Results AND Resistance
What do we resist? We resist job losses. We resist wage stagnation. We resist corporate welfare. We resist corruption. We resist cruelty. We resist dictators.
We resist Republicans.
What do we resist? We resist job losses. We resist wage stagnation. We resist corporate welfare. We resist corruption. We resist cruelty. We resist dictators.
We resist Republicans.
We need to answer emotion with counter-emotion. If we don’t trigger an emotional response, our facts won’t matter because they won’t be heard.
This cannot be our legacy. Our children deserve better. Future generations must have time to invent, to innovate, and to thrive. We have a duty to uplift our children and our grandchildren. Our legacy to our children must be a fertile world that encourages exploration, shares discoveries, expands each other’s universe, and grows our democracy. We have a duty.
We trust in the institution of government, a government that is, in the end, made up of all of us, all of the people, a government that creates the law by which we agree to be governed.
But for the 24-hour political newscasters, the Iowa caucus results were a panic moment. And now, 36 hours later, they are still mumbling and grumbling, talking about apps and coding problems and the horror of having to wait.
We stumbled in recent days, choosing someone who claimed greatness but delivers fear, weakness, greed, corruption, confusion. Who delivers insult, derision, and mockery to America’s friends, and platitudes, flattery, and encouragement to those who seek to harm America.
In two short years, America has surrendered its standing.
“The West Wing”, Season 3, Episode 12: “100,000 Airplanes” (January 16, 2002) SCENE: The team is gathered in the Oval Office. President Bartlett has told them that he wants to include something in his State of the Union speech to say that we will cure cancer. His advisers explain, one by one, why he can’t…
Give 30 minutes to walk out and return, then give an hour to study of these basic tenets of being a citizen in the US, their history, the difficulties of conflicts between rights and safety, how bills become law, and how protests change (or don’t change) law, how courts decide conflicts.
Basic civics education.
We are now being tested, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. What progress we have won seems to be slipping away, not by the natural forces of time and change, but by the sinister forces of greed and wealth and power and deceit. Like our predecessors whose radical ideas have gone before, we must persist.
Burke’s book was a great introduction, for me, to the central tenets of the Deadhead community – that sense of sharing, of helping one another, of finding your place within the world around you, and of keeping that place intact against the familiar pressures of everyday living.
More than just a story – though certainly an interesting and entertaining story – F.T. Burke’s “The Bohemian Adventure” shows us how we can grow, even in middle age, to re-center ourselves into a sense of purpose and value. That value isn’t found in ourselves as solitary individuals, but in the community of like-minded people, sharing among that community.