[Note: I compose on Twitter, because I find that to be a more useful forum overall. So, this post keeps growing, because it’s a compilation of a quasi-viral Twitter thread I keep adding to.]
It was never going to be a landslide.
All the despair broadcast by people acting like anything less than landslide victory is exactly the same as crushing defeat is exhausting… and troubling.
We can’t afford people giving up so easily. The fight was never going to end here.
Things were bad. No matter how this week went, they were still gonna be bad.
The question was never: can we fix it? It was always: can we start making it better or is it gonna keep getting worse?
The only way it gets better is if we keep fighting for better, no matter what.
There’s a fundamental brittleness to fighting FOR rights. People do it because they have to, and mostly they’d rather get on with their lives.
But there’s a fierce passion to fighting AGAINST rights, an abiding desire to hurt and control.
To win in the long run, we need to find that kind of sustaining passion.
It’s not enough to be disappointed when people are bigoted. You need to hate the bigotry with an incandescent rage.
The bigot is irrelevant, but their bigotry needs to be stamped down and screamed at until it’s gone or too afraid to show itself.
Only then will it stop growing.
When you’re trying to save someone you love from cancer, you don’t support the person & sigh disapprovingly at the cancer. You try to kill the cancer.
Bigotry is a cancer & it will keep fighting to grow.
We need to keep fighting to kill it, not just when we’re winning. Always.
Most of my life, I’ve watched the good side concede to the push of bigotry at the first sign of contention. And it’s not like it was a secret or surprise that there’s a lot of bigotry out there.
As far as I can tell, the fact that this wasn’t over yesterday is AMAZING PROGRESS.
I’ve been feeling apprehensive about this election, and it hasn’t just been the pervasive fear that the anti-fascists won’t win. I couldn’t put my finger on what the feeling was…
But now I know.
I’ve been afraid that if we win, liberals would be happy… and that would be it.
Even if we win, winning is not enough.
We have to fight for our values forever, the rest of our lives, as long as we have breath, whether it seems hopeless or feels like we’ve been winning so long that it’s safe to coast.
It’ll never be safe to coast. You always have to fight.