In liberal views, if people donʻt benefit – if wages donʻt go up with productivity, if houses arenʻt affordable, if medical bankruptcies are rising, if school debt is crushing, if lives are lost – then the economy is failing.
It took the Resistance, the nationwide gaggle of Indivisible groups, ADAPT protesters, health care advocates, and the people themselves to bring this reality to the forefront. They marched and shouted, they posted and tweeted, they emailed and called and sang, they carried photos of their friends and family, yes, they disrupted and got arrested – but mostly they told their stories.
Listen to what we are being told:
Fear those who cross our country’s border from Mexico – the are rapists and murderers and drug lords.
Fear those who cross our country’s border from Mexico – the are rapists and murderers and drug lords.
Fear those who cross our country’s border from Mexico – they are rapists and murderers and drug lords.
Fear those who run from brutality and death in Syria – they are terrorists who hate our freedom.
Almost 50 years ago, I was transfixed as a NASA astronaut climbed down a ladder and pressed his boot into the grainy surface of the moon. A week ago, I sat transfixed as NASA guided a vehicle to a soft landing in Elysium Planitia, a “flat, boring equatorial plain” on a planet 300 million miles…
Were they walling people in? Or out? Both, it seems. As much as they tried to keep people in, they also tried very hard to keep western influences out. Jeans, rock’n’roll, Coca-cola, all the symbols of decadence that Americans thrust at them. The Berlin Wall sent a message. Like a giant billboard, it shouted out to us. We heard fear. We heard weakness.
But there’s no need to stop canvassing. Perhaps it’ll be less formal than a campaign might canvass – no mobile app, no careful selection of which doors to knock and which to skip, no glossy door-hangers to leave behind. But canvassing is a formalized version of that most basic political act – talking.
was Trump Jr. lying when he denied having a meeting or is he lying now when he claims he did have a meeting?
If you were Trump, Sr., how would you discredit all of your critics? How would you prove that the press is lying? Here’s what I would do…
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.
He has had a chance to demonstrate his ability to lead, his ability to negotiate, his ability to command, his ability to help. And he has demonstrated weakness, ignorance, and arrogance instead.
It is not about giving him a chance. It’s about honestly assessing what he has said and done, how he has behaved, over these past 2 years. He has been weighed, he has been measured, and he has been found wanting.
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.
