Skye Perryman’s new book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times—A Guide for All of Us: How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom, and Reimagine Democracy, is a handbook for the moment we face.
“I know how you feel—because I’ve been there there too. On a bad day, and there are many bad days, our nation’s backslide from democracy into autocracy accelerates…Untrained, masked federal agents are running roughshod in our streets, terrorizing communities. Peaceful protesters have been killed. The government has been weaponized, and the Supreme Court feels stacked…It’s almost impossible to keep up; even harder to know what to do.”
So begins Skye Perryman’s sobering but hopeful and practical new book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times. Though this handbook for hard times is elevated by a we’re-all-in-it-together spirit, Perryman, an attorney and president and CEO of Democracy Forward, doesn’t sugarcoat what we’re all facing.
“We have to acknowledge that there is no cavalry coming to protect us,” she writes. “No knight in shining armor to save us from the situation we are in. It’s up to us. We are the people who decide what happens next.” And while daunting, she says “it can also be empowering to know how essential we are in the fight for freedom and our democracy.”
Perryman fervently believes that action is antidote. By “reclaiming our collective power,” and by using the “tools that ordinary people have used in extraordinary times before us,” she insists that together we can “fight for freedom today, build for a better tomorrow.”
She is distinctly qualified to provide savvy, hands-on guidance to people who are eager to participate in the struggle to reclaim democracy. A few months after the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Perryman took over leadership of Democracy Forward, an organization founded in early 2017 that “advances democracy and social progress through litigation, policy, public education and regulatory engagement” both inside and outside the courtroom. Under Perryman, the organization has sued Trump and his administration (as the counsel of record or as a friend of the court) more than 100 times, with an admirable success rate that includes winning the release of nearly $6 billion in congressionally authorized funds for K-12 students and restoring more than $100 million in funding for evidence-based reproductive health programs that the administration had discontinued.
We have to acknowledge that there is no cavalry coming to protect us. No knight in shining armor to save us from the situation we are in. It’s up to us.
Skye Perryman in Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times
What is so impressive about the book is how unfazed Perryman is by challenging the richest and most powerful government on Earth, led by a megalomaniac. After succinctly describing how Donald Trump and his henchmen have ruined the lives of millions of people in the United States and around the world, Perryman devotes most of her time to clearly outlining concrete steps—complete with easy-to-use checklists, tip sheets and to-do lists—that we can take to transform ourselves from spectators into agents of change.
Grounded in vivid stories from courtrooms and communities, Perryman’s book provides well-tested strategies, along with analysis and insights drawn from history and her own experiences. Ordinary People outlines seven actions that everyone can implement: “stop spiraling and pick up a shovel”; “achieve information sobriety”; “begin at your front door”; “practice tailgate accountability”; “get serious about fear, courage and joy”; “remember the past, fight for the future”; and “keep going—the only way out is through.” To supplement all that, Perryman has created a dynamic website at ordinarypeopleaction.com, which is updated periodically with new tactics and strategies. Perryman hopes that “when we look back on this moment, we will be able to say that we ensured our rendezvous with destiny was one that led to freedom for all of us. That we upheld equality and the rule of law.”
People all across America are flexing their activist muscles as never before. No Kings Day 3 on March 28, with 8 million people gathering at 3,300 events in all 50 states, was one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history. Ordinary People comes at an ideal moment to help transform periodic protests into a sustained, disciplined, long-term, well-organized opposition movement that speaks truth to power and restores the imperative of liberty and justice for all.
If we roll up our sleeves and promise to heed this book’s call to come together with a common, urgent, inspired purpose, we willtake back our country. Then we can be safe in the knowledge that, like Perryman, we “found our community, we found our joy, we turned anger and sorrow into action and hurt into change.”
