I had the opportunity to go to Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy tour a few weeks ago, and the thing that has stuck with me was the way Sanders points out all the ways that we have improved at a society. Because even given recent backslides, we have so many more rights for so many more people than we did even twenty years ago.
things are awful in this country. And they are getting worse. But we haven’t lost everything yet. And the overall trend across human history, and even across US American history, is gradual, albeit often painstaking, progress.
we can wring our hands about what we should have done in the past, but that won’t change anything. What will create positive changing is refusing to lose hope and refusing to give in. Maybe we should have built grassroot community movements a decade ago, maybe we could have prevented all this pain and suffering, but we can’t control the past, we can only control the present. And it’s better to start building our movements today than to never build them at all.
Keep fighting. And start learning how to organize. There are people and communities out there in the past and in the present who have done and are doing what we need to do. It’s time to join them.
