It’s gotten pretty depressing, this Red Queen’s through-the-looking-class world we’re trapped in. The same tired lies and myths get reinforced over and over again. The governor in South Dakota signs a forced pregnancy bill that was built on the backs of mythical women who get abortions on a lark and “partial-birth” procedures that are actually very rare and performed only when a pregnancy goes terribly wrong and a woman’s life is at risk. Reagan’s “welfare queen” cruises the streets of drowned New Orleans, loading up her stolen Cadillac with plasma tv’s and stolen pain killers. The ports deal with Dubai is somehow Clinton’s fault, and crazed communist college professors are sucking out students’ good wholesome American values through straws, then filling their heads with nasty secular humanist ideas. Every year, Christmas is held to siege again, and Christians are forced to meet in dangerous back alleys and in hidden rooms in decrepit old warehouses.
You hear this crap everywhere. It is part-and-parcel of the regurgitated talking points on talk radio, on cable news and perhaps around the water cooler down the hall where you work. Believe it or not, it wasn’t always this way. The bizarro world we now live in was once the province of nuts written off as John Birchers and conspiracy crazies. They took over by … well … talking about their wacky worldview. Over and over again. They invented modern talk radio to help them accomplish this. They took over our increasingly corporatized press.
This brings us to your mission.
Talk about your beliefs. It’s as hard, and as easy, as that. Not just to the like minded, but when Uncle John starts spouting whatever crap he heard on Hannity that morning on the radio, correct him. Loudly, firmly and often, with as much passion and strong facts and all the conviction you can muster.
People will get mad at you. Relatives will complain that you’re ruining Thanksgiving. Your boss may tell you that the workplace is not the appropriate place. If he does so, demand that Crazy Pete the dittohead one cube over get the same message.
No one is coming to save us. This will be a struggle of years, perhaps generations. You could lose friendships, damage family ties, be looked at a little askance but THIS is how change happens. Not big ad campaigns. Not some magical black knight galloping out of the Illinois legislature (or a doctor skiing out of the Vermont mountains).
If you start hearing about how a pregnant woman should “live” with the consequences of her decision to have sex, confront that person with their own sister, lover, mother or wife. How would HE feel if someone he loved was forced to drive hundreds (thousands) of miles? How would HE feel if that sensible, sensitive female he loves was treated like a recalcitrant child for daring to make a decision about her own body, her own life? The sneers about “sluts” and “”party girls” melt away when there is a beloved’s face superimposed on the charicature.
You have to tell stories. The great angry and resentful American electorate will not help the poor until their stories are told, until the Republican’s distortions are corrected and people learn that the greater majority of the poor work, or try to work, to have a life for themselves. Those immigrants coming over our southern border aren’t monsters … they’re people in search of a dream and an opportunity and all of the things our ancestors came here for. Much of this seems obvious, but busy people think in quick-to-tell stories, the kind of stories that the wacko Minutemen like to tell about brown-skinned men sneaking onto your property with ill intent.
This is your mission. The party will not help you accomplish it, although there will be like-minded people within the party that are pursuing the same lofty goal. THIS is what politics is really about … stories. Myths, allegories and fables … comic books and movies and Jack Bauer torturing suspects willy nilly. You’ve GOT to offer another narrative, another tale, a tale of cooperation and shared risks and a public square where we all recognize that our government is one of the ways we pool resources, one of the ways that people can achieve the “economies of scale” to accomplish important goals that the free market makes no space for. Not everything has a dollar sign attached to it, and some things are too important to have their vitality sucked out in order to maximize profit. Our institutions are in shambles. There in no public health system any longer (the Gulf disaster made that apparent). Our justice system is undermined by a “drug war” run amok. Our governments are awash in lobbyists’ cash, and the demands of usurers drown out the voices of families being borne under by crushing debt. Our public infrastructure crumbles, while special toll lanes are suggested as “solutions” to crowded and declining highways. It doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t MAKE SENSE for us to do things this way. It has to change, and change will take time.
None of this will change until we can tell the story WHY it must change. That’s your mission, if you choose to accept it.
