I'm not a political science major or an economist, or anything like that. My real training is in film and electronic media. Politics was once just something I did on the side, and now it takes up a lot more work than I ever thought it would.
Why bring this up? Well, the title is the key. As a guy who works with media on the computer, I've seen many different kinds of Keyframes and with many different uses. In computer animation, they're what you use many times to move your characters around. In Music and sound editing, you can use them in envelopes that swing your sound from side to side, and determine how loud everything is. With video editing and compositing, it's how you more or less manipulate the attributes of your visual and the effects you've put on top of them.
But what make a Keyframe important is that it shows the computer when a change is taking place. It tells the music when to fade up, the video when to fade out. It tells the creature when to turn its head, and the sound when to follow the creature in space like it should. It represents a decision on the artist's part. What I'm talking about here represents a decision on your part.
I talk about inflection points a lot. not much complicated about them. An inflection point is the point on the curve where the direction changes, where uphill becomes downhill, going right becomes going left. It's also the point in physics where the resistance to a change in direction finally is overcome by the change itself.
Think of yourself driving a car towards a brick wall. If you don't want to hit it, you can't just get within inches of it and turn. You got to give yourself some room to change the direction of the car, to counter the inertia that you built up in the first place.
And so it is with Washington, local government, and other places. We would like to think that everything just changes the minute we win an election, but there is just simply decades worth of political changes that these people have wrought, and they're not necessarily going to let those things change without a fight.
Talk is easy to change. Hot air transports easily, and since everybody's free in this country to say whatever they want, there's no resistance we need pay heed to in simply venting our opinion, saying what we want to say. Word carry little weight, and so have little momentum.
Legislation? Executive Orders? Negotiations? Those things move with quite a bit more momentum behind them, and we cannot by ourselves change these things. You can speak the truth just fine, but the world remains much the same, the laws on the books as they were, the practices in Washington and in big business as they were.
What's more, especially after Citizens United, there is serious resistance in the halls of power, contrary to what people want, against change. This isn't the product of a recent negotiations mistake by Obama, this is the inertia of decades worth of Republican policy and politics. In other words, just like that car speeding at the brick wall, we're going to need a lot of room and a lot of momentum in another direction to really change things.
Now, I understand the frustrations of many with our leaders, but I think we need to quit counting on them to be the vanguard of political change. Rather, they need to be the rubber that meets the road, the people who have the greater interest in keeping our interests in power than defeating them.
We need to be the engine. I don't say that merely as a frivolous bit of cheerleading. I'm serious. We need to decide that we're deliberately going to change the party. We also need to commit ourselves to it despite the unfair, intolerable obstacles that get tossed in the way. Despair is easy. It is also defeat, which is not so easy to live with in the long term. We are given brains like the ones we got so we can avoid these kinds of long term regrets and consequences. We're not merely bundles of feelings inevitably heading for some nasty reckoning, we are free souls who can make a choice.
We need to set the keyframe, to make our deliberate decision to change the directions and attributes of our lives, and our political system. No more simply reacting against the Republicans, we should be acting of our own initiative to change things for the better. We need to set as many keyframes after that as we need to keep the curve swinging in the right direction, and we need to keep at it long enough to change the path of this country. We cannot simply, having fought hard for a few years, having enjoyed some power for a few years and then lost it, decide that it's all just going to hell. Maybe it is, maybe we're too close to the wall after all, and we're going to hit it.
But if we don't try, if we don't move to win, if we don't dedicate ourselves to turning things around, there's no doubt we will hit the wall, and harder than if we tried something, lessened the momentum in that direction.
We may achieve nothing else than damage control, but even that has its uses, and the timeline for the curve stretches on. Perhaps the disaster we fail to prevent will be a turning point that gets people to go our way. We should not simply assume that every setback for us is a permanent turn in a bad direction. We should not give up our will power, our initiative, our ability to choose so easily.
Stop letting the fecklessness of politicians, the failure of votes, the failure to get the policies you want, the intolerable crises, made up and real, get to you. Stop letting your circumstances push you to do out of emotion what doesn't reasonable serve your interests. Stop letting the trends and the turns of the herd convince you that the way we're going is the only way things can go.
The reality is, all these trends that benefited the Republicans started when they were in our position, decades ago. They decided, whatever their morals and motives were, that they were going to do what it took to get back power for themselves. And so they did. It's not a mistake or a coincidence that so many of the Republican's most powerful institutions dated from the late sixties and early seventies.
They made the deliberate choice to seek power to suit their own interests, and to build the institutions necessary to help them do that. We need to build this same institutional support, the same underpinnings of political power. Rather than point at and mourn the existence of ALEC and other interest groups, we should be creating our own core of political and policy apparatuses that will make it easier for us to oppose those we face.
But most of all, we need to care, to show up, to make the bloody-minded commitment to stand up to Republicans, to change the direction of politics in Washington, and most importantly, not let failures discourage us from that mission.
Make the choice, set the keyframe, and bend the curve of this nation's momentum back skywards. Don't let anybody or anything tell you you can't do this. This isn't about clapping harder. This is about picking yourself up instead of walking away in disgust to sulk in your own powerlessness. This is about giving as good as you get, and not letting yourself become intimidated.
Make the decision to be a free liberal. Make the decision to join other liberals, other progressives in the fight of our lifetimes. Make the decision to stick to it no matter what, and get others to do the same. Don't wait for somebody else to make your decisions for you, or bring about the changes you want. Decide to seek these things yourself.
It's not enough, day in and day out, to point out what's wrong with the world. I think we should start trying to figure out how to finagle and force the changes that will get us what we want, even against the resistance of our adversaries. And no, don't just expect the politicians to do these things, find what we all can do, what we all can organize to seek these goals.