How personal has the systematic destruction of the country gotten for you?
I’ll go first.
I am a woman who was raped as a child. I have daughters. I am married to a Black man and we are raising biracial children in a country that hates black people. My son is queer. My other son is active duty military. I have skin in every game they are currently playing with our lives, and I have been paying attention for a long time.
Longer than this. Longer than most people realized there was anything to pay attention to. Fuck these billionaire assholes, starting with the one sitting in the Oval Office. Forever.
Before I say anything else, I support today’s strike, because I am not interested in being the person who tears down the people who show up. A commenter on one of my Substack notes reminded me this morning that the May Day National General Strike is being organized by minority-led Progressive grassroots labor groups as part of a longer-term strategy. She’s right. It’s not nothing. But, what happens in between?
Because the longer-term strategy is fragmented and heavily weighted toward the midterms. November is six months away. All 435 House seats, 33 Senate seats plus two special elections, and 36 gubernatorial races across the country are up for grabs. I am not a religious person, but I am on my knees about this one. Because the window is real and the stakes are not abstract and we cannot afford to show up exhausted and fractured when it matters most.
Talking hasn’t worked. Negotiating hasn’t worked. Asking nicely has never once worked. We force it, or we don’t move it. Which is exactly why I will not stop saying this: we need Progressive working class candidates who actually fight for working class people. Not polished. Not palatable. Not carefully positioned to offend the fewest donors. Real people who feel the fucking boot with us and want it off permanently.
The people on the ground today are doing something real. I believe that. I also believe we have been doing something real for years now, and the needle has not moved, and at some point those two things have to sit in the same room together. I’m not hating, I’m recognizing the pattern. One day protests are not a strategy. They are proof that we still have a pulse. Again, that absolutely matters. But, it is still not enough.
I have been to the school board meetings. The ones that don’t get tweeted about, where you sit in a folding chair for three hours and get two minutes at the mic and drive home alone wondering why you bother. I wrote the letters, worked directly with the ACLU and fellow neighbors when Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton kept trying to shove the Bible down our children’s throats in school.
I pulled money from corporations. I quit the circuses, the ones designed specifically to keep people like me busy feeling like we’re doing something so we never get around to doing the thing that actually matters. I learned to grow my own food. Buy directly from farmers. I actively participate in Substack lives, interviewing progressive candidates to get visibility on them because corporate democrats are doing their absolute best to drown them out. I do what I can to find the veins of resistance that move the needle.
I have been doing this work in public for six years now and in private for my entire life before that. And I am tired in a way I don’t know how to exactly express. Not defeated. Just tired. Tired is not the same as done. I’m tired enough to be honest in a way I might have softened before, and what I know, what I have watched happen over and over again, is that we are very good at the performance of resistance and we are not good at what comes after. This is where we need to leave the ego at the door and see the truth for what it is.
The march. The photos. The crowd counts and the shared posts and the satisfied relief of feeling like you did something. And then May 2nd. And May 2nd looks a lot like April 30th, and the people in power went to sleep just fine. They are counting on this. It is not an accident. It’s by design. The cycle of outrage and action and relief and exhaustion is not a bug in the system. It is the system. And a general strike, if we let it, fits right into that cycle. One day of disruption. A pressure release valve. And then we go home.
Here is what is coming. Not as a maybe. As line items on a receipt. This is happening by the end of May, beginning of June. We will be seeing catastrophic shortages, disruptions and significant price increases in: Food. Beef, vegetables, rice, corn, soybeans, seafood, sugar, the supplies that stock food bank shelves. Fuel. Diesel, natural gas, the infrastructure that carries electricity from one place to another. Medications. Insulin. Chemotherapy. Antibiotics. ADHD medication. IV fluids. The things keeping people alive in hospitals, at home, in the bodies of children who did not choose any of this. And under all of it the supply chain — semiconductors, copper, shipping containers, the last mile between warehouse and door. This is the math of the output of this unnecessary and insidious billionaire war. This is already in motion and cannot be stopped at this point.
The people who broke the institution are not going to fix it. I am not saying that to be dark. I am saying it because it is functionally true and because understanding it is the only way to figure out what comes next. The work of rebuilding lands on everyone who wasn’t watching until it got personal. Life, as we know it, is literally about to change for every single American household in a month. It should’ve gotten very personal for all Americans by now. At the very least, every poor and working middle class American. If you're just now getting here, welcome, there’s a lot of ground to cover.
What actually works is not one day. It is a sustained, coordinated, relentless economic squeeze that makes the cost of continuing to grind us down higher than the cost of stopping. It is pulling money from the institutions that fund the people destroying us, not once, not as a statement, but as a practice that doesn’t end. It’s supporting small businesses only, keeping the money with the people in the community in which you live. It is building something that looks less like a march and more like a union — not of a political party, not around a leader with a platform, but of the actual people on the ground who have been doing this without credit or cameras.
It is staying in the work past the point where it feels good, past the point where there’s anything to post about, into the long flat stretch where nothing feels like it’s happening and that is exactly where you have to stay.
May Day is the floor. I hope we build something on top of it.
So, protest your heart out today. But, what are you doing tomorrow? And the day after that?
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Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
"What actually works is not one day. It is a sustained, coordinated, relentless economic squeeze that makes the cost of continuing to grind us down higher than the cost of stopping. It is pulling money from the institutions that fund the people destroying us, not once, not as a statement, but as a practice that doesn’t end. It’s supporting small businesses only, keeping the money with the people in the community in which you live. It is building something that looks less like a march and more like a union — not of a political party, not around a leader with a platform, but of the actual people on the ground who have been doing this without credit or cameras."
This excerpt is the heart of Eevie's thesis, IMO. It is understanding the process and affecting it, not just the action or inaction of one day. Too often, people act (or do not) and then go back to their everyday lives without doing the work to understand the system. That's what the bad guys count on: that, sure, we might do something one day but go back to "normal." We can't be like that anymore, folks, or we've lost. We have to engage. Again and again.
On point as usual young lady. I just hope that something you say resonates with folks. Actually I hope it all resonates. Because you are correct, it's coming. Already here.
Thanks as always. Keep it up 💪