Keep Expecting MORE, Because It's Who You Are

[Content Note: Nativism.]

Listen, I know (trust me I know) how easy it is to get demoralized by everything that is happening right now. And that, of course, is by design: Authoritarians who destroy democracies hope that their relentless malice and the constant chaos will exhaust all defenders of what is right and good.

It is not only easy but reasonable to feel thwarted. Especially when we bump up against Republican obstructionism and their unyielding protection of a lawless president over and over.

I have, consequently, seen people expressing more frequently how pointless it is even to lift one's fingers and expend the energy to dial a Republican representative's or a Republican senator's office, or to compose an email, asking them, pleading with them, begging them to do something to stop the abuse of immigrant children (or any other intolerable cruelty).

And I get that feeling of futility. I really do.

TFW you hit "send" on an email to your Republican Senator after poring over every word in excruciating detail, as though there is some magic combination of words that will awaken his decency, but you know that you might as well have directed your desperate pleas to a fucking rock

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 25, 2019

But it's not futile: It's always time to contact our elected representatives and tell them to do their jobs. If we abdicate our responsibility to communicate what we expect them to do, we have failed ourselves.

(Even if they cannot be moved. And that doesn't mean it's the only thing we can/should do.)

As my friend Maud once said: "There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the other person, but because if you don't speak, they have changed you."

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 25, 2019

Do not let your interactions with your representative and senators be guided by who they are. Let them be guided by who you are.

They hope that their relentless malice will change you. Resist that above all else.

Badger the absolute fuck out of your Republican reps and senators, not because they can be moved from their intransigent malice, but because YOU cannot be moved from your decency, from your empathy, from your compassion, from your expectations of MORE. https://t.co/dpgtcnF241

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 25, 2019

The Republicans are despicable nightmares who may never be moved by our plaintive cries, but THIS IS WHO THE FUCK I AM: I'm a greedy bitch with voracious expectations, and I dream long and lustfully of a better world that is both my muse and objective. I want it like the cracked earth of the desert wants rain, and I will neither apologize for nor amend my desire because of its remove from the here and now; its distance encourages my reach.

I expect resistance against tyranny, institutional bigotry, dominionism, and war-mongering, because it is my duty as a citizen, as a human being. I expect more from myself, and from all of us, as oppressors careen toward obliteration of all that I value, because complacency is complicity.

And because if I don't expect more, something better than a cacophonous descent into ruin, then I am certainly never going to get it.

That's who I am. Who are you? Make your calls and write your emails and resist in every way that you can from that place. From the place inside you that cannot be changed, cannot be cajoled or compelled or convinced to acquiesce to any of this.

This is resistance.

[If you need a script to use to contact your senators and representative, I have shared the text of the email I sent earlier today in comments here.]