*From Rebecca Solnit – who, as per usual, hits the nail – several in fact – on the head...reframing our narratives of the lone hero, taking a new road – because change is done by many individuals working together over time, reading opportunities for wide-spread movements that positively impact all our lives. There is, in other words, no such thing or person as ‘Superman’…
Re: heroes and the exposure of Cesar Chavez’s crimes against women and girls: that kind of thing (though I didn’t know about him until this past week) is why I said in this interview (NYT 3/7/2026): “One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war.”
I think of how often awards, from the Nobel Peace Prize to the Goldman Awards are given to individuals when it’s the collective who achieved whatever was achieved, even if one person was charismatic or a high-profile spokesperson or founder. No one ever did it alone. It’s when someone’s words or actions or ideas resonate with the many that it becomes a movement, that it succeeds in changing the world. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t even launch the Montgomery Boycott of 1955; Rosa Parks and Black women’s organizing did; in some ways he made it capture the public’s imagination with his soaring rhetoric but it in return made him the high profile figure he became. Had thousands and then millions not shared his vision he would’ve just been a charismatic speaker, not a movement leader. The movement makes the leader, but the movement is the engine driving history forward; the leader is often just a hood ornament.
*& more from Solnit in the wake of the Chavez news, very slightly edited by yours truly:
Dolores Huerta: “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.” That’s from Huerta’s statement today about being raped by Cesar Chavez, timed to coincide with the NY Times expose on how he abused her and some minors in the 1960s, at the height of his fame and impact.
When you think you’re a liberator of your people and you’re also sexually abusing women and girls from among those people you’re demonstrating that you have trouble recognizing them as people. (And that is way too common.) As Huerta says, this happened because he saw her as property, as his to use, and because he knew he could get away with it because he had more power, including social power, than her, including the power of who gets believed versus who gets blamed (and she didn’t want to impact the movement, which would’ve been undermined by this).
Basically feminism for the past 250 years has been a struggle to establish that women are people endowed with certain inalienable rights, and among those rights are life, liberty, and bodily autonomy. Denial of reproductive rights in the name of the personhood of the embryo/fetus is denial of the personhood of the person who’s pregnant. It’s frustrating that feminism is so often treated as done deal to dismiss when it’s just getting started with so much yet to do.
Also frustrating that when I posted on BlueSky, people commented about how this is about “powerful” men, but in a society that listens to men over women and girls, that treats the former as competent and credible, the latter as not, the former as having rights that matter, the latter as not, every man is empowered to abuse, and it happens at all levels and in all sectors of society.
Feminism especially since 2012 or 2013 has worked to dismantle the stories that protected rapists and abusers, notably the stories that somehow men are reliable witnesses and women are unreliable ones, that women lie about rape all the time (it’s rapists who lie about rape all the time). The reason why these old stories are surfacing now is because through the valiant voices of survivors and the efforts of feminists there is space for them to be heard as there was not before.
Each of these stories is treated like an isolated incident, but it’s Cesar Chavez and Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump and the junior high school coach and the Boy Scout leader (there was a huge class action suit in scouting a few years ago, and yeah boys and men get abused too). While we hear about the famous guys it’s also the non-famous guys with ordinary jobs, the family member, the neighbor….
From the Guardian last Sunday we have three separate stories about men and rape: a story about Cesar Chavez’s rape and abuse; a story about the Crown Prince of Norway’s conviction on multiple rape charges; and another Epstein story. …that means that there are three stories about rapists on the front pages of a major paper, which should be shocking but it’s been normal for decades to have that many or more stories treated as isolated incidents all over the news.
But also, from the NYT story that broke the news, a victim says: “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” Ms. Lopez said. “The movement — that’s the hero.”