A STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLE, OR A CRY OF DESPAIR, AS THE CASE MAY BE

Little by little, I am creeping forward with this cockamamie plan I have conceived to foster a nation-wide network of activists.  Why on earth am I doing this?  The simple answer is, Because I feel just awful, and doing something, anything, eases the pain.  That is not a very elevated motive, I admit, but then, that is pretty much why God gave his only begotten Son to save Mankind, and look how that turned out.

At the moment, I have opened a Gmail account and learned, thanks to Google, how to create a distribution list.  Baby steps …

There is one very important point I need to clarify, and that is the real reason for this post.  My goal is to encourage some people all over America to form their own local action groups targeting local elections and ballot initiatives.  It is very definitely not my aim to enforce any particular ideological agenda, no matter how strongly I may support it.  For example, I am on record [with the DNC via a phone call] as supporting Keith Ellison for Chair of the DNC, but there are many Democrats who support other candidates.  So far as I am concerned, that is just fine.  The same goes for any of a number of hotly contested policy issues.  My role, if I have any, is to encourage and maybe facilitate folks in various places to get in touch with one another and start agitating, organizing, identifying candidates for local or state offices, and in this way maybe to move the political center of the country a little bit leftward.  I am absolutely certain that most of the people I manage to get in touch with will have politics to the right of mine.  That has been true all my life.  In my eyes, a Blue Dog Democrat is better than any Republican, a moderate Democrat is better than a Blue Dog Democrat, a progressive Democrat is better than a moderate Democrat, and a Socialist is better than a Democrat of any sort.  If there are folks out there who will only consider working to elect certified radicals, fine.  I will do what I can to help them.  If there are other folks who will only work to elect safe, comforting moderate Democrats, fine, I will help them too.  Of one thing I am sure:  If I am successful beyond my wildest dreams, the result will still fall far short of what I really want.  If I cannot come to terms with that, then I have no business getting involved in politics.  As Paul Newman says to Robert Redford in The Sting as he is explaining how to work the Big Con on Robert Shaw:  “When you are all done, you won’t get everything you want, but it is all you will get, so you will have to take it and walk away” [or words to that effect.]

I am in such despair that at this point I would be delighted to see Clinton miraculously replace Trump as our next President, even though when I thought that was actually going to happen, my heart was heavy at the prospect.  That tells you how deep the s**t is that we are in.