2025 Life Logs, Day 305: It’s November
Date: Saturday, November 1, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny, Still Windy; High Temp 57, Low 50 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
On this first day of November, I attended the weekly rally on the Falmouth Green and then rushed home to meet a possible new neighbor. The house I live in has a studio apartment attached at the back. Since I moved here, no one has lived in the studio apartment as it is used as an office. But, really, it is empty most of the time. Lynda, the owner, found out from a friend that a young man just out of college just got a job at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole and he needs a place to live. His name is Billy, and he came to take a look this afternoon. Lynda wanted me to meet him to make sure I thought he would be a good neighbor. I truly enjoyed meeting him and think he would be a great neighbor, but it is not a done deal. He is looking at other places, and his choice will probably depend on the most affordable. He and Shadow got along famously, so we will both be very happy if he moves in.
I spent the remainder of the day and evening working on the format for the next film screening this Wednesday and also working on developing a resource handout. We will be introducing Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, so I decided I needed to know more about Gene Sharp. The documentary about him is titled, “How to Start a Revolution.” All I really knew about him is that he was considered the world’s foremost living expert on nonviolent revolution until he died in 2018 at age 90. The more I read about him, the more fascinated with his ideas I become. But when the I started watching the film, what I saw was a very genteel old man, not a raving revolutionary who some have called one of the world’s most dangerous men. Those ‘some’ are the world’s brutal dictators for whom Gene Sharp’s ideas have been lethal. It was his ideas, implemented by lovers of freedom and democracy around the world, that have brought down many dictators. And as long as I was at it, I decided to watch another documentary, “Bringing Down a Dictator.” This is about the student-led Otpor!Movement that led to the ouster of dictator Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. This is another really good documentary you can watch for free on the International Centre for Nonviolent Conflict website (https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/icncfilms/).
