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Last Monday, inspired by reading about a small protest of Elon Musk and DOGE that happened at a Tesla charging station in Maine, Joan Donovan decided to make a digital flyer inviting people to join her at a protest this weekend at a Tesla showroom in Boston. Days later, the idea has grown organically into more than three dozen protests at Tesla showrooms across the country. It struck me that there are Tesla dealerships and charging stations across the nation, and this is a point of leverage that many people can access, rather than having to go to your state capital, says Donovan, a professor at Boston University who says she is acting in her capacity as a citizen. This is a place in which we can make a difference. Through DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiencywhich is not an official government agencyMusk gave his team access to private taxpayer data and classified information. Hes forced the virtual shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing lifesaving programs that were delivering HIV drugs, oxygen, and other medical aid to various communities around the world. He’s actively dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that would have regulated his plans to set up a new payment service at X. He’s pushed federal workers out of their jobs. Much or all of the work is likely illegal, and multiple court cases are underway. A website, TeslaTakedown, lets anyone set up a local DOGE protest, many of which will happen on February 15. (It also calls for anyone who owns Tesla stock or cars to sell.) Often, with these types of initiatives, it takes weeks to plan, says Alex Winter, a documentarian known for making The Panama Papers and other films, who happened to know Donovan and helped amplify the idea. In this case, we did it in a week. At the end of the day, the central organizer on this is the publicwere giving them a place to organize. These are individuals across the country who are protesting en masse at these showrooms. When we spoke on Friday afternoon, 39 events were planned, and the number was growing. A handful of other protests have already happened at Tesla locations, from Manhattan to Seattle. The efforts might seem, at first, to be small. But in theory, the pressure on Tesla could succeed. It is possible to get results this way, says Edward Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors. Theres a path to putting a considerable amount of pressure on Musk, personally. Tesla car sales are already struggling. In 2024, Tesla sales were essentially flat, dropping 1.1% from the year before after years of growth, despite the fact that the company slashed prices. In China, with a vast array of newer, arguably more innovative options for electric vehicles, fewer consumers are buying Teslas. Sales have also fallen in Europe, driven in part by Musk’s unpopularity. In the U.K., where Musk has argued that the prime minister should be jailed and America should “liberate” the British people from their “tyrannical” government, one survey found that 60% of likely EV buyers no longer want a Tesla because of Musk’s politics. In Germany, Musks support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, and the fact that he appeared to use a Nazi salute during Trumps inauguration, presumably contributed to a 59% drop in year-over-year sales in January. Tesla sales also fell in France, Sweden, and Norway last month. Some Tesla owners, both in Europe and the U.S., are either selling their cars or adding apology bumper stickers. Musk, and Tesla investors, say that the real value of the company is in its future promise of full self-driving tech. But Musk has been teasing its imminent release for years. The only real business that Tesla has now is its EV business, and with more competitors in the space, its not doing well. The Cybertruck, Teslas first all-new vehicle since 2017, is the biggest flop in the auto industry, Niedermeyer says. That creates an opening for a Tesla boycott in the U.S. The unique opportunity that American consumers have is if we can collectively affect a dramatic reduction in sales here, that pushes volume down, that pushes margin down, Niedermeyer says. At this tipping point, the core business that generates 90% of revenue could turn into a negative-margin business, which means that no matter how many sales they do, they lose money on every car. Eventually, its possible that the psychology around the companys arguably overinflated stock price could shift. With a bubble stock, as long as people prop it up, its great, he says. The problem is once the psychology shifts from greed to fear and people start selling. Musks cash loans are secured by Tesla stock, so at some point, hell have to sell stock to cover margin callswhich is likely to convince many more people to sell and create a downward spiral, Niedermeyer says. Theres no evidence yet that Musk is worried about whats happening at Tesla. But employees and many investors are concerned, according to a Washington Post story. Musk has inflicted a massive amount of damage on the perception of that company, Nell Minow, vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, told the Post, saying that she donated most of her Tesla stock to charity in 2024. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.) It’s not clear how quickly pressure against Tesla could make a differenceor exactly how much harm Musk can inflict on the government while lawsuits make their way through the courts. But in addition to impacts on Tesla, the protests can help raise awareness of whats happening now in D.C. DOGE has done so much damage already to government agencies, particularly ones that were investigating Musk’s companies for wrongdoing, says Donovan, the university professor organizing a Tesla protest in Boston. And so if the government’s not going to call attention to these conflicts of interest, then hopefully the people will. She says the protests are also a way to show support for federal workers who are being pushed to leave their jobs. Winter, the documentarian, says he has multiple motivations for protesting. “There is an end-game desire to devalue the stock and end up with a vote of no confidence [on] Musk from the shareholders, which would absolutely impact him in a meaningful way,” he says. “An enormous aount of his value is tied up in his stake of Tesla.” In addition, Winter says, “There’s an enormous need for greater literacy and understanding in the country and the world about these tech oligarchs. It’s something I’ve been working on for decades, which is to demystify this notion that they’re invulnerable and all-powerful.” Protests “are extremely effective, and educating oneself is extremely effective,” he says. “And, I would argue, [these efforts] minimize hopelessness. Because the more specifics you understand about Musk and his wealthand the vulnerability of his wealthand the more you understand about what powers people do and don’t have, the more you realize there’s a path forward.”
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Compassion comes easily to me. As the granddaughter of immigrants from Lithuania and Poland who spoke little English, I understand what its like to be treated as a stranger in America. As a journalist, I covered stories of war and trauma in the 1990s, including the crushing of Chinese protests in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the Soviet Unions collapse two years later. I covered the war between Iraq and Iran. I witnessed ethnic strife in South Africa and the toll poverty takes in Mexico. As a professor of cultural engagement and public diplomacy, I have watched and studied how compassion can help build and strengthen civil society. And having worked in senior levels of the U.S. government for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on international conflict resolution, I have learned that compassion is a key ingredient of peacemaking. Especially now, as President Donald Trump seeks to deport millions of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization and to stop funding the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has long spent billions of dollars a year helping the worlds poorest people, compassion seems lacking among U.S. leaders. Perhaps that all explains my curiosity about a new study on the state of compassion in Americapart of the glue that holds communities together. Defining compassion Sociologists define compassion as the human regard for the suffering of others, and the notion of using action to alleviate this pain. The report that caught my eye was issued in January 2025 by the Muhammad Ali Center, which the late boxer cofounded 20 years ago in Louisville, Kentucky, to advance social justice. As the Ali Center explains, compassion starts with the individualself-care and personal wellness. It then radiates out to the wider community in the form of action and engagement. You can see compassion at work in the actions of a Pasadena, California, girl, who started a donation hub for teens affected by fires that ripped through the Los Angeles region in early 2025. She began collecting sports bras, hair ties, and fashionable sweaters, helping hundreds of her peers begin to recover from their losses in material and emotional ways. Its also visible in the estimated 6.8 million people in the U.S. who donate blood each year, according to the American Red Cross. Were grateful to blood donors across the country who generously give to help patients in need.Severe winter weather and wildfires have impacted our blood supply since the new year, and we appreciate everyone who has made, kept and rescheduled their blood donation appointments pic.twitter.com/TperMufpjq— American Red Cross (@RedCross) January 24, 2025 Resilience in America While Ali is best known for his battles in the ring and his outspoken political views, he also helped those in need in the U.S. and other countries through large charitable donations and his participation in United Nations missions to countries like Afghanistan, where he helped deliver millions of meals to hungry people. The researchers who worked on the Ali Center report interviewed more than 5,000 U.S. adults living in 12 cities in 2024 in order to learn more about the prevalence of compassionate behaviors such as charitable giving, volunteering and assisting others in their recovery from disasters. They found that the desire to help others still animates many Americans despite the nations current polarization and divisive politics. The center has created an index it calls the net compassion score. It approximates the degree to which Americans give their time and money to programs and activities that nurture and strengthen their communities. Cities with high compassion scores have more community engagement and civic participation than those with low scores. A higher-scoring community performs better when it comes to things like public housing and mental health resources, for example. Its residents report more career opportunities, better communications between local government and citizens, more community programs, and more optimism around economic development where they live. The report provides some clues as to what drives compassionate behavior in a city: a sense of spirituality, good education, decent healthcare, resources for activities like sports, and opportunities to engage in local politics. All told, Americans rate their country as a 9 on a scale that runs from minus 100 to 100. The report also identified some troubling obstacles that stand in the way of what it calls self-compassionmeaning how volunteers and donors treat their own mental and physical health. Frequent struggles with self-care can lead to rising levels of isolation and loneliness. From left: Jeni Stepanek, chair of the Muhammad Ali Index; Lonnie Ali, cofounder and vice chair of the Muhammad Ali Center; and DeVone Holt, the centers president and CEO, at the launch of the Muhammad Ali Index on January 16, 2025 [Photo: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Muhammad Ali Center] Doubting their own capacity The 2025 Compassion Reports findings show that many Americans still want to live in a compassionate country but also that Americans view the country as less compassionate today than four years ago. The report delves into gaps in compassion. About one-third of those interviewed acknowledged that there are groups toward whom they feel less compassionate toward, such as people who have been convicted of crimes, immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization, and the rich. Only 29% said they feel compassion toward everyone. The report also identifies gender gaps. Despite expressing greater awareness of systemic challenges, the women surveyed reported less self-compassion than men. Its not the first compassion study ever done. But I believe that this one is unique due to its focus on specific cities, and how it assessed limits on the compassion some people feel toward certain groups. Helping health and humanity The Compassion Institute, another nonprofit, seeks to weave compassion training into healthcare education to create a more caring and humanitarian world. It cites the benefits of compassion for human beings, with everything from reducing stress to alleviating the effects of disease on the mind and body. Academic institutions, including Stanford University, have conducted many studies on how teaching compassion can guide healthcare professionals to both treat patients better and achieve better outcomes. A team of Emory University researchers examined how training people to express more compassion can reduce stress hormones levels, triggering positive brain responses that improve immune responses. Offering an advantage Although there are plenty of adorable videos of dogs and cats behaving kindly with each other or their human companions, historically compassion has differentiated humans from animals. Human beings possess powers of emotional reasoning that give us an edge. Scholars are still working to discover how much of human compassion is rooted in emotional reasoning. Another factor theyve identified is the aftermath of trauma. Studies have found evidence that it can increase empathy later on. You might imagine that in a world of hurt, theres a deficit of compassion for others. But the Ali Centers report keeps alive the notion that Americans remain compassionate people who want to help others. My experiences around the world and within the U.S. have taught me that human beings both have the power to be violent and destructive. But despite it all, there is, within all of us, the innate ability and desire to be compassionate. That is a net positive for our country. Tara Sonenshine is an Edward R. Murrow professor of practice in public diplomacy at Tufts University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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James Chappel is an associate professor of history at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. He is the author of Catholic Modern, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and The New Republic. Whats the big idea? Aging in America is becoming one of our countrys most important policy arenas. With more old citizens than young ones, the relevance of elder members in society has never been greater. Despite great progress in the quality of old age over the past century, there is much need for growth in terms of practical policy and cultural perceptions. Below, Chappel shares five key insights from his new book, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age. Listen to the audio versionread by Chappel himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Population aging is one of the biggest historical transformations of our time. We think about population aging as an issue for medicine and finance, but we dont usually think about it historically. From the broadest perspective, population aging is one of the biggest changes that has happened to American society in the past century. Many people think of politics, iPhones, or AI when considering dramatic societal change, but those things matter less than major demographic changes. Human life is not what it was a century agoits twice as long!and that deserves much more attention. 2. Weve only been seriously contemplating population aging for a century. Most of the major things we deal with as a society (education, politics, health, war, gender) are topics we have publicly debated for centuries. We have reflected long and hard on many subjects, but no one really paid attention to population aging until about the 1930s. Even people thinking very hard about social reform and progress, like Karl Marx, werent thinking about aging at all. So, aging is an issue that has a pretty short history. What to do with old age and how to pay for old age are areas of reflection with a lot of space open for creativity. Its an exciting, vibrant, fresh avenue for collective contemplation. 3. There have been many different approaches to aging. We often think of aging as something nonideological. Education is ideological, and the military is ideological, so we have robust public debate about the meaning of these things. But old age is kind of like, well, you get Social Security and Medicare, and we dont want to think about it too much beyond that. Old age is in a moment of ideological stasis. But for most of the past century, theres been much debate about what it means to age well: socially, politically, and justly. There has been socialist aging, conservative aging, green or eco-conscious aging, etc. One tradition I look at is critical race theory. From that perspective, the history of aging looks quite different. There actually was a robust tradition of Black thought about aging. A lot of inspiring Black leaders said, essentially, that racism and prejudice follow Americans through the whole course of life. Older Black Americans have all kinds of negative outcomes, and Black activists suggested specific reforms to bring the insights of the Civil Rights Movement into old age politics and policy. We need to reinvigorate and repoliticize old age. We should remember how political and divisive it was (and therefore, how exciting it was) to debate old age just a few decades ago. 4. 20th-century solutions to old age are very good. Historians are often quite down on American history. They tend to focus on the persistence of inequality, violence, or disenfranchisement. But when it comes to old age, the situation is much better than it was a century ago. A century ago, older people often lived in squalor, in one-room shacks with dirt floors. There were only a few elders because public health was so bad. Now, older people are quite economically privileged, and they have access to the best poverty reduction program in the country, which is social security. Theyre the only age bracket with something like socialized medicine through Medicare. Theres a lot to be grateful for as aging Americans, but theres also a lot left to be done. There are failures in old-age policy, especially for people over 80, the old old. Issues of frailty, nursing home care, and things like that. Many American middle-aged couples, especially women, are financially or emotionally devastated by caring for older relatives. This is a result of a policy decision that could have been approached differently. There were approaches on the table that would have lessened the burden on unpaid caretakers, and it is not too late. When we think historically about old age, its important that we tell an optimistic story. Im excited to get old. There will be way more social programs for me when Im 65 than I have available to me now. But theres also room for growth, especially in dealing with policy for the old old. Nursing homes and extended care will be the most important policy arenas in the near future. 5. Getting old is an adventure. Old age in America can be very good. It can be very fun. You have access to so much when it comes to opportunities for leisure and health. But what I mean by the adventure of old age is a bit different. As Americans, we tend to believe that we make our biggest contributions as citizens when were young, that politics is a young persons game: green energy, Black Lives Matter, and other movements are for younger people, and old people can step back. I think that is absolutely not true. That is a completely outdated way to think about American politics. I think the age of youth has eclipsed. There are more older people in America than younger ones. The decisions we make about how to age and think about old age policy will matter now more than ever. Being provocative, I might even say that decisions about aging are going to matter more than decisions about youth because I think the age of the youth is over. Theres been a major demographic transition in this country and many others. As we age, we should not think of ourselves as becoming less relevant. We should think of ourselves as becoming more relevant. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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