It's fucking bleak, but I'm not surrendering to these assholes.

On optimism and momentum when the stakes are high

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Yep. Fucking bleak is right.

Between SCOTUS gutting the voting rights act and several Southern states proving that they were just fucking waiting in the wings to disenfranchise Black voters and our addle-pated, demented world leader falling asleep on camera hours before he ranted well into the night on his pet social media site, it’s ugly out there.

The Iran debacle sending gas prices soaring, inflation on the rise, the cost of living becoming nearly impossible for whole swaths of the population, the rapists and pedophiles still getting swept under the rug while ICE continues to detain and abuse human beings they’re storing in cages, it’s really hard to not give up any hope that we can salvage any of this.

But what’s most important to remember is that is exactly how the fuck they want you to feel.

Project 2025 wasn’t just about policy and kicking our society back to the fucking Reconstruction era, it was about what the walking sack of leprosy Steve Bannon would call flooding the zone. Do so much, so fast, with so much chaos that people just give up trying to stay on top of it all.

And friends, that’s the last fucking thing we’re going to do. Ever.

You can’t go hard all day every day. I know. You need to have grief and anger days. You need to have “fuck it I’m going outside and not looking at the headlines for a while” days. You need to spend time away from the maelstrom in order to survive it. Please do those things, because we need clear fucking heads on our shoulders.

To the crowd who keeps shrieking “Why doesn’t anyone DO anything?”, I feel you. It can be easy to lose the plot inside the assault, but there are a LOT of things happening. Lawsuits at the state level, walkbacks of policy decisions, failure of attempts to buy warehouses to imprison immigrants (and citizens) in, seats getting flipped in state and special elections all over the country. You just aren’t seeing them because your brain is now seeking out the doom. Because it’s reinforcing the narrative they want you to have in your head that everything is lost and we have nowhere to go from here.

But I’d like to remind you that Black, indigenous and other people of color across the country have been in this fucking fight for generations. We’ve only really been a democracy since 1965 when the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act were passed after countless Black people put their bodies and lives on the line to fight for it. I mean fuck, the 19th Amendment took a fucking CENTURY to pass.

This is a long, arduous fight. And the people who fought before you did so knowing they might not live to see the outcome.

We are not letting them fucking break us, okay? We are going to honor those who fought before us, we’re not abandoning our Southern neighbors, and we are going to make peace with the fact that our desire for instant gratification here is not the fucking move in a country whose history has been profoundly whitewashed. Now that the pain and suffering has hit comfortable, affluent and sheltered white people, there’s a lot of pearl clutching but that’s a fucking insult to so many people—Black people in particular—who have been telling us all along what was actually happening. We should have listened then, but we really need to fucking get a grip NOW.

Here are some things I need you to do if you aren’t already:

• Get fucking involved. Somewhere. Anywhere. I volunteer as an election judge. I do text banking for local candidates. I use Mobilize.us to find opportunities near me to donate or volunteer.

• If you have means, get on Oath.vote and send your dollars to the most consequential races where your dollars can have the greatest impact.

• SHOW UP LOCALLY. Especially if you are in the South, the 2030 census is going to be absolutely critical and we have to work the long game of state legislatures and courts because that’s where maps will be drawn in the future based on that census. Your local school board races all the way through township and state elections are fundamental and you cannot neglect them. For example, there are consequential court races in Georgia in the GA Supreme Court and Court of Appeals that can unseat right wing justices Warren and Bethel. Head to yourgeorgiaballot.com to learn about the candidates, their positions, and how you can help support the races no matter where you are.

• If you’re doing all of the above, then I need you to find ways to get the word out. If you have a platform, use it. If you can volunteer locally to send out postcards or texts to get voters registered or remind them of upcoming elections, do that. Voter turnout is essential and the only way to really counteract the racist gerrymandering happening across states. We have to flood the zone our own way with turnout that is “too big to rig”. Hungary showed us that you can indeed topple fascism at the voting booth.

We outnumber them. They know that, which is why they have to cheat, lie, manipulate and rig the system in their favor. If they can only win by corruption, they know we can take them out and they’re trying desperately to prevent that through the most nefarious means. Don’t you dare surrender to that.

The midterms have them scared shitless. They’re losing support from their own base on nearly every single issue, from the economy to the war in Iran to immigration on up. They’re caged animals, desperate to survive, and this is their extinction burst replete with violence and purposeful cruelty as progress comes for them.

Stay with us. Gird your fucking loins and put steel in your spine and lean on me or others when your knees buckle. But fucking stay in the fight.

It’s not okay right now, I know. But WE will be okay, and we are far too fucking big to be broken. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, it dies in apathy and surrender. And that is not what we’re going to do.

I’ll see you out there, friends. Let’s get to work.