Photo by arochman on Freeimages.com
This is my first post since May 2024 and there are reasons for that. After I had finished everything involved in the CEO search that I ran this spring, I wanted to relax. But more than anything, I wanted to mentally and emotionally prepare for Trump to be reelected. Yes, I was one of those people who had no confidence that Biden would be reelected. I decided to spend my time focused on simple things like listening to music, doing needlepoint and learning Spanish on an app. It was my way to deal with the stress of the incoming disaster that I could see heading our way. I gave thanks for being retired and having the space to try to deal with this stress.
When Biden stepped aside and Harris stepped in, it was like a jolt of adrenaline for me. I felt excited for the future. I looked for volunteer opportunities with the campaign and was recruited to be a moderator on the campaign Discord channel for volunteers. The job was greeting people who joined the channel and helping them find their way around and telling them how to get involved. There were 25,000 people already on the channel and I viewed this as a great way to help others and meet people. I became a “Mod” and it was fun. At least at first.
A few weeks into it, the campaign leader for the channel told us all that we now had to push people into phone banking, that we ourselves had to run phone banks and we had to spend hours each week doing this. Every week the pressure placed on us grew and we were told to be to be aggressive in our tactics towards new volunteers. We kept being told “people like being told what to do” which raised the hair on the back of my neck. I also worked a phone bank and we were not warned that we would be calling Republicans in Georgia. The extreme abuse from those we spoke to was something the campaign should have prepared us for and to be thrown into that without any concern for the volunteers also alarmed me. We were pushed to call someone every minute and they kept track of our calls like we were on commission instead of being volunteers.
The stress grew and the atmosphere felt like a boiler room out of Glengarry Glen Ross. I ended up getting sick and then resigning as a volunteer as I barely able to deal with this situation when I was well. I thought, I guess this is politics, it gets ruthless. I guess this is what is needed to win. But as we know now, it wasn’t. I have worked as a volunteer on political campaigns going back decades and I was never treated like that before and I see now it was a sign of things to come.
The campaign was losing, they knew they were losing and they were desperate. Their desperation permeated their decisions, their interactions and then rippled to the farthest reaches and the most distant volunteers. It’s sad and perhaps in a different multiverse they would have been able to have a year or years, rather than 90 days, to run a campaign. But I know that I will never put myself in that situation again. As I said many years ago when I resigned a volunteer Board position, I would not allow myself to be treated this way as an employee, so I certainly won’t tolerate it as a volunteer.
And now here we are. A country where the ruling class is infested with extreme corruption with no guardrails. It does feel like we are back in 2016 but there are some important differences this time around.
In 2017 I wanted to be Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, I wanted to take on the machines and be a warrior and win. I learned the landscape of activism and eventually found out who the grifters were (and many of them are back in large numbers for this next round). Last time we felt so desperate and thought a hero would come and save the day. “Help us Mueller!” was all over Facebook. Nope, that never happened. Those who are part of the establishment will not dismantle the establishment and not even when the crimes are clear as day (Merritt Garland is a good example of this). The Democratic candidates I met and talked with and supported in 2018 to flip Republican seats in Congress were elected. I then learned that in politics the first thing that happens to supporters like me after a victory is that we are immediately and purposefully pushed away and forgotten.
But I did learn a lot from all that activism work and that helped me be confident enough to run for City Council in 2020. I learned a lot doing that as well (and no, not interested in ever doing that again). I learned more about the city I live in by running for office than I knew from the decades I had lived here.
The election of Trump last time jumpstarted my personal evolution into who I am today. It pushed me out of my comfort zone and into situations where I grew and found I had skills I didn’t realize I had. The confidence I have today is a direct result of making the decision to not sit back and accept the cruelty, inhumanity and insanity that those four years would consist of.
Here we are again. Again, we have an establishment that we cannot depend on to lessen the economic and social blows. That means we have to take care of each other. We have to be prepared in every way we can think of. It’s hard to imagine the worst-case scenarios but think of the ones we do know could happen: A pandemic without cure or end; crippling tariffs that raise the cost of basic goods; persecution of anyone who those in power decides is one of “them”. Think about how each of these will affect your ability to survive. This is what I am doing now, while we have time to prepare.
Timothy Snyder is a Historian and wrote a book in 2017 titled “On Tyranny”.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny
Here is his substack with a brief synopsis of the contents. He is being quoted by many at this time and the most common quote is in the first chapter in the book and I am this seeing over and over:
“Don’t obey in advance”
Don’t fall into line, don’t accept, don’t cooperate. Don’t make it easy.
This is different than what I saw during the prior years of Trump which was, in essence, “Stay Angry – Don’t Look Away – Stay Outraged”. No, don’t do that part any more. Anger and outrage are crippling and exhausting, they will distract your focus and energy and won’t accomplish anything. There is an old Buddhist saying, anger is an acid that destroys the vessel that contains it. Anger is easily manipulated, easily misdirected, and without focus or purpose it destroys and then burns out without any positive impact.
Stay focused and calm, don’t overload yourself. Don’t deplete your energy trying to take it all in. They want to overwhelm you because that will keep you from following rule no.1, don’t obey in advance.
I still plan to do my needlepoint and read books and pick up my Spanish lessons, things I put aside when I was trying to help Harris win. But I won’t check out and I hope you don’t either. My number one priority right now is to take care of myself and my friends and neighbors. People are scared and worried for good reasons and I want to help them get to the next phase of all this. And then after that, we will survive the next phase and so on. Step by step we will continue to take care of each other. And that is what I intend to do for a long time.
11/21/24