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How to fight without leaders [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-13
I’m furious, disgusted, distressed, you name it. Schumer has caved, to the surprise of absolutely no one, I imagine. But someone here, or on another site, asked how can we fight if we have no leaders?
I got to thinking about that and I realized something: leaders appear when they’re needed. This is a tenet of woo-woo thinking (“When the student is ready the teacher appears”) but we’ve seen it happen in real life.
Lech Walesa became a labor leader in Poland because he stood up and fought back, not because he was an experienced politician.
Zelenskyy was a stand-up comedian before he became his nation’s leader.
Like him, hate him, or think he’s useless, Bill Clinton came from a nothing state to win the presidency, even though the powers that be were running him mostly as a test for the following election: he wasn’t supposed to win in 1992.
An obscure Chicago organizer, another outsider, came from nowhere to win the presidency in 2008.
My advice, which I’m taking, is to join groups and build bridges. If you’re a union member but haven’t paid your dues, please do. And attend the protests.
Join Indivisible. Join RedWine&Blue. There was a zoom call tonight with union activists. I’m on another computer right now but I’ll forward a link to the organizing site tomorrow.
Veterans, you should know about Common Cause: commondefense.us
Attend your local Democratic meetings. I was at one Monday night and there were about 60 people there (Zoom) in a county where about 143,000 Democrats voted in the 2024 presidential election. This is a county that leans Democratic but swings both ways, and the elections are always battles. It’s a disappointing turnout to be sure, but the point is, there were at least four new people there (out of 60-ish), so about 5%, and more join every month.
If there’s no group in your area, start one.
I think we are too isolated behind our keyboards, doomscrolling every piece of rotten news out of DC and ignoring things that are going well. We also worry about things we can’t change. Yes, we all made dozens of calls, but we have no control over the final vote.
The antidote to this despair is to become more active, advice I need to take myself.
In short, join something, help grow an organization that you support, and you might just find the leader we need suddenly appears. That person, who is maybe a minor school board official, suddenly has “legs” and starts getting noticed, and before you know it, the whole city is aware of them. Then the state. Then the country.
It is entirely up to us now, and we cannot give up, CANNOT give up. So let’s prepare the field so a leader can grow. And here’s Barnaby with his favorite toy, which means typing will become problematic. I’ll post this now before he deletes the whole thing. :D
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