Weekend Update: Storm Front
Howdy! How are you doing with the indictment news, and all of the crazy, dangerous weather up in these United States the past few days? Hope you and yours are doing okay.
We had wild hail here in this part of central Iowa (photo below), but lots of folks had much more severe weather including some tornadoes. Reports are coming in today. Too much to keep track of or link to… especially as people in many states have been dealing with tornadoes the last few weeks.
There’s so much and it all looks the same. Doesn’t matter if you’re in Alabama or Missouri… once a devastating tornado takes out your town, it looks like a tornado just hit. Tree bases. House parts. Cars strewn about. Traumatized people talking about who or what they’ve lost, or the sound, or who’s still missing. It’s godawful, and we’re likely to have more as we get more intense storms in this time of climate change.
One of my local-ish Facebook friends wrote the other day that the day-to-day weather is itself unsettling. She said that it used to be that once spring started to come about in March, you could go out and walk and be outside. She said it doesn’t seem like that these days. It seems intense and foreboding; dangerous.
Indeed, we’ve had very unstable air here this week, and it does feel dangerous. I think we’re meant to pick up on the danger in the instability. Old genes and so many centuries of evolution.
The instability in the country is a different story. It’s kind of counterintuitive in some ways. There’s widespread denial, and that’s hard to power through. There’s cynicism and apathy, too. Giving up. Finding distractions. Focusing on day-to-day stuff. Next thing you know you live in an unstable democracy.
Oh wait! That’s already happened! We’re there!
We’re not powerless, though.
But: we are going to have to get folks to see the danger. It doesn’t present like the green sky and the unstable air before a dangerous storm comes in. You can’t open the front door and feel the danger in the country like you can with a storm front.
Here’s what I offer:
We’re creating space to get people together to build connection, to commiserate, to dream and scheme, and then to act.
We’re fixing to do politics, persuasion, and pressure differently.
We’ve got big ideas. We’ve been working with volunteers this past week to grow those and start working on how we can make that shift happen. For our first week actively working with volunteers, we had some very neat stuff happen. I’ll try to write a summary of that by Monday.
We’ll need to get a whole freaking ton of people involved to really go all out. I think we can get there.
We need your help with that. We need you to check out our events, and also to share them with other people. LOTS of people. Like every Facebook group you’re in. Like every real-world group you’re in. Like every nonprofit, and every county political party, and every knitting group, and so on.
I thought I might write a big indictment-news post, but to be honest I was so excited about some of the volunteer big-idea work we did this week that I didn’t get to it. And, we had to do some legal stuff like you do to stay legitimate as a nonprofit. But aren’t there already 900,000 indictment posts already out there?
Here’s the biggest post-indictment thing I’d add: I think Trump and Company are going to ramp up their own pressure to add to the nation’s instability. That’s not breaking news. Trump has everything to lose so why not go all out? He as already pushed the norms so far that now we have new norms and less shock. So he keeps it up… as the overwhelm persists.
Related, the accelerationist crowd (more here and here) has had increased chatter about what they might do to ramp up pressure. That’s really bad, as it involves attacks on power grid pieces and parts. While they’re unlikely to succeed nationwide, they could do some real damage. That’s a story for a different day — but it shows that we need to keep our wits about us and be more resilient. Our work here is designed to help with that, too, as resilience can come from community and connection.
Also related: most of the remaining Republican party has opted to go full-lawless and take further action to erode the institutions of law and order in this country by declaring that the indictment is political rather than what it is: criminal charges against a man who commits crimes out in the open regularly because no one before was ever willing to charge him.
Also related: a loud, scary, raucous, dangerous set of extremists in a country can absolutely do huge damage… including seizing power. It doesn’t matter if the majority disagrees if the majority doesn’t freaking push back on the raucous, dangerous extremists.
They win sometimes in some countries because people get cowed. They win because terrorism works sometimes. They win because people don’t know what to do.
Well I’ll tell you something.
We know what to do.
Shift the Country has been getting set up so we can help push what will be like the 342nd wave here since Trump came onto the scene. Now that everyone’s all worn out from the first waves and the second waves and the holding-democracy-together-in-2020 waves and the doing-it-again-in-2022 waves… it’s time for more waves.
It’s time to energize the majority. We’ve got a plan. It’s based on history and sociology and science and mass communication and freaking raw courage. And big ideas. And big brains. And your willingness to get out of your comfort zone and try new stuff. Mine, too.
We need to go bigger and louder and more brazen because the extremists are going bigger and louder and with more threats. They’re winning local elections where they’re banning books and outlawing drag and making it dangerous for trans people and getting rid of abortion and abortion pills and making women and girls have to fight to stay alive when a pregnancy goes bad.
Where is the fight?
I know we’re tired, but we have to rally. People are depending on us. Kids and neighbors and friends and colleagues and people we’ve never met. Future Americans.
We have options. Join us to get engaged.
PLEASE. SIGN. UP. FOR. SOMETHING.
Or, please share this around.
Or talk about it. Or bring people in with you.
Or donate to help us get this going, so we can advertise soon to bring people in!
Okay! Keep the faith — in humans, and in democracy. We’ve got good people.
We’re going to do amazing stuff.