santa Ana wind: California’s Department of Motor Vehicles had issued its long-delayed driverless vehicle testing regulations that would allow autonomous vehicles on California highways. A potential global market of at least $42 billion by 2025, panted the L.A. Times business pages. But for 3.1 million U.S. truckers (who represent represent two percent of total employment), there was little to cheer. In May, Goldman Sachs became the latest to predict that autonomous vehicle technology will disrupt trucking jobs — one of the last middle-class occupations that doesn’t require a high school diploma — into obsolescence at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year. A far more apropos headline would have been, “Just Say No.”

2017’s poster child for neoliberalism: Elon Musk. Again.

Everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley’s virulently anti-communitarian, anti-regulatory ethos seems to eventually get uttered by California’s favorite South African-born billionaire bad boy, Elon Musk. And in 2017, Musk did not disappoint. In February, the entrepreneur announced the creation of a new tunnel boring company and its first for-profit venture — digging an express tunnel that will bypass L.A.’s legendarily impenetrable rush hour traffic by connecting Musk’s Bel-Air home with his Space X headquarters in Hawthorne. Those lucky enough to be Elon Musk could see their morning hour commute cut to six minutes. Lest there be any confusion about who the free market best serves, this month Musk tweeted his Marie Antoinette-esque distaste for public transit and its twin aims of affordability and accessibility.