Friends,
Like so many of you, I’ve been cycling emotionally since first learning the news early Wednesday morning. Disbelief. Rage. Sorrow. Guilt. I can’t understand how this happened. I don’t want to understand how this happened. And, yet, I must understand how this happened. Why our country elected a man so manifestly against everything we claim to stand for. Why, amidst clear evidence of racism and misogyny, we have to listen to arguments that this was really about economic anxiety and the “forgotten” white America. Why, after over a year of promising to enact truly un-American policies, we have wide swaths of our media telling us to wait and see, that maybe he won’t be as bad as we fear, to just give him a chance.
Simply put, it will be a long time before we find the answers to how this happened and why we are being told to accept it. But the one thing we don’t have is time. The fight to recover what this country should be, what we want it to be, has to begin right now. And it has to be fought at all levels of government.
For too long, I’ve been complacent and thought that all would work out if we had the right president and the right senators. All the while, conservatives have successfully undermined our democracy at the state and local level for decades. Across the country, voting rights are being lost. Reproductive rights are under constant assault. School boards are run by people who care more about ideology than the basic education of our children.
These are the facts. What we need to do now, all of us, is start to push back. We need to mobilize across the country to elect progressive politicians at all levels. We need to mobilize to raise awareness of the policies being enacted. We need to know more, to speak out more, to do more in every way we can. We need to shine a bright light on what is taking place on the state and local level and we need to do this together.
So here’s my idea. Let’s come together to form a group of like-minded people to get organized, both in person and online. I would like to see groups formed in as many parts of the country as possible. Each group would organize and act in whatever way they feel is best for their situation. And we would all communicate nationally to better understand what conservative groups like ALEC are trying to push through at the state and local level.
This will be an organic process and I’m asking all of you to help make this as productive an effort as possible. I’m still not sure what this will look like in action, but I do know that our combined passion and enthusiasm to fight will make anything we do far better than sitting in despair over what is happening to our country.
I keep coming back to the words of Thomas Paine in the first issue of The Crisis: “These are the times that try men’s souls…Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” He wrote this in 1776 at a bleak and uncertain time for a collection of people trying to form a nation. And now, all these years later, his words feel as appropriate as they have ever been. So let’s come together. We are a group of smart, caring, engaged citizens and we can do so much in these next days, weeks, months, and years that can set us back on the road to being the nation we want to be.
Please reach out to me at AmericanCrisis2016@gmail.com. I welcome any and all interested people, so please spread the word as far and wide as you can. We are in this together.
Mike Shaw
