If you, like me, have a lot of people in your social media feeds who are older, whiter, and consider themselves progressives because they voted Democrat, I’m confident you’ve seen a lot of “I Told You So”s in the last several weeks. Lots of holier-than-thou “Is this what you voted for, Republicans?” and the like.
And I gotta tell you, I’m damn sick of it.
It’s messages like that that tell me we learned nothing. That this will just keep happening, because people would rather be right about the problems than actually solve them. And I get it, it’s so goddamn frustrating to see all of the things we were afraid of coming to pass, all of the lies exposed and all of the masks coming off just like we said they would. I get it. I do. But like…we’re here now, and looking back and saying “wow don’t you feel stupid now” is helping nothing and just keeping those people at arms length.
And honestly? I’ve talked a little about this in a past post, but those Republicans didn’t get us here, at least not by themselves. This ball has been rolling for a LONG time, and all those pearl clutching liberals did just as much to either keep it rolling or watch it go by. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
And for those of us on the left, it can be so frustrating to see your, like, liberal uncle posting 30 times a day about all of these terrible things that are going on, sitting there screaming at Facebook or whatever “Yeah, I know, it’s been happening the whole time and you just had your eyes closed when the civil rights violations had blue pins on their lapels.”
That being said
There’s fuel here. There’s a lot of anger, and a lot of energy. If we can focus and direct that energy, we can actually do some good. I think that’s going to be one of the biggest tasks for the pinkos out there for the rest of this year. We need to funnel these outraged Democrats into action, and into causes. And we can’t let them get bored or complacent and just fall back to doing nothing and having no energy for progress.
There is such a tremendous potential for change in the American political consciousness right now, but there is also a great deal of inertia, in both ways. The GOP has their ball rolling, and it’s gonna be hard to stop, and the Dems have been stationary for a long time, and getting them moving will take just as much effort.
We need to organize these people into a political force, to educate and train and collaborate. I strongly recommend the podcast episode “You Already Know How to Organize” from It Could Happen Here if you, like me, have been feeling stuck seeing all this potential and not knowing what to do with it.
No more “I Told You So”, no more “This is Just Disgraceful” facebook outrage. Let’s do stuff.
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