I wrote this to my cousins but I want to share it with my larger progressive community.
What do we do now?
After Obama was elected the tea party for all their craziness pulled together and transformed the house and the Senate. It's time for the left to do the same thing to get organized to pull together.
One tendency of the left is that we splinter. There was a time when me my mother and my father were all in the same Union: the Chicago Teachers Union. So you might think that we would have been in agreement but you would be wrong. We were in three different factions and our dinner table conversations were just as contentious as the conversations in families where you have uncles who voted for Trump.
So my point is we need to get it together take a look at the big picture and stop dissecting every issue like Talmudic Scholars.
What I see as positive going forward is that the left has really lacked coherent leadership. But that has changed. Two years ago no one had heard of Bernie Sanders. I remember I went to see him at the 1199c union hall and it was a maybe a hundred gray haired old lefties sitting on folding chairs.
Two years later people were lined up for hours to hear him speak.
We have a leader we can unify around.
So my call to action for my colleagues on the left is to put aside our differences. We need to stop arguing about who's more privileged. We need to stop worrying about whether or not safety pins are a good idea or a way to assuage white guilt. We need get it together, to organize, to unify.
I don’t care anymore if you were #bernieorbust or #imwithher. It doesn’t matter anymore. We are all on the same side now.
When workers rights are being stripped away, we need to be there on the picket line.
When medicare is being threatened we need to be there at the offices of our elected representatives making noise.
We need to run for office up and down the ballot—school board, precinct captain—all those grunty positions.
We are no longer the loyal opposition we are now the resistance.
See you all on the picket line.