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Making it happen: Week 22
Volunteer letter-writers outdid themselves once again! Many thanks to Pennie Burns, Linda Chamberlain, Nancy Clement, Fran Finney, Tom Hons, Dave Mason, Kathy Pickering, Liz vonRuden and Sarah Bellinson & friends, who together completed 375 SwingLeft voter engagement letters this week. Woohoo! Gold stars on collars!
Many thanks, too, to our generous donors who are supporting the letter-writing, and to Pat Evenson-Brady for keeping the pipeline of prepared letter packets full. More gold stars on more collars!
Make it happen: Choose your action!
It’s chaos out thee, but we’ve got our eyes on the prize - DUMPING TRUMP and FLIPPING THE SENATE. Please join in and do your part to make this happen. It’s gonna take a full-court press.
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Act on the calls-to-action above.
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Do some SwingLeft letter-writing with us. Click here to request and pick up a prepared packet of letters and envelopes.
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Donate to help our work go forward. We’ve done 7200 (yes!) letters - they’ll require $3888 in postage (yes!).
Desperate, and Designing for Division
If it wasn’t quite enough dealing with the ongoing pandemic and 104,000+ deaths and an incompetent and cognitively impaired president, this week brought the murder of George Floyd, subsequent protests becoming riots, Trump himself inciting violence, Trump accusing China of numerous misdeeds, worse Flynn info, and Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO.
This is an impressive array of damage and destabilization for one week, even by Trumpian standards. What do we make of all this, and all at once? In her Friday (5/29) blog, Prof. Mary Cox Richardson, political historian, says, “This chaotic onslaught of news is designed to divide Americans and make us fall back into old animosities in order either to get us to accept a strong leader [Trump the autocrat] or to exhaust us until we quit caring what happens. … The leaders creating it are doing so precisely because they know they are not in control.”
This is where we Indivisibles come in. The Indivisible movement has grown to fight this threat to our democracy, together, for the long haul.
We will not be divided. We are INDIVISIBLE.
We will not accept Trump the autocrat. We will RESIST.
We will not be exhausted to the point of not caring. We will RESIST until we have our government back.
And we’ll do it together.
Empathy Like It’s 1850
The murder of George Floyd is a national tragedy, and worse, is just the latest in a consistent string of fatal racist events in this country. There are protests and words and exhortations to do better, to turn the corner, to finally bury our racist heritage. But will this time be different? What will it take to turn that corner, to achieve lasting cultural change on racism?
Here, again from H.C. Richardson, is a unique perspective on our current response to racial marginalization:
“Crucially, white Americans are finally paying attention to the violence against the black community. I suspect the reason for this attention is that the current leadership of the Republican Party has gone so far toward consolidating power in favor of an oligarchy that ordinary white Americans are identifying with marginalized people. This is precisely what happened in the 1850s, when even desperately racist white Americans pushed back against the elite slave owners taking control of the American government because they recognized that they, too, could be sacrificed if leaders thought they stood in the way of the economic system that enriched a few.”
Our thinking on overcoming racial marginalization usually revolves empathy and equity and justice. The scenario noted above, where it becomes easier to identify with the nail you’ve been hammering on when something starts hammering on you, seems a bit more self-serving in nature. But if it helps, so be it. We need help where we can find it.
QUOTES
“Everyone is a vector. Choose what you spread.”
- Francis Weller, therapist and author.
“Unspeakably stupid and self-defeating.”
- Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, on Trump withdrawing US from WHO in midst of pandemic. (Could have said the same about Trump himself, but she kept to the topic.)
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We’re all-in for CHANGE in 2020. Can you help fund our SwingLeft letter-writing project to register/engage voters in the 12 “Super States?" It will run through October and cost over $4000 (for postage, printing, supplies). Thanks for considering!
