I pick up my Daily Kos paper today, (in the figurative sense, of course), and what do I see on the front page, topping the Rec List?
This kind of stuff. Sigh. I read into the comments and somebody brings up this quote out of the same article.(h/t to Kronecker D)
As Brands, the historian, put it, "It’ll be really interesting to see if a president who is thinking long term can have an impact on a political system that is almost irredeemably short term in its perspective."
And that got me thinking.
There's another quote worth drawing from the same comment:
"I make no apologies for having set high expectations for myself and for the country, because I think we can meet those expectations," he said. "Now, the one thing that I will say — which I anticipated and can be tough — is the fact that in a big, messy democracy like this, everything takes time. And we’re not a culture that’s built on patience."
That's Obama speaking. And reading that, it hit me that as good as our community here, a lot of weakness comes from a lack of that same patience.
The world isn't kind to folks who grow reliant on instant gratification, who grow short on patience. The world is complex, and not everybody's reading the same script as we are, playing in the same movie. We ask ourselves how can people oppose what we love, or get hornswoggled by GOP and all their partners, forgetting that not everybody gets the kind of information we get, or looks at it from our point of view.
A lot of people point at all that's gone horribly wrong, and are saying, why should you be patient with this?
Well, we can choose to be patient, or we can choose to be impatient, but we are much more constrained when it comes to whether or not the object of our impatience will actually budge. I won't claim to be the worlds most perfect practictioner of patience. I've been short with plenty of people here, even to the point at going after the folks who were anxious about our fortunes just before the 2008 election with an allegorical baseball bat.
I know what it is to be impatient, then. I also know, in the back of my mind, though, that I'm getting impatient because the political process, inside and outside of my party, is not going quite as fast or quite as consistently as I would like it to.
I feel incline a lot of times to just give up. I don't feel particularly betrayed, as I never expected Congress or the President to be completely consistent to what went on in the campaign, but there are plenty of times when doing other things, like reading novels or writing my own, doing really fun stuff just seems a better use of my time.
And when I read stuff like this, and the kind of pessimistic, despondent commentary that typically follows, I feel even less like showing up.
What keeps me going, keeps me in the fight, is a feeling akin to what the film character Neo feels when he tries to get out of the car before meeting Morpheus that night. Trinity says, you've been down that road before, and it doesn't lead to a place you want to go.
I've been alive a little over 31 years. I have a long memory. I've seen Liberals and Democrats withdrawing, pulling back, allowing so many institutions to get dominated by Conservative and Republican thinkers. I've seen voters get more and more cynical, more and more inclined to see the parties as no different. I've seen voter turnout drop. I've seen the conservatism go from having Reagan's face to having Glenn Beck's.
And you know what? I don't think these things are unconnected. I don't think this decay of our system is simply an accident. I think there are forces out there whose basic mission is push us out of power, to destroy the ability of folks like us to get what we want.
And these folks, more and more, represent the establishment in our country. The fact that they screwed things up so royally has only succeeded in pushing them from that prominence so much. Right now they are pushing back, trying to recover the power they had and more.
So, when I think of giving up, like Neo, I see a dark road that I've been down before, that I've in fact been down my whole life, and looking at that I lose all willingness to give up. Yes, I can lose pushing my party and its policies forward, I can lose supporting Obama, I can lose supporting the Democrats in Congress. I certainly do not see my country anywhere near where I desired it two years ago.
I see progress, though, if not in full fact, then at least in terms of preparing the groundwork for later policy changes. I see the cause moved forward. I see where this can put us for the long term.
So, I am not so sensitive for these "WTF is this" moments. Why? Because basically speaking, if you get wrapped up in, and discouraged by every little setback, real or simply apparent, if you're just waiting for evidence of betrayal, if you're clinging to a hope that you'll get everything you want out of a candidate, you will not last long, and you will not feel like adding your voice to the political argument for long.
Or, at the very least, like so many do for me, you will make the other progressives and other liberals feel like all is doom and gloom, and that will encourage many to simply give up. Relentless self-criticism is an easy way to diminish yourself, and its no way to run a party. There's good reason to hold people accountable, but there are more diplomatic and mature ways to do that.
When we do otherwise, we put ourselves in a position where the constant knocks, both intentional and unintentional, have greater power over us. When we fail to deal with the troubles of being a political party, much less a majority one, in a mature, calm manner, we make our situation more brittle, and we make it easier for our enemies to win.
If a few wrong words, a few setbacks are all it takes to make us quit, or settle into a despairing funk, if we look at the shortfalls, and see failures alone, if we set goals, and instead of keeping to them in the long term and keeping calm, we throw a fit in anger when efforts don't succeed, all the Republicans and the conservatives will have to do to maintain their hold on the country's politics is what they're already doing: being obstructive roadblocks to our agenda.
That's been their strategy. That's been their point. They want to take our mistrust and skepticism of our leaders, and fan that into a fire of discontent that will undermine their rivals when they most need them undermined. So they'll force all the compromises we don't like, they'll poison the political atmosphere, and they'll drag their heels on everything and anything, whether it makes sense or not.
And they'll watch us tear each other apart from the frustration and impatience. They'll watch us lose support and enthusiasm, they'll watche us let people lose in a elections they shouldn't lose, as they drum up the kind of mad, desperate, nasty countermovement they have to drum up to keep people from rationally appreciating just who they're planning to put into power.
It may be too late now to reverse the damage this year, and that will be a pretty sad thing in my opinion. But I will find out whether it's too late for sure after the elections. I don't plan on being defeated before I play the game on election day, and neither should you.
But if we lose, we cannot afford to die of shame, puttering around asking what happened. We have to look beyond the present moment and the present concern to the long term. We have to be sea that wears away the rocks, the natural selection that changes the species.
I'm not saying to move at glacial pace. I'm saying we must be relentless and constant, and not let consistency be the hobgoblins of our heads. We can't be so uncompromising in the details, in the means of gaining our progress that we sacrifice the consistency of our efforts to push things further to the left, to take this country in a new direction. Sure, we should look for opportunities to gain more ground fast, but we shouldn't wait for those opportunities to act or vote or get our message out. We shouldn't depend on those inconstant windsocks in Congress to lead us, we should lead them. We should be the prevailing wind that keeps them pointed in the same direction drawn out with the same force.
In short, we should be more concerned with acting out our purpose than seeking out the signs of our destruction.
We need to commit ourselves to create the change we want, not wait for somebody else to give it to us.