I think this is important to consider. A lot of people I know have taken the time to make phone calls, write e-mails, be heard by their representation (or most normally their staffers) and they’re probably wondering about their impact…
A note for all of us who feel defeated after Sessions from the Indivisible Team: This is the long game. We are going to lose a lot. We are going to get good at losing. We are going to lose cabinet votes for terrible nominees. We are going to lose bills that are offensive and appalling. But while we are losing, something else is going to happen. We are going to keep raising our voices and slowly our representatives are going to start listening to us. We’ve seen it happen.
It won’t happen because of next week’s call to action. It’ll happen over months, where you keep showing up, regularly. Then, we are going to start winning. It’ll sneak up on us. We won’t understand why we are winning. But it starts with losing in a particular way- where we raise our voices and call it out when we aren’t listened to, where we get close but not quite there.
The first 100 days of a President’s term are the honeymoon period, the moment when he’s most likely to get his agenda enacted. Trump is spending his first 100 days mired in controversy, scandal, and backbiting – and that’s because you haven’t for a moment let anyone in Washington forget just how unpopular he is.
Every time we change the narrative, every time we delay, every time there’s a newspaper story about a member of Congress avoiding his or her constituents, that’s a win. And it matters.
You have already made history. You’ve delayed the confirmation of Trump’s cabinet picks longer than any time in recent history. You stopped the gutting on the congressional ethics office. You’ve made Republicans so nervous about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act that it’s been pushed further and further down the road. You caused an uproar of historic proportions over Trump’s Muslim ban and saved lives and reunited families in the process. You’ve inspired people who have never before taken action to make their voices heard and learn how to do things like check how their members of Congress voted and call them out for it.
We’ll never even know about some of the victories – because those will be the fights that this Administration considered starting and then realized it couldn’t win.
We’re in this together. Every visit. Every call. Every loss. Every win. That’s just what friends do. #StandIndivisible
I took this question really seriously, so I asked my parents to help me answer this. Here is what my dad said:
Here is what my mom said:
Here is what I say:
First of all, I am sorry for referring to you as “kid” to my folks. It was just a shorthand I used for them to understand in a simple way that I think you are someone younger than they are. They are professors/teachers, and are often tasked with communicating effectively with young people. (also, sorry if my dad misgendered you? I guess kid = boy in his head)
Next: Yes. To what my parents said. When I feel helpless I often turn to them because they are so blisteringly smart and compassionate, and if I seem strong and like I have all the answers, it’s because I come from an incredibly supportive family. I wanted to share that with you.
Because our representatives are firmly planted in the last century, online activism doesn’t cut through the noise to them—but phone calls do. Here is a website called 5calls.org that helps you make those calls with a script, and is especially effective if you (like me) have social anxiety.
Those walkbacks do not, unfortunately, change the reality that Trump’s cruel new approach to immigration will continue to hurt people. The threat to the health insurance of millions remains real.
But this is still a remarkable amount for a new president to need to walk back in his first 10 days in office.
according to a poll conducted by The Washington Post,
more than one in three Democrats say they plan to become “more involved
in the political process in the next year” as a result of the election.
That’s true of 40 percent of Democratic women, and almost half of
self-identified liberal Democrats…
Here’s an overview of some of the new efforts launched since November 9.
It’s by no means comprehensive, but we started with a list of 75 new
groups and whittled them down to some of the most interesting or
promising. They’re not presented in any kind of ranked order. Our hope
is that knowing how others are standing up to Trump will inspire more
readers to get involved.
You can also hit Breitbart News and other sites that peddle in bigotry
and white nationalism in their pocketbooks by getting involved with a
Twitter group called Sleeping Giants.
Buycott Trump
is trying to get people to vote with their dollars. Organizers have
launched a new campaign on top of an existing app that allows you to
scan barcodes and QVCs, and offers you information about the politics of
the companies who make the products you see on store shelves.
A
federal appeals court early Sunday rejected a request by the Justice
Department to immediately restore President Trump’s targeted travel ban,
deepening a legal showdown over his authority to tighten the nation’s
borders in the name of protecting Americans from terrorism.
The Trump administration is backing away from its plan to revisit using
the CIA to imprison and interrogate terrorism suspects, according to a
revised executive order on detention policy that has been shared with
senior officials…
The new draft appears to preserve some language from the previous
document, including a provision that would allow for new prisoners to be
detained at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
I don’t know, hopefully the latter, but he’s pretty much every negative stereotype about Americans.
jon shieber tweeted this, saying it’s “from an american friend of mine working with the un in iraq”:
so if we’re worried about american image issues we better keep protesting
this is important for many reasons, but one of them is – i think we need to accept that we are going to lose a lot of these battles, and lose big, and it’s going to be fucking ROUGH. and in those moments we will need to remember that we can make a difference not just by winning, but by showing up to fight.
Hearseeno 