Honeymoon's Over

[akirlu]

Okay, well I have done my share of feeling God's own crappy. But as someone said last night, the honeymoon's over. That's as much indulgence as the bastards get from me. Time to pick myself up off the floor, and go do the dishes. Clearly, there are a lot of dishes to be done. But you get the dishes done by starting somewhere and doing one at a time.

Here's what I'm doing for starters:

I just joined the Democracy Now Meetup near me. The next meeting is in early December and I'll plan on dragging Hal along. Continuing to build in-person networks is something I should have been working harder on all along, and I think the mutual support will be a good thing.

I also just signed up for the Party for America discussion list for similar reasons; the networks need to be maintained and extended.

I'm switching my clock radio to a music station for a while. I need not to wake up to the news while I'm still feeling fragile.

I'm getting a copy of What's the Matter with Kansas?, on the theory that you can't fight an effective war without good intel.

I'm thinking about what the next steps need to be. I think our bloggers have to keep doing what they have been doing, acting as clearing houses for the information that doesn't get big news play, and the rest of us have to help them keep the corporate media accountable. Have yo been writing letters to editors and NPR? Now is not the time to quit. The Sinclair advertiser boycott showed that a united effort using economic tactics can work and leveraging the power of internet communication was key, there. And we have to keep and redouble the pressure on our elected and appointed officials. Put those numbers in your cell phone. There's at least one battle over a Supreme Court appointment to be fought, Texas redistricting to be overturned, Tom Delay to be tossed out of the House on ethics and felony charges, and the list goes on.

Big John is right: we are not losers, we're Americans. We woke up on November 3 still Americans, and that means we have been blessed with great good luck and privilege, and that means we have a charge to keep.

I think the biggest disappointment about the election for me was that I thought somehow that if we got a Democrat in the White House, we could all relax and "go back to normal," and let someone else do the dishes for a while. It's not like that, it never was, and I should have known better.

Now, where are my rubber gloves?

Comments

[scottscidmore.livejournal.com]

I'm getting a copy of What's the Matter with Kansas?

Good book, good resource. Takes decades to reverse the changes, I suspect.

Getting to know the beliefs of the Founding Fathers is worthwhile, given the number of times one hears the phrase "The US was founded as a Christian nation".

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Read The Right Nation. Really.

B

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'll take your word. Onto the list it goes.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I've put it on my wish list, but I think I may defer it for a while until I'm feeling either better braced or more masochistic. For all that I do want to look at the best information available, I have a feeling this will not be reading for when I'm in a despairing mood.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It's not a depressing book; it's an explanatory book.

B

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Go you!

I'm so glad to see that people are planning to keep the anger at Bush and *doing* something with it. Just because this election is over doesn't mean that the fight is too.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

M was saying to me today that she hoped that people would react like this. I will bring her to Seattle one of these trips ;)

There is a part of me, a nasty gloating part, that hopes that this is a phyric victory like the Tory one in the UK in 1992 where the crap that had built up in the late 80's and early 90's hit with a slam soon after the election.

Well, we can live in hope eh?

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

I'd like to know why you picked Democracy Now Meetup as a choice for activism? I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my effort and money and would love to hear why you picked them.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Democracy Now is on my list because back when they were the Dean campaign, they did some awfully effective things for getting previously non-engaged, Democratic leaning people to get engaged and fired up about participation in the process. They seem to have a real interest in building coalitions and shaking up the DNC to be more inclusive and more effective and more aware of their potential allies outside the Beltway, and all those things are needful. I think it's important to keep those people engaged, get more, and leverage that new political involvement.

Meetup is on my list because I think that the way people are most effective politically is in person to person contact, and that having a social support network to learn from, lean on, and to leverage when you have specific agenda items in hand, is a very valuable tool.

Whether my local Democracy Now Meetup will in practice turn out to be what I hope, I don't know yet. I'm taking a pragmatic and experimental approach to this. It isn't a proposal of marriage, after all, so if one group doesn't get me where I want to go, I'll keep testing and trying with others. I'll keep looking at my various political filters and see what other people find effective. It's one of Steve Barnes' principles: failure equals feedback. If one thing doesn't work, you try the next thing. The important thing is to keep trying, to keep your eyes open for people who have successfully done what you want to do, and to learn from them.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Had Kerry won, the struggle would just be starting. The struggle against the Republicans determined to thwart him, the struggle against Kerry's own squishiness, not to mention the struggle against terror which Bush seems to think he's winning.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

You're right that I was kidding myself that I could have relaxed if Kerry won, but I think Kerry's "squishiness" was more a product of the election cycle narrative of spin-guided caricature than of reality. I also continue to think that our struggle is not against terror, nor even terrorism, but against the hijacking of the country's ability to reason clearly by crass exploiters of human tragedy. The truth is, as an American, you're far likelier to be killed by a drunk driver than a terrorism. Strangely, we have not declared war on alcohol.