With the redacted Mueller report about to drop, it’s tempting to get sucked into the news and spin cycles that are sure to follow. I plan not to do that today. But I also plan not to go politically inactive and abandon the field of action to others. I am going to keep doing the activist thing I’ve been doing lately – sending personalized postcards to Democratic voters urging them to vote in various local, state, and special Congressional elections. (https://postcardstovoters.org/)
I am also going to continue using the wonderful online tool, Resistbot
, to easily write and send letters and faxes to members of Congress demanding that the full, unredacted report be made public, and keeping the pressure on about other important issues.
And I’m going to look for opportunities to keep hammering away at the long term enduring work needed to win local, state, and federal elections for Democrats, by checking on Indivisible’s work in my area and keeping up with a great activist organization in my state, Turn PA Blue.
We can’t count on good luck with news cycles and the unfolding of events. If the eventual contents of the full Mueller report see the light of day, and if those contents actually bring Trump down or decrease his chances of re-election, huzzah – bonus – yay! But we all know that things might play out very differently, justly or not.
We can’t control the news cycle. We can’t control the judgment calls on political strategy that the top House Dems or the Dem candidates for president will make (though we can sympathize with how hard those calls are to make sometimes). We can’t control the way Americans perceive the news stories of the day, and we can’t control what the Bannons and Fox Newses of the world put out into the public consciousness.
All we can do is direct the energy and resources we have to building a progressive majority from the ground up. We do that by participating in the many organizing efforts that have come alive since 2016. We do that by inviting people to join us, and by reaching out and nudging and supporting a zillion grassroots efforts to change our society and win every election we can, even if it’s for school board or county clerk. We’ve been doing that since 2016, and it has already made a positive difference. We need to keep doing it for the long, long term. It will build a strong foundation for a progressive American future that will be bigger than any one turn of events, any single election loss, any single bad Supreme Court ruling, and single anything.
And we need to turn to each other for emotional and spiritual support while we’re doing all this work. We need each other – we need comfort, and encouragement, and places to share fear, grief, and worry, and people to feel connected with. We need to not be isolated. This also helps achieve political goals, because it’s part of how the bonds of community get built strong, and it’s how Americans make friends across lines of class, race, gender, immigration status, etc.
That’s my game plan. Hope you’ll join me.
The Accidental Rabbi 