Dear Reader: A Note On This Issue
Photo: pikrepo.com /creative commons
Dear Reader:
It’s been quite a week and I am physically and emotionally exhausted. Like several others on the Indy staff I have been working for a campaign up until election day and since then have been staying up late tracking the returns. The anticipation of the end of Trump’s occupation of the White House juxtaposed against the déjà vu of an election night in 2016 where the results were trending in the opposite direction of what the polls had promised was emotionally terrifying. And so, since we’ve been mostly wrapped up in that stuff, we offer you an abridged version of The Indy, this week.
I’m still riding that roller coaster. I’m still staying up late, waiting for the networks to call the election for Biden. I’m still waiting for Trump to exhaust his efforts to overturn the election through litigation. And I’m thinking about the possibilities of what we can do to end the COVID-19 pandemic, to heal our broken country, to do better at building solidarity and looking out for each other, and to beat back the fascism for which Trump has been a major enabler. I have some prelimary thoughts on all that elsewhere in this issue.
In order to move us along the path of healing, of rebuilding and of inventing a democracy that is not hobbled by the limited original vision of our founders, in the coming days we’re going to have to eschew a return to the old normal and we’ll have to make democracy part of our daily discourse. When Trump leaves, Trumpism will remain. We need to start talking to each other about what we are going to do about that.
And so we invite our readers to join us over the next weeks and months in reacting to the election, and to the possibility that it has granted us to envision and enact something that is better, more humane and more democratic than the fascist wreckage that Trump will leave behind. So please write to us. Tell us how you are feeling. Tell us about what you’d like to see or what you’d like to do in the coming weeks and months and years. Tell us what you think the Biden/Harris administration ought to accomplish and what perhaps you would be willing to work for.
Thanks for reading. We’ll be back with a full issue next week.
Art
Art Keene
Managing Editor
Such a good point Art.
Especially to ones so ensconced in more progressive surrounds (we don’t see the bigger picture – the 40% nationally, in our local – Wonderful free state of Amherst).
I remember when Regan was elected. Those more informed among us (organizers just out of grad school or those practicing a few years) said “WoW ! This i’ll take 30 yrs to turn around.” Like my divorce court – “can’t get worse” I was told – it just did – more and more so. 40 yrs later ‘the polite party’, those of the same ilk – have seen the marshaled, declined, moneyed, reactive, fearful (time to stop) gain the appellate courts, us senate, big piece of the house, gerrymander districts, supreme ct of the land, and these administrators have been joined by the corporations (well, often 1 in the same). Today it is ‘2 against one’ where in the 30s, 40s, and 50s it was government (more) with the citizen, monitoring, taming, assisting the corporations to serve our nation’s citizens. Thank goodness we have taught our children (strains of Crosby Stills’n Nash in the background) as the millennials seem to be with us (see LGBTQ & others rights advance). We must concentrate on the coalitions that served us in the past. No echo chamber but as BLM has, leave no 1 behind (use of “BIOPOC” the brown as well as black, yellow, female, red, etc, etc). Let’s get going on town-wide, region -wide, nation wide coalitions that serve us. Let’s do it today ! Think national (international/globally !) act local…