By sharing information via email, we’ve learned that online petitions are nearly useless, but phone calls (and faxes when phone lines are shut down) to Congress can have an impact. We can do those calls from home with relatively little inconvenience, but is that enough? Do we need to meet up with others to have a greater impact?

Over the course of my 70+ years, I’ve linked up with like-minded individuals at different times, and I do think that groups with a strong focus and some minimal organization can have a real impact. Still, I’m often frustrated with groups and find the process of sifting through options and agreeing on a course of action tedious. I’m hesitant to join anything. I’ve occasionally been active in the Democratic Party, but never for long. Instead, I’ve worked with groups with a more narrow focus for a few years at a time in order to work on an issue that’s important to me.

This year is such a challenge. I don’t have the energy to really do a lot of work. Yet, I feel like we’re in the midst of an earthquake that won’t quit. The good news is that there are many younger people who are revved up and more able to respond to today’s challenges.

For those of you who have some time and energy and are not moving, yet again, please click through the links here to see which ones offer options that you can use to #RESIST. I’d love some feedback on what you find.

If you have a Twitter account, you can follow me at @anncantweet

Where do you go for “fair and balanced” news? Or do you even look for fair and balanced news?

Recently I found myself clicking around at Federalist.com, an interesting collection of opinions that I mostly don’t agree with. However, most of the articles I read were written in a somewhat civil tone with some sort of reasoning behind the opinions. I will come back to the Federalist because I need to read and think more first, but today I want to share an article from Vox about the court battle over the immigration ban Executive Order.

I turn to Vox for background on issues like this. It’s not a breaking news site, but I like their ability to pull together good background information quickly, and it’s liberal but not unwilling to challenge liberal thinking. They earn a star for “fair and balanced” in my list of sources. Bottom line: winning this battle is possible, but not guaranteed.

Legal Battle over Immigration Ban Explained

The Spanish Civil War captured the imagination of activists, artists, and writers from many countries. Hotel Florida is one many histories of this period, has some great reviews, but is not my personal favorite. I would direct readers instead to Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, a first-person account by an author best known to us for his other works.

Hotel Florida tracks the lives of three couples and additional friends and lovers drawn to Spain to get close to the action in order to advance their careers. Homage to Catalonia chronicles Orwell’s contact with various partisan groups as well as his personal participation as a combatant, service cut short when he suffered life-threatening injuries.

I encourage those of you who enjoyed Hotel Florida to use the comment option to share your reasons for liking the book. I’m going to use my space to tout Homage to Catalonia. If you’ve read other books about the Spanish Civil War, please direct us to those you found valuable.

One reason I enjoyed Orwell’s book is that it gives us a peek at the person behind the books we all know, 1984 and Animal Farm, as well as vocabulary such as Big Brother. The one similarity to Hotel Florida is that Homage is also the tale of a couple as Orwell’s wife joined him in Spain. In Orwell’s case, he was committed to tackling totalitarianism with action as well as words, not just observing and reporting.

Was Spain in the 1930s comparable to Syria in the 2010s? Certainly there were many factions, much name-calling, and difficulty knowing what was happening in various regions at any given time. The fascist label was thrown around with abandon to shape the narrative. Factions paired up and split apart frequently. Foreign powers shipped arms, fighters stole arms, and some fought with sticks, stones, and trickery for lack of arms.

Orwell talks of his admiration for the anarchists, a section of the book that was valuable to me. I have a narrow perspective of anarchists, seeing them only as black-clothed thugs who like to break things and use any organized protest as an opportunity to mess things up. Orwell tells of the uplifting feeling of fighting with troops without rank.

Beyond his description of the anarchists, Orwell “clarifies” the mess of the many factions opposing Franco’s attempts to defeat the Republican government. The one thing these factions really had in common was the desire to defeat Franco. Their disunity and disarray, their focus on one angle such as workers’ rights, or anti-clericalism, or some other angle could only have helped Franco prevail in the end.

When a book leads me to learn more about a subject, I consider that a good book. Homage to Catalonia has done that. I don’t want to know the details of the Spanish Civil War, but I do want to better understand Europe during the decades between the wars.