swan_tower | Entries tagged with we are political monkeys

I've long thought that the closest thing we have to medieval cathedrals is NASA projects (and those of other scientific space agencies). People work on those in the full awareness that they themselves will often be long gone by the time their mission reaches its destination, returns its data. And yet they do it anyway, devoting themselves to a cause that stretches beyond the everyday horizon of today, tomorrow. Just as the cathedral builders of past ages patiently hewed stone, raised walls, framed roofs, knowing they would not live to hear the psalms sung within the sanctuary they built.

The cathedral of a better United States has been under construction since 1776. Its original blueprint was badly flawed. Sometimes its fabric has crumbled, and what was built had to be built again. Very likely, none of us here today will live to see its true completion.

We must keep building it anyway.

We may hope for a victory in two years, in four -- but a victory is not, will not be, the victory. We have to think in the longer term. The Republican Party didn't get to where it is now overnight; it's the fruit of decades spent working toward their goals, at every level from school boards and city councils on up. Pushing that back, making a truly progressive society, will be the work of more decades.

So we must celebrate the victories as they come, even when they are small. We may say "there is still more work to be done," because it will be true, but that must not become a mantra of discouragement. We are building a cathedral, one stone at a time. We may not live to see it completed, but the work itself is still worth doing.

I think I was somewhere over Hudson Bay, about thirty-five thousand feet in the air, when I heard the news that Biden had dropped out of the race. I've spent the last two weeks on vacation in Europe (more about that later), and I'd really been enjoying the extent to which that put me out of daily engagement with political news; when a flight attendant oh-so-helpfully shared that particular bombshell with me, the bottom dropped out of my stomach, because I thought, this is going to be fucking chaos.

But it's . . . not, is it? I mean, yes, the racists and the sexists are going to lose their goddamned minds over Harris, and yes, there will be other people who are definitely not racist or sexist but nevertheless find ~other reasons~ to not support Harris. (Maybe she has some emails they can freak out about?) This will be chaos in the sense that the ugliest aspects of America are going to scream their bigotry to the skies. But she has the party establishment behind her, and she has an absolute FLOOD of support from grass-roots donors in the aftermath of the announcement. I think the whole "I'm not excited about this candidate" thing is sometimes overblown -- my ideal president is honestly a boringly competent administrator who puts their head down and gets the job done -- but it's true that excitement can get people to the polls who wouldn't have otherwise gone. And we're gonna need that to make sure Team Bigotry doesn't fuck this country over and enshrine the King of Orange to rule over us all, with a compliant Supreme Court behind him.

So, yeah. Let's fucking DO THIS. Let's get our first female president into office, not through the GOP trotting out some conservative mannequin to show how much they care about The Ladiez, not through Biden stepping down during his second term (which I honestly thought had a decent chance of happening), but through us actually electing her. Let's put the female mixed-race prosecutor against the sexist, racist felon. And let's elect a tidal wave of Democratic candidates into the House, the Senate, the governorships, the mayoralties, everything down to the local dog-catchers, because it's that patient attention to down-ticket races that has let the GOP build the leverage they needed to screw us all over the way they've been doing lately.

And if you don't have a lot of money to donate -- to Harris or to those down-ticket races -- or if you do, but in either case if you have free time, consider volunteering with Vote Forward. They work to encourage unregistered and low-propensity voters to engage with an election, and their success rate is pretty damn good. All you need is a printer, envelopes, stamps, and the will and ability to write a brief personal message on each letter. Said message has to be non-partisan, but since we're at a point where saying "democracy good" is simultaneously non-partisan and anti-Republican, it's not a tough needle to thread. Let's get people to the polls.

Vote Forward

Get more voters registered; get more voters mobilized. Because many states strip voting rights from felons, and the more basic rights SCOTUS criminalizes, the more of us they remove from the voting rolls.

We need numbers on our side.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/EzVx1p)

So Biden has won both the popular vote and the electoral college. Yay! This is, of course, an enormous relief to me.

. . . but if you think that means we can all now cruise along and not worry, think again.

We still have a pandemic to deal with, and it's not magically going to go away because of an election. Neither is climate change. We need to fix our broken system of immigration, and demilitarize our police. There are countless problems that still need to be addressed, and the momentum for addressing them is going to come from us.

Especially since . . . y'all, this election should not have been remotely close. By any objective metric, Trump has been a disastrously bad president -- the sort who should have been catapulted out of office without thinking twice. In previous decades, he would have been. Instead, the election was close enough that it took days to count the votes to the point where news outlets could cautiously say that Biden appears to have won. Because in addition to the problems I listed above, we've got a problem right here in our own body politic.

And that problem is quite simply white supremacy. Not just in the active, obvious, neo-Nazi sense, but in the creeping sense where fifty-seven percent of white people voted for the most incompetent president most of them have seen in their lifetimes. You can't just blame it on QAnon conspiracy theories -- and the reason those conspiracy theories are meeting with such an eager audience is, at its root, still white supremacy. Fred Clark at Slacktivist (himself a white evangelical) has for years now been charting out how much of American white evangelicalism is driven by white supremacy: built on a base of justifying slavery, continued in the opposition to the Civil Rights movement, and now desperately seeking grounds to say that no really, they're still the good guys by embracing overheated lies which tell them at least they're better than those Satanic baby-killers underneath the local Pizza Hut. Imprisoning immigrants at the border? White supremacy. Our inhumane carceral system? A replacement for Jim Crow laws. Housing policy? Time and again, looking for ways to keep people of color out, to keep them down. And it's no accident that the voter suppression efforts disproportionately hit those communities. I'm not going to say there are no other factors playing into this mess, but white supremacy is the poison at the root of this tree.

If you are glad that Trump is on his way out of office, thank the black voters, the Latine voters, the Asian voters, the Native American voters. Because if it had been left up to white people, he would have won with ease. Sure, 42% of my own demographic looked at the corrupt, incompetent, pathologically dishonest bigot and said, "please, let's not." But that's not enough. It isn't remotely enough. We've got to leach this poison out, and that means getting more white people to take positive action.

As soon as I'm done posting this, I'm going to go donate to the campaigns for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who are headed into runoffs in Georgia. I'm also planning on writing more letters through Vote Forward, which specifically seeks to encourage underrepresented demographics (such as voters of color) to step up to the ballot box. You can donate to Black Lives Matter, the Native American Rights Fund, LUPE, and more. Give your support to the people white supremacy wants to keep down. The more power they have, the stronger we all will be.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/zPgPnS)

Doing something is a really, really good antidote for stress and worry. My chosen Thing to Do: write letters through Vote Forward, which sends personalized messages to voters, encouraging them to vote and providing them with information on how to do so. They specifically focus on young and/or minority voters, i.e. the kinds of people who have historically been underrepresented in our electorate, timing the mailing for maximum effect (this year letters will be going out on October 17th); they've got several years' worth of data backing up the idea that this makes a measurable difference. This year they have blown past their initial goal of ten million letters prepped, so now it's moving on to the stretch goal of 15 million. Each one takes about three minutes to prep and you can "adopt" voters in batches of five or twenty, so it's easy to make this as small or large of an undertaking as you want -- I've done sixty so far and want to do a minimum of a hundred, though once I hit that target I may add more. You can volunteer here.

I make my living with words, but some things are so large and so awful, they leave me at a loss. The death of George Floyd, and what's happened as a result, is one of those things.

But I should try anyway, because from the outside, you can't tell the difference between silence caused by an inability to articulate, and silence from a lack of care. And even if my words are going to be inadequate, it's my responsibility -- it's the responsibility of all those who care, but especially white people who care -- to say something anyway. Because just sitting here feeling bad about things? Gets precisely jack shit done.

One of the things that really struck me in reading Ijeoma Oluo's book So You Want to Talk About Race was her metaphor of the abuse victim, replicated on a society-wide scale. It's easy to look at many things abusers do in isolation and think "well, that wasn't good, no, but it wasn't that awful, so why are you making such a big deal out of it?" But looking at them in isolation misses the point. If my husband says something hurtful to me, I can cope because he doesn't usually say such things, and I know he didn't mean to hurt me, and I'm confident that when I say "hey, that bothered me," he'll listen and apologize and avoid that in the future. In the case of an abuser, though, it's yet another blow landing atop an existing bruise landing atop deeply-buried scar tissue -- and all of that damage is also the abuser's work.

In this situation, the abuser is society as a whole, white society most particularly, and the victim is marginalized people. Particularly marginalized ethnic groups, but others as well.

Jim Hines posted a good quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., and I've taken my lead from him in using part of that quote as the title for this post. What we're seeing right now is the result of centuries of abuse, and centuries of America -- white America -- refusing to listen. Of white America making changes here and there, sometimes big ones (abolishing slavery), but more often small, grudging ones . . . or no changes at all. Read Jim's post for the statistics on what institutionalized prejudice looks like. If you're white, imagine raising your son knowing there's a 1 in 1000 chance that he will die at the hands of the police, and ask yourself how okay you'd be with that. Imagine this has been happening to your people for decades, and before that it was Jim Crow, and before that it was slavery. And the genocide of Native Americans and everything else white America has done to people who look different.

Imagine those blows hitting, again, and again, and again, and again, while people around you say "why are you making such a big deal out of this? Why are you angry? If you want to see things change, you should ask politely." While continuing to ignore the polite requests you've been making for years and decades and centuries.

And let's be clear: if you're thinking right now "we've got to vote Trump out of the White House in November," you're not wrong . . . but you are woefully undershooting. We can't wait five months to start doing something, and we can't pretend that swapping who's at the top will be enough to fix things. Change needs to happen everywhere. And it needs to start yesterday. Right now, do you have a little money to spare? Donate to Black Lives Matter, or the NAACP, or the ACLU. Write to your local lawmakers -- city, state, and federal -- to push for change where you live. Ordinarily I would encourage you to find a local protest and join it, but in these times of plague, I don't think in-person action is the best idea.

And speak up. Say something. Even if your words are inadequate. What I've written here certainly is -- but it's better than writing nothing.

It would be too much to say I’m relieved. That would imply a more sanguine outlook on the next two years, the next four, the next decade than I actually have. Given the path this country has been on, it’s going to take a long time to truly turn it around.

But I’m not crushed, either. And given how I feared I was going to feel tonight, I’ll take that. There are a lot of things to be pleased with from the election results. If there are some to be disappointed by . . . well, that was always going to be the case.

Either way, the next step is the same. We keep organizing. We keep shouting. We keep voting. We keep protecting the vulnerable, the marginalized, the people the Republican Party is determined to wipe away, by violence or law or just plain disregard. We keep striving for that more perfect union, because it ain’t gonna happen without a lot of work. And nobody can do that work but us.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

cover art for ARS HISTORICA by Marie Brennan

The past: Ars Historica is on sale now!

The past is prologue . . .

Kit Marlowe. Guy Fawkes. Ada Lovelace. Kings and sailors and sainted nuns populate these seven stories of historical fantasy by award-winning author Marie Brennan. They span the ages from the second century B.C.E. to the nineteenth century C.E., from ancient Persia to the London of the Onyx Court. Discover the secret histories, hear the stories that have never been told — until now.

The future: if you are able to vote today, please do.

cover art for Nevertheless, She Persisted; ed. Mindy Klasky Yesterday saw the release of Nevertheless, She Persisted. There are many things with that title these days, but this one is mine — well, mine and that of eighteen other authors from Book View Cafe. It is, as you might expect, a collection themed around female persistence in the face of adversity. If you feel like you need that sort of encouragement right now, or you know someone who might, or you want to support the general idea, or you just think that sounds like something you would like to read, you can get the ebook directly from Book View Cafe, or from Amazon, Nook, iTunes, Kobo, or Amazon UK; if you want a print edition, those are available too, from Amazon US or UK.

My contribution to the anthology is “Daughter of Necessity”, which is one of the stories I’m proudest of having written. It was inspired by an essay of Diana Wynne Jones’, and of course she herself is the woman whose work inspired me to become a writer in the first place.

It’s been six months since Elizabeth Warren was silenced on the floor of the Senate. Keep on speaking out. Persist. We will stand strong.

Table of Contents

“Daughter of Necessity” by Marie Brennan
“Sisters” by Leah Cutter
“Unmasking the Ancient Light” by Deborah J. Ross
“Alea Iacta Est” by Marissa Doyle
“How Best to Serve” from A Call to Arms by P.G. Nagle
“After Eden” by Gillian Polack
“Reset” by Sara Stamey
“A Very, Wary Christmas” by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
“Making Love” by Brenda Clough
“Den of Iniquity” by Irene Radford
“Digger Lady” by Amy Sterling Casil
“Tumbling Blocks” by Mindy Klasky
“The Purge” by Jennifer Stevenson
“If It Ain’t Broke” by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
“Chatauqua” by Nancy Jane Moore
“Bearing Shadows” by Dave Smeds
“In Search of Laria” by Doranna Durgin
“Tax Season” by Judith Tarr
“Little Faces” by Vonda N. McIntyre

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I posted a little while ago about today, July 12th, being the “Battle for the Net.” The short version is that the FCC is trying to roll back the “net neutrality” protections we currently enjoy, which would have the effect of letting corporations control how you interact with the internet. Think of your cable company: you know how they charge you more money for “premium channels”? You might find yourself paying your internet provider extra fees to access “premium sites.” (Not paying the sites; paying Comcast. Or whoever provides your internet connection.) Sites they don’t have a financial stake in might load more slowly. Streaming sites could be throttled to the point where you can’t watch a video or listen to music or play an online game without constant hiccups.

All of those things are bad. But here’s what’s worse.

Think about the flood of online political activity we’ve had in the last year. All those petitions, all those videos, all those political blogs. Right now, the only thing controlling your access to them is your level of interest and will to engage. But if we let the FCC empower internet providers to become the internet’s gatekeepers, then it may get a hell of a lot harder for us to make our voices heard. A lot of the groups speaking out right now are precisely the ones being disadvantaged by the current administration’s policies; they’re the ones who can’t afford to pay prioritization fees to keep their sites from being buried. This would be another way to screw them over, to make sure the voices we hear first, last, and loudest are the ones with money behind them: a negative feedback loop that ensures that power stays in the hands of those who already have it.

We can’t let this happen. Call your senators. Call your representative. Write a letter to the FCC. Speak up now, while you still can. As tools for speech go, the internet is up there with the printing press and the invention of writing itself — and our democracy depends on freedom of speech. We have to protect it.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

So, net neutrality.

It’s an important thing. Without it, cable companies will have far more control over what you see and do online: they’ll be able to slow down or block websites, or charge apps and sites extra fees in order to reach their audiences. They’ll push you toward sites belonging to companies who can afford to pay for “prioritization.” Marginalized communities and voices will be muted by the power of money, and your ability to say “I want to hear them” will be weaker, too.

Ajit Pai, the new FCC chairman (and not coincidentally, a former Verizon lawyer) thinks this sounds great. Me, not so much.

There’s a protest planned. I’ll be back on this topic July 12th, because I’ve signed up to participate. If you want to do the same, you can sign up at that link. My microphone isn’t huge, but the more of us that shout together, the louder we get.

Let’s get loud.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been making these tikkun olam posts for about half a year now, and responses to them have been slowing down, which I suspect is in part a sign of fatigue. It’s hard to keep on working to repair the world when so many people seem determined to break it, and when it’s hard to see any result for your effort.

But sometimes you can make a very real difference to a very specific person. Chaz Brenchley has put out a call raising funds to treat his wife’s multiple sclerosis. If we lived in a country where this was covered by insurance, they wouldn’t have to worry; instead we live in a country where Republicans are trying to take away even the insurance we already have. Karen is the primary earner in their family, and she doesn’t know how soon she’ll be able to return to work. Helping out, either by donating directly, or by subscribing to Chaz’s Patreon, can make all the difference in the world to these two people, and to their friends and family.

And while you’re at it, call your senators and beg them to oppose Trumpcare. Because I’d like to live in a world where things ranging from anxiety to surviving sexual assault don’t count as “pre-existing conditions,” and where health insurance companies are required to cover things like doctor’s visits.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I’ll keep this short and to the point.

The intended replacement for the Affordable Care Act is going to kill people.

It sounds melodramatic — but it’s true. It will leave an estimated 24 million Americans without insurance (compared to the ACA), which will make it extremely difficult for them to afford healthcare. It cripples Medicaid, because poor people don’t deserve to be healthy, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, because children only matter while they’re fetuses — oh wait, insurers wouldn’t be required to cover maternity care, either. Nor birth control. Nor gynecological exams. And we all know what the right wing wants to do to Roe v. Wade. So you’re having that baby whether you like it or not, but don’t expect any support from conception until after your kid has graduated. Guess you should have kept your legs closed, bitch.

Call your elected officials. Call them until you get through, because their lines are swamped, and it may take you a while. Especially if you’re represented by a Republican in either chamber, for the love of god, call them. A number of them are already wavering; they know this is bad. But this isn’t the kind of bad where it’s okay to let it happen and let them reap the consequences later, because for them, the consequences will be that maybe they get voted out of office two or four years down the road. For other people, the consequences will literally be death. They need to hear voices telling them not to do it, before we get that far.

For the sake of the millions of people who will be hurt by this, speak up. Make your voice heard. Make a difference.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/801095.html

(Jim Hines posted this to his blog earlier today; I’m reposting it because it is timely and well-chosen.)

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

…

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

…

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured…

-From Letter From a Birmingham Jail
Written by Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 16, 1963

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/794523.html

Today I went to the “Hour of Prayer and Solidarity” at a local mosque, which they organized in the wake of receiving a piece of hate mail. I estimate that around 300 people showed up, which is bloody good turnout for a cold Sunday afternoon and a place that’s basically inaccessible without a car. They had leaders from a bunch of other faith communities (Methodist, Catholic, Sikh, Jain, Jewish — those are the ones I recall), some local legislators, and the mayor. There were some speeches and a lot of clapping.

In addition to the good it does for the people targeted by hate mail to see us all standing out there in the parking lot to support them, it did me good to go. Because in the end, Tweets don’t carry as much impact as much as the physical presence of people around me, going to effort greater than clicking “retweet” to stand against that kind of prejudice. It is, in a way, a kind of medicine, strengthening my heart against the poison that’s seeping out of the cracks right now.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about religion lately. I was raised in the Methodist church, largely for reasons of convenience rather than tradition (neither of my parents was raised Methodist); I went through confirmation, but none of it ever meant very much to me on a personal level. But lately — especially as I listen to Christmas music for the season — I find myself thinking a lot about myself as a Christian. I feel this odd desire to claim that label for myself right now, not because I’ve experienced a sudden upwelling of doctrine-specific faith, but because I want to stand in contrast to all the Christians who have let themselves forget the importance of love, tolerance, charity, and forgiveness. I want to be in solidarity with the Christians who haven’t forgotten those things, to help keep them from being drowned out by the others. I want to stand in a cold parking lot for an hour and say wa-alaikum-salaam back at the guy who just wished peace upon me as a member of not just a geographical community, but a religious one — at least in the social/cultural sense of “religious.”

I’m not sure where this impulse will go. I doubt I’m going to start attending church again — though you never know. I just know that that feeling of community is important right now, that feeling of solidarity. I need those reminders that the hateful are not the only ones out there, and the rest of us have voices, too.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/790713.html

One of the issues I keep chewing on is the fundamental weakness of journalism today. A combination of factors ranging from the ability of fake news to spread via social media to the economic pressures that encourage our formal outlets to pursue sensationalism and fence-sitting have made it such that misinformation rules the day right now.

I want to work on fixing that, but I don’t know how.

I’ve seen people say “we need to subscribe to paid outlets so they can afford to do proper investigative journalism.” Is that the answer? I’m not sure. I have no guarantee that’s what they’ll spend my subscription dollars on, and no certainty that even if they do, it will have a noticeable effect. So I put it to you all: what’s the best place to apply leverage to improve the state of journalism today? Is it a newspaper subscription? Some organization? Does anybody out there have a real, practical solution to this problem — or at least a convincing argument for one — and if so, where?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/789956.html

Back in high school, my sister and I decided to respond to a friend’s tendency to call us “witches” by circling him in a swimming pool while reciting the entire cauldron scene from Macbeth.

(Yes, we were very strange. Still are, in fact.)

Anyway, as somebody who still has that entire scene memorized, I found this to be utter and satisfying genius: “Nasty Women Have Much Work to Do.”

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/784576.html

Last night, I went to the website of the California Democratic Party and filled out a volunteer form.

Because I believe that this election matters — and I don’t just mean the presidential election, though keeping that proud bigot, Donald Trump, out of office is a high priority for me. As I’ve said before, I think we as a society need to pay more attention to the down-ticket races, to the local elections and measures. And I think one of the most corrosive factors in the United States right now is the combination of apathy and organized efforts to restrict voting rights: the sense that your vote doesn’t really matter, and the passage of laws supposedly designed to combat the next-to-nonexistent problem of voter fraud, which just so happen to make it harder for the Wrong Kind of People to vote. I don’t know yet what my local party will ask me to help out with, but I’m hoping I can work on the “get out the vote” end of things.

But I won’t be choosy. Whatever they need, I will do my best to provide. Because I’m not sure I’ve cared about any election year as much as this one.

If you’re involved in politics, organizing or volunteering or holding some political office, speak up in the comments! I’d like to know who out there has already waded into this particular pond.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/776164.html

With Clinton sewing up the Democratic nomination, I understand that a great many people are feeling disappointed by the results of primary season, and discouraged by the prospect of the upcoming general election. You don’t want to vote for the racist, sexist egomaniac, but you don’t like the idea of voting for Clinton, either: she’s too corporatist, too much of a hawk, too much or too little of whatever you’re most focused on. And so you’re thinking that come November, maybe you’ll write in Bernie’s name or vote Green or just not show up to vote at all. As a protest against the corruption, the two-party system, the rightward swing of our country.

To those people, I say this: look at the rest of the ballot.

Not the rest of the presidential ballot. The rest of the ballot. Governor. Senator. Representative. State legislators. Heck, go past those down into the real nitty-gritty: mayors, city councilmembers, school board, local measures, whatever your particular voting district lets you register an opinion on.

That is where your protest can mean something.

At that level of the ballot, you can damn well bet that every single vote can make a difference. Maybe your state is guaranteed to go blue or red in the electoral college, but your town? That’s easier to swing. And if you swing the town in the direction you want, it gets easier to swing the county, and the state, and the nation.

Sure, it’s a pain in the neck to pay attention to all of those races. Lots of them don’t even have official party affiliations, so you can’t just look for the right letter; you have to spend some time googling endorsements and policy statements. Voting responsibly at the local level requires preparation. But not much: even just an hour online the night before the election can give you a decent sense of the lay of the land. And then you’ve made the area around you just a little bit more like the world you want to live in.

Because for fuck’s sake, if we sit around expecting to make change happen once every four years, it’s never going to happen. We need change at the local level. We need city governments that prioritize making our lives better on a daily basis. We need ordinances that protect people’s health and safety. We need fields in which to grow new candidates, creating the governors and senators and presidents of the next few decades. So find the people you want, find the fire-breathing socialist radical of your dreams or the economic visionary with the ideas that can save us all that’s running for county commissioner, and vote for them. (Hell, maybe even sign up for their campaigns. But I haven’t gotten that far myself, so I’m trying to just preach what I practice, here.)

Then, when you’ve done that, take a look at the top of the ballot again.

Ask yourself: of the options there, which has the best chance of supporting all those downticket people in their work?

(And remember, this is not the Hugos. We can’t vote No Award, can’t say we’d rather have no president at all than one of the candidates on offer. We’ll have a president. And it’s going to be one of two people.)

When you vote, it’s not about you or your preferred candidate. It’s about the rest of the country, its government and its citizens, the extent to which they’re going to work together or against each other. It’s about the Supreme Court justices that candidate will nominate, who will decide the cases that will improve or wreck lives. It’s about those lives they’ll improve or wreck, all the people who can’t afford to say “well, maybe four years of Trump would be the wake-up call this country needs” — because they’re already awake, and they’re the eggs that would get broken for your self-righteous omelette.

You say you want a revolution? Vote for one — down at the bottom of the ballot, the roots that tree needs in order to grow.

(Personally, I’m fine with Clinton, and am happy to vote for her in November. If you feel differently, I won’t argue with you; but I’m not particularly interested in dissecting her character, voting record, or other qualities in the comments.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/771733.html

One thing that comes up a fair bit in discussions of diversity and so forth is the accusation that liberal types are only buying/watching/otherwise supporting particular books/movies/tv shows/etc because those things promote a particular agenda: racial inclusiveness, gender equality, queer acceptance, and so forth.

It occurred to me today, after reading this excellent post by Jim Hines, that we seem to have no problem with boycotting things because we disagree with their political agenda and wish to not support it. That is, in fact, a time-honored and widespread tactic for registering your displeasure with a situation. So why is it wrong to do the opposite?

And clearly, if “boycotting” is avoidance for the sake of protest, then participation for the sake of support ought to be called “girlcotting.”

(Yes, I know that isn’t the actual etymology of the word. Hush you with your logic.)

So I say, those who feel that science fiction has room for bug-eyed aliens of all kinds but not women or black dudes as protagonists should feel free to boycott the new Star Wars movie. Me, I’m going to girlcott it. I’m going to try to see it opening weekend, and if it’s good, I’ll go see it again. Because sometimes you need to throw your toys out of the pram . . . but sometimes you need to grab hold of them and say, yes. mine.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/748010.html

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