For the past couple of days an intense, almost feverish conversation has busted out on the Net. Salon’s editorial inbox is overflowing. (Some highlights are here. And here. And here.) There’s, uh, a lot to talk about.
Here’s an exchange I had earlier today with one letter writer:
Dear Scott, On Wednesday, 11/03/04, you said, “So let’s remember that we’ve just lost a big battle, and that hurts, but it’s not the end.” Yes, it is. By the end of this 4 years the cartel will have sold our national patrimony to their fellow-travelers (note I did not say friends, they have no friends) and any civil rights will be tightly constrained by a court that KNOWS we are Xtian and nobody else counts. I will be long dead before any even get their rights back, though to be honest I think future generations have no hope of this whatsoever. Once the last national lands are sold, there will never be enough money to buy them back, so kiss wild lands and even the national parks goodbye… |
Here’s what I wrote back:
I think I understand your despair, and at times I’m tempted to share it. But I’ve also lived long enough to know that there’s really no alternative to persevering. When Reagan was elected, twice, I was sometimes quite certain that we would wind up obliterated in a nuclear showdown. I still think Reagan was a lousy president, but the worst didn’t happen — in part because people didn’t just accept his policies, they fought back. I intend to keep doing my own tiny part of fighting back, which, since I’m a writer, means continuing to write. I hope you find your way back to playing whatever your part may be. |
And here is a very powerful letter that one of the wiser people I know, the writer Sue Halpern, sent to some friends:
Yesterday, looking at the map of the United States, the visual metaphor was hard to miss: those of us who voted Democratic, who oppose the war, who support gay marriage, who value civil liberties, who believe in due process, who are concerned about jobs and health care and education and the environment, were relegated to the margins of our country. If we didn’t already understand that our point of view was marginal, that map showed us.
But the map is deceptive, and reading it that way is the equivalent to Dick Cheney’s arrogant declaration that the people of this country had delivered a resounding mandate to George Bush. We did no such thing. Even in states like Wyoming and Idaho and Georgia and Tennessee there are tens of thousands of people who did not stand with the majority, just as there were plenty of people in our own home states who stood with George Bush. Such is the nature of democracy, even a democracy as broken as ours. So the other metaphor from the election is the one about the glass being half-empty or half-full. About half the people in this country appear to support the politics of George Bush, and about half are with and among us. For the purposes of the election, the glass was half-empty and we lost. For the purposes of going forward it is half-full, and it is from that that we must take our solace, and from there begin. The solace, such that it is, is that despite the lies, the willful deceptions, the cheating, the abject meanness, the subversion of reality, half the people heard the truth. And many of them live in places where the noise machine is a lot louder than it is here in Vermont, or in New York or Berkeley or Cambridge. The solace is that we know each other and that we found each other — that friends urged friends to send checks to ACT or Run Against Bush or Band of Sisters and they did; that neighbors called upon neighbors to sign petitions and visit legislators and they did; that strangers from Duluth, Minnesota and Spokane, Washington met on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio going door-to-door to turn out the vote. True, it didn’t exactly work as we wanted it to work, and as we thought that it would work, but it did work. We raised a lot of money, we raised our voices, we raised a ruckus, we raised consciousness, and we learned that our point of view does not consign us to loneliness. This may have been the most divisive campaign ever, and the country may be divided, but we are not alone. This is important, because the agenda of the other side works best if we think we are. I am not simply suggesting that if we think we are alone we will be less likely to stand up and be counted, though that no doubt is true. Rather, that if we think we are alone, we might start to believe that the only way to regroup is to embrace the ideas and rhetoric of the other side. The Democratic party has already done that, of course, in many areas, which is why its economic platform sounded remarkably conservative, why it articulated no serious opposition to the war in Iraq, why both John Kerry and Howard Dean were quick to state that marriage should be reserved for the union of a man and a woman. This last is crucial, because it represents the beginning of the values “creep” that some believe will allow us to cast our net wider — wide enough perhaps to capture that crucial three percent of voters who, next time, will send us over the top. It’s a brilliant strategy — but it’s not our brilliant strategy. It’s theirs. How best to advance the faith-based theocracy that underlies the current discussion of “values” than by having us believe that the only way to “win” next time is by changing the language of the debate to make “our” side more palatable to some of “them?” But once you start changing the language, you start changing the content, and who wins then? We have to be clear: There is no such thing as a faith-based democracy. Democratic values are purposefully agnostic so that democracies can embrace people of all faiths. It is possible that as soon as the Supreme Court changes hands, this point will be moot. We have to be prepared for this. That is why the lesson of the past year or two — the lessons we learned from Moveon and the blogs and the Deaniacs and National Voice and ACT, and from our friends and neighbors, and from people all over the country whom we now consider our friends and neighbors — must be this: That while we can act we will act; that while we can speak out, we will speak out; that while we can organize, we will organize; and that while we can stand, we will stand together. |
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