So, as I'm sure everyone has noticed, things are bad. I've been thinking a lot about the question that I'm sure is on everyone's minds: "What next?"
I'm going to take some very good advice and give myself 72 hours to weep, gnash my teeth, and rend my clothes. Then I'm going to dust myself off and get on with life. No matter how bad things seem now, the sun will rise tomorrow. Western civilization will not fall, women will not become chattel, they will not put a statue of Jesus on the White House Lawn. We survived eight years of Reagan, we'll survive this too.
That's said, I'm not going to crawl into bed with a box of Fig Newtons, pull the covers over my head and ignore the bad stuff that we all know is coming. I'm not going to sit around and complain and wait for the other half of the population to wake up and see things my way. Things will only get better if we make them get better. Extreme conservatives have done a great job of claiming the initiative in the political arena. They're in control. We can't let that continue.
(Thanks to supergee, Bull Moose and James Wolcott for inspiring blog posts.)
8 Comments
Hell yeah. It's our country too. Commentating and talking-head-TV types get entranced by that big swath of red in the middle of the country, as tho the fact they won makes them right. And ignoring the fact that half the voters disagree, and all those blue states around the edges. Or as Gil Scott Heron put it so eloquently lo these many years ago, "mandate my ass"
i really like supergee's positive spin, and enjoy his perspective that democrats aren't "surrounded" by repubs like we're all feeling right now... that the vote was close, and we have more power than we think.
but i've gotta be honest... when 11 states pass a gay marriage ban, i have to wonder what we're up against.
my big concern at this point is that all of those "blue" voters now have very little voice in the federal government, which means we need to work very, very hard to make ourselves heard.
for me this means actually calling congresscritters to make my views known to them. even though i really don't think richard burr and liddy dole give a rat's ass if i'm frothing at the mouth over a radical-right supreme court appointment, still it is my duty as a citizen to let them know that not all of their constituency thinks the way they do.
xta: I think that civil rights for gays are to our era what civil rights for minorities were to the sixties. A lot of people oppose the idea, and think it's not just okay but necessary to deny those rights. Change will be painful, but it is going to happen.
lisa: I used to contact Edwards about issues though I don't think I ever called. The problem now is that whatever the issue, Dole and Burr (as you say) don't want to know what we think, and Price is probably already on our side. So either way it's kind of a wasted call :)
i guess my hope is that if enough people call burr and dole with an opposing viewpoint, it will have *some* effect. and contacting price might spurr him to work harder to get more congressfolk on our side.
having worked quite a bit against the DMCA and CARP issues a couple of years ago, i can tell you that you'll get the best results by scheduling a meeting with your representatives. emails, faxes & phone calls, while not to be discouraged, don't have nearly the impact of a face-to-face meeting.
chances are you'll end up meeting with a staff member and not the representative him/herself, but it's a powerful feeling nonetheless.
i once did one of salon.com's online petition/write to your senator things, and a few weeks later i got a form letter from liddy thanking me for my note and informing me that she doesn't agree w/ me about reprodutive rights.
doesn't mean i wouldn't do it again though.
At least she was willing to state her opinion! I wrote to both Price and -- I guess it was Edwards -- about the DCMA. Not an online petition but postal letters. Price wrote back that he agreed with me, but in Edwards' letter, the closest he would come to an opinion was acknowledging that I had expressed an opinion.
It would be great to have Price as our senator. It's too bad that he's probably way too liberal to win a statewide election.