At the end of the latest communication from his recent solo trip through the American heartland (https:/medium.com@BetoORourke/i-saw-the-spanish-peaks-from-a-distance-emerging-from-the-flat-yell
ow-plains-shrouded-in-clouds-db530f5eb65e), Beto O’Rourke summed his experiences up.
As have many of his recent communications, it brought tears to my eyes. The tears were not because of his good-hearted eloquence…you can find the same sort of writing in all of the long history of American literature and journalism if you look hard enough…the tears were there were because this was written by someone who stands a good chance at becoming the President of the United States of America at a time when opposing forces are threatening to end the American Dream and turn it into an American nightmare!!!
Read on.
Please!!!
My mind wandered to all the people I’d met over the last week, thought about how generous and kind everyone was, no matter where I traveled throughout the five states I’d visited. Villages, towns, cities. How inspiring, and funny, and strong people are. Kids and college students looking forward. Older people reflecting on where they’d been and how they got there. Over the course of the trip I’d gone from thinking about myself and how stuck I was, to being moved by the people I’d met. Forgot myself in being with others.
We’re all connected, related, part of one another’s lives through the stories we tell ourselves and each other. For good and for bad. Our long memories hold the stories of what our people accomplished, but they also hold the prejudices, the injustices, the harm that we’ve received from others. Our short term memories can forget the kindness most recently rendered, our vision can become focused on the divisions and lose sight of the way up and out. And there is always someone, usually on cable TV or Twitter, to remind you how small or stupid you’re supposed to feel. Our side is truly American. Yours, not so much.
In the Letter from Birmingham Jail, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
To the idea that those who think differently than the majority, those who come to different conclusions on the issues we care most about, are somehow un-American, or “outsiders” he writes: “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”So – at this moment that the government is shutdown for its longest period ever, over a wall, with a President who warns of immigrants coming to get us, with every possible division among us exploited by every unscrupulous politician, with the United States as divided as we can remember – how do we come together? How do we stop seeing each other as outsiders? How do we reconcile our differences, account for the injustices visited upon so many, understand the pride that each of us feels for ourselves, our families, our point of view – and respond to the urgent needs of this great democracy at its moment of truth? As the country literally begins to shut down, how can we come together to revive her?
I know we can do it. I can’t prove it, but I feel it and hear it and see it in the people I meet and talk with. I saw it all over Texas these last two years, I see it every day in El Paso. It’s in Kansas and Oklahoma. Colorado and New Mexico too. It’s not going to be easy to take the decency and kindness we find in our lives and our communities and apply it to our politics, to all the very real challenges we face. And as Tina says, it’s complicated. But a big part of it has got to be just listening to one another, learning each other’s stories, thinking “whatever affects this person, affects me.”
We’re in this together, like it or not. The alternative is to be in this apart, and that would be hell.
I repeat:
“We’re in this together, like it or not. The alternative is to be in this apart, and that would be hell.“
Consider this statement well, please.
We are one false step away from entering that hell of which he speaks.
Consider your options thoroughly.
More of the same neoliberal/neocentrist business as usual? The same people doing the same things that have led us from Clinton I right on through to Trump-The-Terrible-Inevitable?
Or a new “New Deal,” one that values the contributions of all working people no matter what their race, culture, religion, financial sitiuation, etc.
Lemme know.
Please.
If you are going to continue in your pragmatic politics positions…you know, like which one of the continuingly obedient mainstream Dems you are going to support in the name of so-called “winning?”
Stand up and be counted.
If not?
Stand up and be counted as well!!!
It’s down to this, now.
More DNC “pragmatism”…the short-sighted, Scylla-and-Charybdis approach that brought us the Mussolini/Trump paradigm that we are about to face…or the culmination of the real deal of which a few of our founding “fathers” (and mothers and successors like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and MLK Jr.) dreamed.
Hustle on, if you must.
Or…
NOT!!!
But understand this:
IT IS YOUR CHOICE!!!
And you …as well as millions of others…will suffer the consequences.
Consider your choice(s) well, O loyal DemRats.
This is the pretty much the last hand in the game coming up.
Bet on it.
AG
