In 2006, the Reverand Will Bowen launched a movement called A Complaint Free World.  The goal of the movement was to get people to stop expressing "pain, grief, or discontent."

The best way to stop expressing pain, grief, or discontent was to buy Bowen's book and purple  bracelets from his website. [...]

In an America built on the reinvention of reality, critical words make people uneasy -- and so do those who speak them.  In 1996, Alan Greenspan famously chided the financial communiity for "irrational exuberance."  They ignored him, and America became a bubble economy [...]

When the bubbles popped, and the jobs disappeared, and the debt soared, and the desperation hit, Americans were told to stay positive. [...] Complainers suffer the cruel imperatives of optimism: lighten up, suck it up, chin up, buck up.   In other words: shut up.

The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that the problem exists.[...]

All social movements are dismissed at some point as complaining.  Over time, they are recognized as speaking truth to power.  [...]

Complaint is often perceived as an alternative to alternative to action.  Those who complain are criticized as "just complaining," instead of "actually doing something."  But for marginalized and stigmatized groups -- racial and religious minorities, women, the poor, people who lack civil rights -- complaining is the first step in removing the shame for a lifetime of being told one's problems are unimportant, nonexistent, or even a cause for gratitutde.  Complaining alerts the world that the problem is a problem. [...]

People hate complaining because the do not like to listen.  When you listen to someone complaining, you are forced to acknowledge them as a human being instead of a category.  You are forced to witness how social systems are borne out in personal experience, to recognize that hardship hurts, that solutions are not as simple as they seem.

You are forced to trust, and you are forced to care.  In complaint lies a path to compassion.   (Coda: "In Defense of Complaining")

On January 18, 2017, two days before leaving the White House, Barack Obama addressed America as its president for the last time: "We're going to be okay," he promised citizens anxious not only about Trump's unexpected win, but about the autocratic policies he promised to pass and the extremist cabinet he had assembled.

As you know by now, America is not okay. [...]

"Who could have predicted a Trump win?" pundits pondered, and the answer was often blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and residents of the ignored heartland regions where he gained popularity -- the people whom Trump treated as target practice, and people in regions he targeted for votes.  These folks are the "no one" in the oft-said and inaccurate phrase of "no one saw it coming," a phrase that indicts the fool who utters it.   Many Americans saw it coming, but their warning were often dismissed as implausible or, worse, hysterical, when they were simply logical predictions based on lived experience.  The people pushed to the margins knew it would not be okay, because it had never been okay.  For many, the hypotheticals had already happened.  (Epilogue, September 2017)