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# 2025-05-26 - You Are More Powerful Than You Think by Eric Liu
A friend sent me a copy of You Are More Powerful Than You Think by
Eric Liu. It is about power in a civic sense. For power in a
self-help sense, see Sage Liskey's zine below.
(DIR) You Are A Great And Powerful Wizard by Sage Liskey
What follows is the full text of the prologue, about 1000 words. I
call this powerful writing.
* * *
Picture a ripe, red tomato. Perhaps there's one in your kitchen. If
it's nearby, hold it. Feel its heft. Consider its origins.
There's a fair chance it was picked in Florida, home to a
$600-million tomato industry; and if so, a fair chance it was picked
in Immokalee, in the sweltering southwest of the state, where much
of the industry is concentrated; and if so, a fair chance it was
picked by someone who not that many years ago was, in essence, a
slave.
Immokalee isn't a place most Americans have seen. But most Americans
have eaten the fruits of its vast harvest. And because the picking
of tomatoes can't be mechanized, that harvest has always been by
hand. By the hands of migrant workers, mainly from Mexico and South
America, who were entrapped in debt peonage, paid by the bucket and
not the punishing hours in the field, yet whose meager wages were
routinely stolen by their overseers, and who were pistol-whipped and
chained in locked containers if they complained.
These workers were the very definition of powerlessness. They had no
recourse. No advocates. No fluency in the language of their own
domination. They were socially dead to the rest of the United States.
And yet, starting in 1993, they came alive. A few of them began to
meet secretly in a local church. They resolved, together, to act.
First they organized community-wide work stoppages, then hunger
strikes, then mass marches hundreds of miles long. They became the
Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The press took notice. The workers
fought for better pay, and after five years, they finally got a raise
from the growers. They fought for such small dignities as shaded
rest areas. They earned the currencies that people crave once they
achieve subsistence: respect and recognition. They were /seen/.
And they didn't stop there. Once they escaped invisibility, they
were determined to undo the bigger system of involuntary servitude.
They worked with prosecutors to build cases against their traffickers
and captors. Those investigations and convictions freed over 1,200
farmworkers from captivity and forced labor.
They didn't stop there either. They realized that the machinery of
their exploitation was powered by supermarket and fast-food chains
that buy produce in mass quantities and create pressure to drive
costs down. So in 2001, they organized the first ever farmworker
boycott of a fast-food company, against Taco-Bell; four years later
Taco Bell's parent company agreed to raise wages and reform its
supply chain. With this victory came more allies, more assistance
from more experts of all kinds.
And they didn't stop there. They pressured McDonald's and Burger
King to agree to the same terms. They organized the Fair Food
Programs, through which these restaurants and retail chains would buy
only from growers who paid a fair wage and abided by a code of
conduct stricter than federal law. The buyers agreed to contribute
some of the same pittance they once squeezed from the workers--a
penny per bucket--to a common fund for worker health, safety, and
education. Wal-Mart, with its market-moving scale, joined in 2014.
over $10 million has been paid into the fund in its first seasons.
The pickers of Immokalee fought for a fair chance, and they're still
fighting.
So if you sometimes wonder whether you have enough clout to make
change happen--how /you/ could ever be seen or heard, or have your
demands answered--then just think of them. If people who started
where /they/ started could learn power and transform their lives
together, can't anyone? If /they/ did it, shouldn't /everyone/?
Now think about where /you/ work and live and ask yourself: Who runs
this place?
It's not that simple a question. There are certain public offices
you can identify: mayor or city manager, council members, or
commissioners. Widen the lens. What businesses dominate the local
economy? Now wider still. Where are the arenas where deals are
made, and to whom are they open? Who are the fixers and the
enforcers? Are there groups or blocs or interests that always seem
to get their way? Who /really/ runs this place?
Once you have a sense of an answer, ask another question: How could
it be different?
This brings us to what I call the Pottersville flip. In Frank
Capra's classic film /It's a Wonderful Life/, George Bailey gets to
see what life would be like if he'd never been born. In this
counterfactual world of Bedford Falls--an idyll of trust and mutual
aid and democratic pride--becomes Pottersville, a race-to-the-bottom
grid of slums, trashy bars, and pawnshops all owned by the richest
man in town, Mr. Potter.
Many American towns in the three generations since /It's a Wonderful
Life/ have become a lot more like Pottersville than Bedford Falls, in
the sense that wealth and clout have consolidated into the hands of
one or a few. But wherever your town might fall on the Bedford
Falls-to-Pottersville spectrum, imagine flipping places.
Imagine, if you live in a place where you and your neighbors have
been crushed by the unseen force of someone else's wealth an wants,
what it would be like to be Bedford Falls. Or imagine, if you live
in a place where civic health is high and opportunity abounds, what
it would be like to descend into Pottersville.
Now run the same thought experiment for the other places in your
life: Who runs this company? This campus? This state? Who, if you
want to change custom or culture or policy, do you have to see, win
over, pressure, shame, praise, or /be/ to get the change you want?
Who runs this neighborhood, this party, this club or association?
Who decides who gets what? What counts as a fair chance?
To ask the question is to begin to change the answer.
The immigrant pickers of Immokalee may never have seen or even heard
of /It's a Wonderful Life/. George Bailey is probably not part of
their cultural vocabulary. But they've definitely done the
Pottersville flip. They imagined the opposite of helplessness and
the inverse of invisibility. They seeded the change they needed.
They are harvesting it now.
Go back to that ripe, red tomato, whether in your mind's eye or on
your kitchen counter. Appreciate the world of possibility within it.
And let it be a humble reminder to you:
You're more powerful than you think.
See also:
(HTM) Review by Ame Sanders
tags: article,inspiration,political
# Tags
(DIR) article
(DIR) inspiration
(DIR) political