Thread by @clairewillett, I remember once when I was a kid reading a quote from [...]

I remember once when I was a kid reading a quote from Bill Clinton that said "there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America" and he's a whole trash barge and the absolute worst Clinton but I actually think about this concept all the time??

like

in the face of an unprecedented level of blatant, out-in-the-open voter suppression, facing a president who spent four years stoking violent white supremacy and inspiring millions of people to channel the absolute worst of what this country is, people never stopped fighting

it isn't even about Joe Biden, not really

it's like

the people who got up and went to work every day in beige unglamorous cubicles to process ballots

the people who have been calling and texting and emailing us all for months to remind you to check if you're registered

it's all the people in horrifically gerrymandered states who have spent the past 10-20 years pushing boulders uphill to move the needle even a LITTLE bit against a level of voter suppression many of us white folks in blue states can't even comprehend having to live under

I am not particularly sentimental about what America is, as an institution, because most of the things that we're encouraged to be sentimental about crumble into dust pretty quickly once you scratch beneath the surface to see what's underneath (spoiler: it is white supremacy)

and I don't think that being sort of misty-eyed and emo and "HUZZAH, JOE BIDEN SAVED DEMOCRACY" is a useful starting place for the long slog of grueling hard work it will take to nail down everything we learned, over the past four years, was not in fact nailed down

but I do hope that maybe this election can be the beginning of the end of dirtbag left bro cynicism, and the idea that incremental gains are useless - that if you don't get 100% of what you want the first time, then why bother

the work that tipped the scales in so many of the Southern states we've been talking about this week has been going on for decades, even if you, personally, just noticed it, and it's a lot bigger than just Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke, the two people whose names you know

so like idk if that's how Bill Clinton meant it, I'm sure he didn't, I'm sure at the time it was generic bipartisanship pablum and whatever, but that's how I choose to interpret it

it's heroic to dedicate your life to a fight you have no idea how long it will take to win

and maybe instead of trying to cure racism with NYT thnkpieces about the economic anxiety of white coal miners, we might consider that it actually IS possible - if you point the money in the right direction - to rebuild systems and institutions to limit the harm racists can cause

I really do feel a lot of hope

not because anything has been permanently fixed or is definitively over and now we're out of the woods

but because good people fought hard and won a rigged fight in a corrupt system, and have new power now to begin the work of un-rigging.

and none of this happens overnight, we will be fighting some of these battles for our whole lifetimes, I don't know how old I will be by the time we finally have a balanced Supreme Court again

so basically now we all have to think like progressive Black organizers in Georgia

and there's something fundamentally generous and civic-minded and open-hearted about that, because you're accepting the fact that you will have to do a lot of hard work at perhaps very little benefit to you personally, in order to make the world better for other people

so I guess, for me, that's where I locate my sense of hope

the siren song of Trumpism - "nothing matters except winning," "I don't care who gets hurt as long as it helps me" - attracted a lot of people, but not ENOUGH people to permanently lock it in as our new national ethos.

I think the desire so many of us had for a massive Tuesday night Dem blowout was because if we saw a cataclysmic repudiation of Trumpism it would feel like some part of the work was now definitively over

but realistically, it was ALWAYS going to be a slow, grueling, uphill slog

all of this was always going to be about planting seeds in a garden that we never get to see, and none of it was ever going to be about a one-and-done magical electoral fix for all the ways in which this country is deeply, systemically, structurally broken

but a whole lot of people who came before us began that work a long time ago and they carried us on their shoulders as far as they could, and now we'll pick the work up and carry it as far as we can go, and after we die others will come along and keep it going

that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, I think is comforting and hopeful

that for every problem that exists in our society, there is somebody who really does have an idea how to fix it, if we would just give them the resources and support they need to get to work

anyway

there are things about this country that are terrible (mostly systems), but there are also things about it that are extraordinary (mostly human beings), and that's what keeps me from hopeless cynicism

I know being earnest on Twitter is deeply uncool, but still, here I am

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