Thread by @dynamicsymmetry, Okay, the fatalism and despair on my TL is foolish and silly [...]

Okay, the fatalism and despair on my TL is foolish and silly and exhausting. Sit down and shut up and listen to me for a sec.

We said—WE SAID—that Trump was a symptom, not the disease. That when he won, it was a sign that there was something very, very wrong deep down in the fabric of the country, and it had been there for a long fucking time. We said that. I thought we all understood it.

Well, seems like a lot of people didn’t.

I say this with love: get your fucking shit together.

A single election was never going to fix it, and it was never going to be the dramatic win we wanted it to be. There’s just too much wrong.

I think a lot of people subconsciously wanted this to be the election that let them off the hook, that made it okay for them to sit back and not do anything for a while.

I also know a lot of us wanted to crush the GOP and make them hurt for a change. Christ knows I did.

And THEY PROBABLY WILL HURT, BECAUSE JOE BIDEN IS VERY LIKELY TO WIN. It’s just not a night-of gut punch. They’re going to whine and kick and scream all the way.

They were always going to do that.

It was always going to go this way.

Real progress, the kind of progress that actually *fixes* things in a way that sticks, takes a long time. Generations of time. The more broken things are, the longer it takes. And Trump winning in 2016, and the stability of his approval ratings, was a sign of brokenness.

I just tore into someone telling me that because the GOP didn’t collapse after 2008, they’re never going to, and you know what, I’m trying to get my temper under better control, but I told that person to shut up and that kind of sentiment needs to shut the fuck UP.

SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

You think something as gigantically entrenched and colossally evil as the GOP is going to collapse in a couple of decades? What are you, new here?

If you think it can’t happen, of COURSE it never will.

If you think it can happen, you have a shot of making it happen. No matter how impossible it seems.

Why have you not learned this.

Why.

It’s always going to be hard. It’s always going to be frustrating. It’s always going to be two steps forward and one step back. It’s always going to take way, way longer than it should.

You want real realism? I’ll give you real realism.

Real realism, realism that looks at data and history and is clear-eyed, is: anything can change if people work for it, and it hardly ever changes as fast and as dramatically as those people would like it to.

America is deeply, profoundly fucked up and it was never going to be fixed quickly, and you have no excuse for not knowing that.

I get that you’re disappointed. I get that you’re sad that people aren’t as good as you wanted them to be. I am those things as well.

But you don’t get to declare that because it didn’t happen now, it won’t ever happen, and throw your hands up and sit this out. We need you. We need you to accept that a better world is possible.

So get give yourself some time to be sad, get your shit together, and get to work.

We’re in this for the long haul. Our ancestors worked to make it better, and we must work to make it better, and we will not see it fixed in our lifetimes, but if we work hard and believe it can happen, we will live to see it get better.

The GOP is crushable, or at least the monstrous horror that is the current GOP is crushable. They’re in a losing war with time and demography. They are literally dying out. But that wasn’t going to happen overnight.

Say your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion—put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world.
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Practice resurrection.

Resurrection is wild, it is literally insane, it is impossible that it ever happens, and it happens over and over every day, as part of natural processes, so we lose sight of how literally incredible it is.

Look the fuck around. How dare you say anything is impossible.

We had a good night, we will most likely come out of this into a world where Donald Trump is gone. Everything will still be fucked up and bullshit. It was always going to be. Sorry. I hate it too.

Someday it will not be that way, if we believe it can be better and we work.

In the meantime, if what you have time contribute is “that’s impossible, you’ll never do that”:

SHUT
THE FUCK
UP

And go away. Unfollow me. Never speak to me again. I’m uninterested in literally anything else you have to say.

Because I disagree with you, to my very marrow bones. I believe you could not be more wrong. And I believe you are hurting far more than you are helping, and if you can’t help, get the fuck out of the way.

The rest of you, take some time to be sad that it wasn’t what we wanted. Then sit with that sadness and understand that a better world is possible. It’s all possible.

Then get your shit together and get back to work.

Do like the bard Wendell Berry says, for he brings divine wisdom and inspiration.

Practice resurrection.

The only other option is death forever.

I don’t want that. Do you?

(By the way just to be clear that poetry up there is Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”, which is the poem of my very soul. Go read it. Even if you already have. It will do you good today.)

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