The Day Before the Revolution

I’m writing this before I know what the mid-term elections will bring.  I think it’s important to see this day as a day in a process and not as either a victory or a defeat.  Nothing is going to magically restore whatever fantasy we used to have about America.  We have seen the ugliness beneath – not very far beneath – the glossy surface of our democracy.  The hatred and stupidity that have been exposed have always been there.  If you are privileged enough not to have noticed until now, count yourself lucky.  The real issue, no matter what happens in today’s election, is realizing that tomorrow is not a destination, it is a small step in a long march toward sanity.

In Ursula LeGuin’s short story, “The Day Before the Revolution,” the main character, Odo, is revolutionary leader who has struggled her whole life just to make the smallest inroads into the corrupt power of her society.  In the day covered in the story, she laments her futility, her frustration and the unrelenting task of change.  She suffers a stroke and dies that day.  The revolution bearing her name started the next day.  We have to be prepared to see ourselves as Odo, as servants to a cause we may not fully witness or realize.  In MLK’s famous line, we may not get to the mountain top. 

Our job as we wait results is to prepare, no matter the outcome, to get up tomorrow and continue the struggle.  The forces that we oppose are never going surrender on their own – they will never relent.  We must be prepared to take either a defeat or a modest victory as just another step toward more organizing, more resistance and more hope.  This isn’t a game.  The way we tend to cover elections is more like a sporting contest than an act of civil engagement.  We must stop that.  We have been delivered a great gift, the chance to see what could go wrong, a chance to see just how soulless the future could be.  Despair is the most certain way to waste that gift.  Pessimism is not an option.

We have the challenge, but also the privilege to live in a moment where we can do something important, even remarkable.  We can take the soaring rhetoric and false narratives of our history and transform them into something better – not perfect – but better.  We have the government we have because it suits too many of the people in the country.  We are here because we don’t value families and education.  We are here because we don’t take of the environment, and we are here because we have commercialized the very idea of existence.  We have to “be the change we seek.”  We have to be better.

We need to help each other take the next step.