AlterNet has a great article about a great speech given by Van Jones.
The room is packed, and a line snakes along the sidewalk outside Busboys and Poets, a restaurant designed as a gathering place for progressives, even as the event begins.
The evening after the big Rally To Restore Sanity/Lies, Van Jones spoke to an audience of progressives about the work ahead.
If there is a silver lining to Van Jones' removal from his job inside the administration it is that he is no longer constrained from speaking his mind about progressive organizing. His words are a rallying cry and a reminder that we are in charge of how we respond to events as they unfold. We do not have to wait for the president to lead the way, nor should we.
"Now, here's our problem," he says. "Most of the people who are in this room have given away, over the past two years, almost all of our power. The reason the country is in the shape that it's in is not just because bad people created a hate machine; it's that good people shut down the hope machine."
We have a history of activism that created a whole list of successful outcomes, including the Obama presidency.
"The Obama victory, he explains, didn't begin with Barack Obama inspiring progressives; it began with progressives inspiring Obama.
So, if there's an inspiration deficit, or an inspiration gap in America, don't look to him," Jones says, "let's look back to ourselves."
We do not have to watch in mute horror as Republicans tear down the social safety net and destroy federal environmental oversight. Jones see those as the two major battles ahead of us. We also do not have to wait for the president to do something.
Van Jones sees the power of 2008 not as the successful election of one man, no matter how historic his election was.
There's been too much focus on Obama among progressives, Jones says, and not enough on growing the movement on our own terms, even though, he notes, progressives helped to create as many jobs in the wind energy industry as there are coal miners in America -- 80,000 -- and another 46,000 in the solar energy industry.
"But somehow we became a movement, after our greatest victory, that sits around munching popcorn, waiting for one person to give a great speech so we can feel good," tells the activists. "Now, that's gotta stop."
My take-away from this article was that defending Obama and attacking Obama are two sides to the same coin. Our attention needs to be on our own power and how we can use it to forward a progressive agenda. To quote a sub-heading from the Alternet article, "If we are the ones we have been waiting for, what are we waiting for?"