Keep on Truckin'

Politics is the slow boring through thick boards.  I don’t know who said that first, but I try to remember that when I get discouraged, and lately I’m discouraged much of the time.  The climate change, the creep toward authoritarianism, the loss of community, the violence, the stupidity–it gets to you.

In our American studies classes at SJSU, we always pointed out that even in the worst of times voices were raised in protest.  Abolitionists, labor organizers, feminists, civil rights workers, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Eugene Debs, Fred Korematsu, Cesar Chavez, Wilma Mankiller, Linda Carol Brown–always voices speaking up.  

We are not in that rarified company, but all of us need to keep speaking up against bigotry, cruelty, selfishness, and just plain meanness.  Make that your resolution for 2019.