Why I quit the “Indivisible” movement
Or: Indivisible ain’t that inclusive
I’ve been interested in politics since I was a kid, and I come from a politically-active albeit staunchly-conservative family. In college, I majored in Political Science and Journalism and since then have worked on local city and state legislature campaigns for candidates I personally know and in whom I believed during election cycles.
Yet I did not get personally invested in any presidential or national campaign season like I did in 2016. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone there. Being incredibly motivated to stop Trump, whom I believed (and still do) to be a demagogue, I supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 cycle and ended up voting for Hillary Clinton in the end.
After the election it was the Women’s March and though we took part in it in our little town in red county rural Washington many people did show up, more than 3,000 in fact. I felt like we were part of something powerful and large — a mass of like-minded people willing to use our collective muscle to resist and accomplish something, anything. Yet almost from the first moment after the Women’s March here the Indivisible movement changed. It became about a few people trying to establish leadership and dominance over this newly-formed group of well-meaning folks.
What’s worse is that instead of merely establishing a petty kingdom and ruling over their new subjects in the way they saw fit, the “Indivisible” leadership began to clash with and undermine the already-existing groups of liberal organizations in the area. That doesn’t seem so “indivisible” to me.
Being a card-carrying Democrat I’m used to being around some pretty galling condescension, but the open hostility and general bad attitudes on display by the leadership of the indivisible group in Wenatchee, Washington left a very bad taste in my mouth indeed.
In addition, none of the events after the Women’s March were kid-friendly so I couldn’t bring my wife and young daughter along. That trend has continued and to tell you the truth kids don’t seem very welcome in general, so we stopped going. I also left the myriad indivisible Facebook groups that have sprung up like wildfire across the region. I left the secret, public, private and super-triple-stamp secret alike. The only one I stayed in was the congressional district-wide one and even that I stopped following.
And you know what? It felt great!
I don’t feel like I’m missing anything and I’m free of the petty internal politics, non-sensical memes and melodramatic chicken little rhetoric.
