The Progressive movement stared into the abyss two weeks ago.
On November 3 the United States of America had a chance to correct its course, the first chance since things began to go out of control.
But the United States of America re-elected the Bush Administration.
In that moment, the struggle changed. You can see it all over the internet, all over the opinion media, all over the grassroots networks. If you look, if you read, if you listen you can see it happening. This is how it begins.
The election has become a symbol of what we face.
We are using the symbol to transform ourselves. The progressive movement is changing. It is realising that it must do what it hates to do: it must go to war.
A war of justice, for their culture is built on exploitation.
A war of truth, for their culture is built on deceit.
And a war of survival, for they want to wipe our culture from existence.
There is no room to negotiate – what would we negotiate away? Our belief in social justice? Our belief in the vulnerability of the environment? Our belief in human rights? We are past the point of negotiation: this is a war.
This is a culture war. We have fought these before, and we have won. We will win this time as well. Their culture must be shattered.
It will not shatter itself.
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Allow me to deflate my own rhetoric here. I know I’m speechifying. There’s a lot of it going around – it’s a sign of how things are changing, right now. Anyway, I’ll step down from the rhetoric.
Getting real: we’re all ordinary people with lives and commitments and responsibilities and nuanced understandings of how the world works. The question I ask in the title remains: where now? What can we do?
You tell me. Put a message in the comments, or a link to suggestions elsewhere you found useful. (Lurkers especially welcome – I know you’re out there.) This blog is one tiny bit of a very big network. But it’s part of that network. Lets see what we come up with.
