We are Fighters, not Folders

We won’t lie. The last few weeks have been rough. It’s been a difficult year and a half since Trump took office for the second time, but since April 29th, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, decimating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it has felt particularly bleak. In the aftermath of Callais, the southern states have taken actions, including canceling elections and redrawing maps to remove Black majority districts, which makes  it seem like we are moving back to the 1950s or worse. On May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court's decision, which threw out Virginia's new maps, overruled the will of the people of Virginia who had just voted to uphold those maps, not to mention the tens of thousands of volunteers who called, wrote postcards, and knocked on doors in the days leading up to Virginia’s special election. And now, last week’s news included Trump’s taxpayer funded $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 insurrectionists and the Justice Department’s apparent grant of IRS immunity to Trump, his family and businesses, all while we are still embroiled in a deadly, costly, and unnecessary war. (A cease-fire deal is supposed to be in the works, but we’ll believe it when we see it.) It feels overwhelming, even for those of us who have been involved in activism since 2016. With some exceptions, we are not getting the leadership we need from our own party. (In fact, the Democratic Party is once again embroiled in conflict over the DNC, and the upcoming primaries have exacerbated intra-party tensions.)

Not that we are succumbing to despair. There are always postcards to be written, doors to be knocked, phone calls to be made, Democrats who are fighters, not folders to be supported. And there is at least one loud voice that is speaking truth to power in these beleaguered times, offering us hope and a path to patriotic resistance: Bruce Springsteen. In his appearance on Stephen Colbert's penultimate show, Springsteen called out Trump and the billionaire owners of CBS: "I am here in support tonight for Stephen because you're the first guy in America who has lost his show because we have a president who can't take a joke. And because Larry and David Ellison feel they need to kiss his ass to get what they want. Anyway, Stephen, these are small minded people. They got no idea about what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about." (emphasis added) That last sentence is one of the themes Springsteen speaks about on his current "Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour," that the current leadership of this country – Trump and his cronies – have no idea about our freedoms, our  history, or our patriotism. Springsteen’s words seem particularly fitting in this period between Memorial Day, when we commemorate those who gave their lives to protect our freedoms, and Independence Day, when we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding.

Springsteen begins the concerts on his current tour with some version of the following speech, the first of several overtly political, but also patriotic speeches, during the concert:  “We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideas — democracy, our constitution and our sacred American promise. The America I love, the America that I’ve written about for 50 years that has been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over division, and peace over war.”

That is as good a statement of our pro-democracy creed as we’ve heard. Unless or until they make a concert film from this tour, you can find clips of these speeches online. We urge you to listen to Bruce Springsteen, remember that we and our country are better than the “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration” temporarily in power, and join us to continue to fight for the America we love.