On This Is Our Chance
This, right now, is our chance. This time, this moment, this slim and narrow slice of time.
This is our moment, our time, our chance, our opportunity to do what has not been done in a 100 years, and change the course of America, and change the shape of our children’s fates, their lives, their world.
Generation X, Gen Y, Millennials, and the younger Boomers are the most liberal, most affected, most stubborn and focused Children of America in a century. We are greater than the Lost Generation, we are more durable and tough than the Greatest Generation.
We outshine, outdo, outstand, live out, stand out, shine out more than they ever did, and we are at a moment and a time, right now, more than ever, that defines who we are, collectively, as people, as the latch key, mixed race, internet fueled, computer driven, trophy for just showing up collective Modern American Generation.
We are overwhelmingly “socially progressive”, and not one of us has lived without the certainty that our social security, our retirement funds, our medicaid and medicare, our schools and our colleges, our debt balances and our savings account are all going to be gone or so overwhelming that we do not see ourselves as owning a home to live in beyond one generation, so shattered that even as so many of us were the first in our families to move on, we are also likely to be the last, who escaped the ghettos and ‘towns and the violence and the gangs and somehow managed to find something that is only more slavery, still legal, after all these years.
This is our chance. Right now.
We are the disabled, the women, the gay and lesbian and bi and trans, the Black and Brown and Native and PacRim. We are the Legacy of the Civil Rights movement, grown and raised in its ugly aftermath or its social burial.
We are the American Generation, moreso than our Founding Fathers and our Murdered tall men. We are so American that we take it for granted and even laugh at that idea, the idea that what unites us, right now, is some vague notion of what it means to be born in the borders of a country that has spent centuries breaking us, defiling us, defaming us.
We stand on the shoulders of all those who came before, and we celebrate them — those we have pulled out of the wreckage of those before us, and those who had the imprimatur of legend granted by those in power. We do not forget them, we do not let them be lost, because we find from them the strength to be what we are:
The American Generation.
Whose time is now. Whose chance is now. Whose opportunity is alive and struggling in this moment, and we have taken hold of it and we are, truly, wondering what the fuck do we do with it now.
The election of this Pretendent has shattered our ability to see this as a place where slow and steady can get there, and if there was ever a time to abandon the dribble and drabble of incremental and compromised change, this is that time.
We start with the candidates we support.
I know that a great many people do not like the Democratic Party. I do not blame them. There is much to dislike about the people who have control over it, the people who have been going to precinct meetings and who have made friends with the same people who started going decades ago, when the time and the tide was different, people for whom change and simply good ideas like a universal basic income are “scary” and “unworkable” and “never sell” — and they think that because the only people they ever turn to, the only people they ever have encounters and conversations with are the same people they’ve been doing that with for the last twenty years.
So yeah, I totally get it. That whole “we need to win, so we can’t do that” idea that has been so strong for them for so long! It let them defeat that Dubya dude, and it kept hold of governorship and state legislatures so well that now we can pass a constitutional amendment without a sweat.
Oh, wait, no, that’s just about where the folks who oppose the USA, the Constitution, the idea of Human Rights they hate so much they lie and call it “identity politics” are at present. That’s right. The Right. A right that is so corrupted by anti-government, anti-human rights, white supremacists, anti-Semites, homophobic and transphobic bastards that they make our own internal divisions over those same things seem like arguing over which color of flower is better by comparison.
So, yeah, I get why you don’t like them. What I don’t get, my fellow American Generation people, is why we aren’t doing anything about it?
We have options.
We can riot in the streets, engage in rebellion, sit down and laugh at people trying to tell us what to do. We can start a civil war and let the dreams of a Culture and Race war the right has let fester for so long become reality, and watch the blood of our compadres run down the streets and wash the walls as the power of the full State is leveraged against us.
We can take the subversive track, and take over and control everything that has to do with children, period — daycares, schools, Colleges, cartoon shows, tv shows, movies, music, the works! We can pour everything we have into making sure that the generations coming now will be smarter, better educated, more brown and black and yellow and red and blended than any generation before.
Or…
We can decide that we are going to take over the Democratic party the same way that the Tea Party and the “alt-right” took over the Regressive one.
That one is actually easier. That one is how we get our voices heard when it comes to things like finding the new candidates, and making sure that people who vote to confirm unqualified people to head cabinet posts in order to protect themselves because they face re-election suddenly find themselves with a primary challenger that they never expected.
It is where We start our runs for office, it is where We stand so that they have to look us in the eye when they say that reapportionment will never happen or Single payer just isn’t possible, and where they cannot escape enough times to avoid having to tell us why they are talking about why we shouldn’t do things instead of talking about how we should do it.
This is our chance to make sure that the old guard has to come to us, because we will unite under one glorious purpose and we will take over a party and we will not merely change the status quo, but we will change EVERYTHING.
Because this is not just about opposing the orange fuckup shitting in the White House.
And this is why This Is our Time, our Moment, our Chance, our Opportunity:
This is about changing everything to work better, to work more fairly, to work more efficiently and more in line with the ideas of human rights.
You see, right now, the bad guys, they are dismantling everything. Which is a bit of a blessing in a way. They are taking it all apart. They are dismantling the system s that didn’t work as well as they should have, and part of the reason we know that is because they are being dismantled.
If they had been the good systems, then this wouldn’t be happening. Because the people doing it wouldn’t have been able to do so.
This is our chance to build a better Government, one that makes laws and metes justice out in service to human rights, not human wealth.
It is easier to compromise among Liberals — for us, it is a hallmark of how we work: collectively. We all share certain basic premises in common. We may differ on the value of capitalism, on the the import of of taxation, on the need to advance the cause of the Individual.
But we are united in our love and our zealotry over Human Rights.
Civil Rights, Gay Rights, Women‘s Rights, Trans Rights, Disability Rights, Labor Rights, Better minimum wage, my personal campaign for a maximum wage, Ageism, better retirement and health benefits, single payer, universal basic income — ALL OF THIS IS HUMAN RIGHTS.
It is not “identity politics”. It is how our individual groups work together to achieve the same goal: human rights.
I have talked in the past about how the single most radical change we can make is a simple thing, a renewal of focus and a sharpness that will without doubt have a political cost.
Simply pass a law that all laws and justice must in service to human rights. If at all possible, make it an amendment to the Constitution.
Enumerate those rights as completely as possible, and make damn sure that we leave room for those rights we are yet to know.
Change apportionment. If you support third parties, and want to see more than just Republicans and Democrats, change apportionment.
There will be those who say that the math favors it becoming two parties. The catch there is that the math does it “over time”, not instantly. It will take time — years, in fact.
Right now, 1 person is expected to represent, fairly, the concerns and interests of 700,000 citizens.
Explain to me how that works out well? It doesn’t by any measure I have tried, and I have tried a lot of them.
Adjust that to something more like 100k, and it is still unfair, but now we have a whole bunch of districts where gerrymandering is suddenly undermined incredibly. Yes, the Capitol building is not big enough for them all. So what.
That’s jobs for an area that needs more blue collar jobs, right? Good jobs, if they do it right.
To some that will mean more gridlock in getting legislation passed — and I’m like SO THE FUCK WHAT? IT means having to do the hard work of figuring out how to get something done, not just ramming it through. It shatters coalitions and lessons the voice of the right.
It works in favor of liberal compromise.
But note, as well, that shattering of gerrymandering in the states. That’s key. That is a game changer.
And all the third parties can go at it — although keep in mind, most of the third parties in this nation today are conservative, not liberal.
To get there, we take over the Dems, and then we let the fracture happen.
We have a chance to make a more powerful environmental defense, an opportunity to make Civil Rights a cabinet level posting. To write the minimum requirements of experience for these roles so that billionaire asswipes don’t get picked.
We have the chance, right now, to do this and more. To make a change and a difference so profound that it will shatter the shitheels who put the orange fuckup shitting in the white house there.
This is our chance to do what was done once before: to make America prosperous and to mitigate and shatter old systems that are horrible for all of us.
All we have to do to start that process is take over the Democratic party (easier than you think, and far less than 25 hours a month), and then make sure that in 2018 and 2020 that the Senate and House become overwhelmingly Democratic — even if that means running “republicans” in primaries who later switch party after election — and finding and running kick ass candidates for every office locally and nationally in the interim and getting them in office.
No matter what the odds are.
How do we do that? What is the messaging we use?
Not “civil rights”. Not “gay rights”. Not “women’s rights”. Human Rights.
We talk about using human rights to ensure that everyone in the US gets a chunk of this nation. We talk about how the prosperity of the old days was built by people who focused on human rights. How with the change in our manufacturing base and the rise of automation, we need to find ways to ensure that no one is left behind, that everyone has a chance at a great education both in grade schools and colleges.
We already have the policies developed — we talk about them, we sell them. 12,000 a year to every single person in the country, young and old, rich and poor, and hey, now the dream isn’t just to find a partner, have some kids, buy a home and work at a job, but to start your own business or to learn a new skill or to follow your dreams, as a person, no matter what they are, and build a better life for yourself and your children than you have right now.
Because that’s what human rights focused and centric thinking does.
IT doesn’t decide *if* we should help, like every single Republican Regressive fuckwad idea does.
It decides *how* we should help, and for that we need everyone’s voices, and that means those people who feel abandoned and left out and ignored and scared and wondering where the hell the jobs are.
Well, the jobs are not with corporations, they are with small business owners, bakers and copy shops and little convenience stores and the next great basement inventor.
They are there in the dreams of those who want more, not those who want less, as Regressives do
They are in the American Generation, where an app can make you a millionaire or a sidewalk art piece can make you famous or playing a game can make you a hero.
This is our chance, our moment, our opportunity.
Let’s take it. Take the Party, Take the Election, Take the Nation.
And Build a Better America.