Obama Victory

A Change

Terrance Heath — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:19:50 -0500

It's been a long, long time coming
But I know, a change is gonna come.
Oh, yes it will.

Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"

At 11:01 p.m. last night, after the polls closed in California, I just had to call someone. I'd spent the night at the National Public Radio headquarters with a bunch of other bloggers, liveblogging the election results. I called home and spoke briefly to my partner, then found myself walking aimlessly down a hallway. I stopped in a reception area, looked at the night sky from the second story window, and though how strange it was that the world — my world had changed so dramatically — yet the sky looked just the same.

And I thought about the people who didn't live to see what happened that night, and the people who never thought they would — but did.

I thought of Charles Alexander.

He didn’t say it in so many words, but I'm willing to bet that Charles Alexander has thought to himself at some point, "I never thought I'd live to see the day..."

I thought of Gertrude Baines, a 114-year-old daughter of former slaves who cast her vote for Barack Obama in this election. I thought of Ann Nixon Cooper, the 106-year-old daughter of former slaves Obama mentioned in his speech last night, and who also cast her vote for him. I thought of all they'd seen — all under the same unchanged sky I gazed upon last night — and how they'd seen the day they likely never thought they would.

To understand why, you have to understand the context of their America.

For African-Americans, at least those of us old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement, this is nothing short of mind-blowing. It’s disorienting, and it makes me see this nation in a different light.

You see, I remember a time of separate and unequal schools, restrooms and water fountains—a time when black people were officially second-class citizens. I remember moments when African-Americans were hopeful and excited about the political process, and I remember other moments when most of us were depressed and disillusioned. But I can’t think of a single moment, before this year, when I thought it was within the realm of remote possibility that a black man could be nominated for president by one of the major parties—let alone that he would go into Election Day with a better-than-even chance of winning.

Let me clarify: It’s not that I would have calculated the odds of an African-American being elected president and concluded that this was unlikely, it’s that I wouldn’t even have thought about such a thing.

African-Americans’ love of country is deep, intense and abiding, but necessarily complicated. At the hour of its birth, the nation was already stained by the Original Sin of slavery. Only in the past several decades has legal racism been outlawed and casual racism made unacceptable, at least in polite company. Millions of black Americans have managed to pull themselves up into mainstream, middle-class affluence, but millions of others remain mired in poverty and dysfunction.

...Along came Barack Obama, a young man with an unassailable résumé and a message of post-racial transformation. Initially, a big majority of African-Americans lined up behind his major opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton. The reason was simple: In the final analysis, white Americans weren’t going to vote for the black guy. Better to go with the safe alternative.

But an amazing thing happened. In the Iowa caucuses, white Americans voted for the black guy. That’s the moment Obama was referring to when he said his faith in the American people was vindicated. For me, it was the moment when the utterly impossible became merely unlikely. That’s a huge, fundamental change, and it launched a sequence of events over the subsequent months that made me realize that some things I “knew” about America were apparently wrong.

I thought of my father, the one person I wanted most to call last night — thought of all he had seen and all he "knew" of America — and quietly called out to him, as I looked up at the night sky; the sky that still looked the same.

"Dad, did you see? Do you know? You waited, we all waited for a change to come. It came tonight. Did you see? Do you know?"

On April 26, 2006, my father passed away. Born in 1930, he was 75 years old. He was born and raised in Dawson Georgia, by parents who were sharecroppers. He joined the Army, married my mother (they had 50 years together before he passed away), served in Korea and Vietnam, and fathered three children, raised and educated us.

Growing up in the South before the modern civil rights movement, and serving in the military as a black man, I know my father experienced discrimination; probably more than he ever let us know. But he did not let it stop him from doing his best for us and encouraging us to be our best. Once he drove us several hours to Macon, Ga., to see the daughter of a family friend graduate from medical school. I didn't understand why until we were leaving, and he stopped and said to us very emphatically, "I wanted you to see this because I wanted you to know that is something you can do. If you want to, and you work for it, you can do it."

I never forgot that, and as I stood among the crowds in Denver on the last night of the convention, and listened to Sen. Obama accept the nomination, I thought of my father. I wished he was alive to see that moment, and thought of how I'd like to be able to pick up the phone and share it with him. And I shed a tear. Separated by distance, and difference — him a staunch Baptist church deacon, and me a gay man and a practicing Buddhist —moments like that one often brought us together.

Now I have two sons of my own now — one nearly six years old, and the other 11 months old — and I want to leave them a country and and world in much better shape than it is now. I want a chance for them to live in a country where they have a chance to become whatever their talents and abilities place within their reach.

Last night, that world came within their reach, and perhaps within ours too.

Across this country, of the countless voters who stepped into the voting booth, some who voted for Obama no doubt had to take a long, hard look at themselves; to peer at the nagging discomfort they might have felt upon voting for a man who doesn't look like any previous president and whose name, as one NPR anchor put it, "ends in a vowel" — a man whose lineage goes more directly back to Africa than mine or many other African Americans, and whose parents' marriage would have been illegal less than a generation ago — no matter how right for the country they thought a president Obama would be. And they either got over those feelings and cast their vote, or cast their vote in spite of them.

And then they stepped out into a different world, under the same sky as before they entered the voting booth, but changed world nonetheless. A world they had helped to change, an act joining them to every progressive movement in our history — from the abolitionist movement, to the suffragist movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and every movement that worked to extend the promise of American to more Americans than perhaps was intended at its founding; every movement that, as conservatism in every era was "standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop'," said "Yes we can." And then did.

As I left the relative quiet of NPR headquarters, I stepped into a cacophonous celebration on the streets of D.C., unlike anything I've seen after living here for 14 years. The streets were full of people—young, old, black, white, brown, etc—cheering, honking their horns, waving from car windows and sunroofs.

People ran into the street to high-five each other. Buses carrying passengers and trucks making late night deliveries honked their horns. At stoplights, people ran down the street, high-fiving rows of cars. As I waited to cross street after street, I high-fived total strangers who walked by with their hands raised.

You'd have thought the Redskins had won the Super Bowl, or that a war had just ended. There was that much joy in the streets.

After walking from the NPR building to 16th & Q N.W., I gave up trying to get a taxi, and instead waited for a bus. As I waited, a spontaneous parade of people cheering Obama's election came down the street.

The cheering continued on the bus full of people celebrating a world they had helped change.

Now, I can do for my eldest son what my father did for me, years ago. He and I started a scrapbook two years ago. We put in it pictures of African Americans who have accomplished great things, and I contribute short descriptions of what each did. Sen. Obama is in that book, and my son is very excited about the possibility that Sen. Obama may become president. He even voted for Sen. Obama online, in Nickelodeon's "Kids pick the President." (Actually, he insisted I help him vote on the site.)

We live in the metro-D.C. area, and I will take my oldest son to the inauguration. I will make sure he witnesses the moment my father didn't live to see. And when the oath of office is done, I will turn to my son, look him in the eye and say, "I wanted you to see this because I want you to know that is something you can do. If you want to, and you work hard at it, you can be whatever you want to be. Even president."

And from that moment, my son will be growing up in a world my father didn't, and that even I didn't; a world with more possibilities open to him than existed before; closer, at least, to the world as it should be than the world as it was. Or is.

The Obama Moment - America Looks In the Mirror and Celebrates

David Sirota — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:55:50 -0500

The day after Election Day is always a time for reflection (and coffee, Pepto, wheat toast, and whatever other concoctions cure a hangover). In my lifetime, none has ever been as nationally momentous as November 4, 2008.

For three obvious reasons, last night was an historic landmark - the election of the first African American president, the success of a campaign that was more grassroots than any past, and the very bold progressive mandate the country delivered thanks both to the sheer size of the victory and to the candidates making clear this was an ideological choice between Reagan-ism and Roosevelt-ism. While I tend to try to live up to the "there's no crying in politics" rule, I'll admit it - I, like so many others last night, shed more than one tear of happiness and hopefulness.

In the weeks ahead, pundits, pollsters, prognosticators and prevaricators will inevitably analyze the election to death, tell us that these stark results somehow mean America is more conservative than ever, and insist that the only Serious and Responsible thing for an Obama administration to do after such a resounding election is to perpetuate the status quo. Indeed, we're already seeing this from most of the commentariat, and I offer you this graphic that everyone should remember when they see more pundits claiming Obama's election means America is a "center-right nation" - it juxtaposes Newsweek's recent cover declaring America a conservative country next to last night's election results.

The same "center-right nation" meme that downplays last night's mandate is now coming even from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), whose first declaration after seeing his Senate majority increase was, "This is not a mandate for a political party or an ideology." Reid's comments echoed Sen. Clarie McCaskill's (D-MO) yesterday, when she told Fox News the first order of business for a President Obama is to appease John McCain's supporters.

This is par for the course - this is how the system works. And we shouldn't be surprised nor demoralized by it. We should instead simply listen to what the two presidential candidates themselves said last night.

McCain, gracious and honest in defeat, said what almost every Establishment voice refuses to say - and that apparently includes congressional Democratic leaders fearful of the huge responsibility they now have. The Arizona senator said simply: "The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly."

Minutes later, Obama said: "This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change."

They are both correct. America did speak clearly, and this election is only the chance to turn that unified American voice into action - it isn't concrete action yet, but it sure could be.

In the coming days, I guarantee you there will be many reasons to feel cynical. Hell, only hours after one of the most powerful and inspirational election victory speeches about "change" in recent memory, we learn that Obama is considering appointing various Clinton administration officials to top White House posts - some of them the people who played a key role in passing the lobbyist-crafted policies that origianlly deregulated our financial system (Glass-Steagall repeal), gutted our domestic economy (NAFTA, China PNTR), and shredded the social safety net (welfare "reform").

These moves are troubling - but as I told Amy Goodman's Democracy Now audience last night, we must carefully balance our skepticism with optimism. I'm not saying we should be naive - but what I am saying is we shouldn't judge Obama only on personnel decisions, because we shouldn't automatically assume he will outsource his own vision to his minions. However troubling those minions' personal politics, record and history may be, we shouldn't get too bogged down in inside-the-Beltway debates over people like Rahm Emanuel (potentially Obama's new chief of staff) - people who may seem important, but who are, in terms of importance, mere fleas compared to the president himself.

I'm also not saying we should avoid pressuring Obama to fulfill his concrete campaign promises and last night's overpowering progressive mandate - and that's true whether Obama puts the same old D.C. hacks or a whole new crop of progressive thinkers around him. He may put a disagreeable team around himself, or he may put the most honest and principled team around himself - but that's way less important than what we force him to actually push for.

As someone who both strongly advocated for Obama in the primary and general election, and also questioned him on some of his policy positions, I think that (despite the naysaying of some partisans) support and pressure can be as complimentary as the carrot and stick. Indeed, I think real movements and concrete change come only with both. Yet, I also believe that we should make sure the pressure we harness is the kind that assumes that Obama is at minimum trying to act in good faith for progressive goals, at least until he gives us clear reason to believe otherwise.

Why do I, a perpetually perturbed idealist-cynic and a campaign-scarred pessimist-optimist, say this? It has something to do with the above photograph of the Colorado Democratic Party election night festivities in downtown Denver. That photograph could have been anywhere in America last night, as millions experienced the same scene. And what's significant about that seemingly poorly shot picture is not the CNN headline declaring Obama the victor. It is the foreground and the background juxtaposition - the exuberant crowd in one city looking at another exuberant crowd in another city, an optimistic America looking at an optimistic America and celebrating together.

That's what last night will be remembered for, even as we head into debates about what Obama's first priorities should be (stay tuned for my newspaper column on Friday about that). Though the post-election political coverage is all about D.C. jockeying for cabinet positions - that's not what this election was about. Though the television broadcasts that delivered last night's news were chock full of professional pundits and D.C. operatives and political insiders insisting that we needed their analysis to tell us what happened - we didn't. Because for once, this wasn't their election, it was ours; this isn't their presidential candidate, he is ours; and if we keep pushing and remember that election night was the start of our work and not the end, it won't be their government, it will at last be ours.

Hallelujah! And Now, The Work Begins

Robert Borosage — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:10:27 -0500

Americans wake today to a new dawn, a new possibility.

You don't have to drink the Kool-Aid to appreciate how extraordinary this is. We will look at one another with new eyes. We are a better, bigger, more generous, more optimistic people than many—particularly Karl Rove's acolytes in the McCain campaign—assumed.

The world will also look at America with new eyes. For a shining moment, we will be once more that city on the hill, the example of a free people choosing a remarkable new leader. A similar choice—the son of a native born woman and an African—could not happen in Europe, in Japan, in China or much of Asia. Amazing grace.

It wasn't easy. It took a candidate of remarkable intelligence, discipline and ease, organizing a truly exemplary campaign. It took the worst financial catastrophe since the Great Depression and the worst foreign policy debacle in Iraq since Vietnam. It took the self-immolation of Republican John McCain. It took Americans deciding not to fall for the old politics of division—not this time.

But this victory is grounded in far more than the campaign or the candidate. This is a country disfigured by slavery from the start. The Constitution even dictated that slaves would count as three-fifths of a person for apportionment (even though they couldn't vote). A century and a half of slavery; 100 years of legal apartheid, known as segregation; a slow and hard struggle to overcome.

Yet this same country was founded on an idea—that all men (and now women) are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That same Constitution that counted slaves as less than human guaranteed the right to speech and assembly, freedom of and freedom from religion. Each generation has been given the opportunity and the mandate to struggle to extend freedom and to make America better.

Many sacrificed; many died to get to this day. Barack Obama, as he knows, stands on the shoulders of giants. So this is a time to celebrate ourselves and to honor those who came before. Hallelujah!

And now the work begins. Obama inherits the desert—with the situation far more dire than many, even now, understand. Manufacturing is at levels not seen since the deep recession in 1980. Consumers are cutting back spending. The banking system is still reeling from losses and shocks. The recession now has gone global. Homeowners have lost $5 trillion in housing values.

So forget about the routine chattering-class babble about how America is a "center right" nation and Obama must "govern from the center." (For a good mashup of quotes from ThinkProgress, go here. David Sirota tracks the "center-right watch" from ourfuture.org, here.) With independents and moderates looking more Democratic and liberal on issue after issue, the claim that this is a center-right nation was misleading even before this election. Americans are voting for a northern, liberal, Ivy League-educated, African-American, former college professor to be president, someone who campaigned on raising taxes on the wealthy, affordable health care for all, investing in new energy, getting out of Iraq and against trickle down economics. Conservative nation?

Govern from the center? Americans voted overwhelmingly for change. And to be successful, Obama will have to be bold. In reality, the center has moved. Wall Streeter Robert Rubin now is for a large, deficit-financed fiscal stimulus. Conservative Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Christopher Cox now tells us "self-regulation" doesn't work, and calls for re-regulating the banks. Alan Greenspan admits his ideology blinded him to reality—or at least that he got it wrong. "We're all populists now," says Will Marshall, a leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, the Wall Street wing of the party.

Mandates are not given; they are claimed. Majorities do not form; they are forged. The center is not frozen; it is molded by events, moved by leaders and movements.

But this Beltway clamor about the center serves as a warning to progressives. The entrenched forces of the status quo are already in motion. Obama takes office as the Reagan era comes to a close, bankrupted by its own failures. But change, as Obama says, isn't easy. He said in Chicago Tuesday night:

"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. ... There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can't solve every problem.

But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it's been done in America for 221 years—block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand."

Even the best presidents need to be pushed to act. Even the most calcified Congresses can be driven to move. The best of the New Deal—Social Security, the Wagner Act that gave workers the right to organize, fair labor standards that gave us the weekend—came not from Roosevelt's first 100 days, but two years later, in what became known as the Second New Deal. That was driven in large part by an active and mobilized labor movement, and by the growing political threat posed by a populist right—Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Francis Townsend—that gave Roosevelt both reason and excuse to move. "I agree with you," Roosevelt reportedly told labor's Sidney Hillman. "Now go out, and make me to do it."

Obama will need that same kind of pressure. We will need to build an independent progressive movement to push for reform, to challenge those who stand in the way. So celebrate. And then get ready to work.

What Happens to the Progressive Movement Now?

Sara Robinson — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:38:23 -0500

All good movements turn into organizations turn into businesses turn into rackets.
—Old organizers' saying

I don't think any of us expected to get so far so soon.

Back in 2003, when Bush was southern-frying the Dixie Chicks and the Iraq War was propelling millions into the streets and progressive blogs consisted of a small handful of folks writing in their pajamas under esoteric banners like "Eschaton" or "Orcinus" or "Daily Kos," anybody who suggested that America might someday return to its liberal Enlightenment roots was right up there on the wack-o-meter with those who dreamed that the country might someday abolish private property and adopt socialist utopianism. Nobody serious thought it was remotely possible. Amongst ourselves, we told each other that ousting the conservative juggernaut would probably be the work of a couple of decades. Or maybe even a whole generation. Or maybe it was a fool's errand that wasn't even possible at all any more.

At the same time, we had the sick feeling in our guts that the republic simply didn't have that much time left. We would probably fail; but we had to try. Fighting back was the only thing that seemed to quell the queasiness, so we fought for all we were worth. In 2004, we organized the country. In 2006, we used the lessons learned to do better—and took back the House. Along the way, we pioneered Internet fund-raising, built or revived an entire infrastructure of liberal organizations, and took our message to every county in the country—some of which hadn't seen a proud liberal in decades.

And so it came to pass that this fine November morning, we are waking up—to our own unutterable surprise—to find ourselves in power, in undisputed control of two of our government's three branches. We did it. We actually pulled it off. The country survived President Bush (by the skin of its teeth: that urgency we felt was fully justified); and the permanent one-party rule of the GOP is over. Our fighting spirit, combined with a series of disasters that deeply undercut people's faith in conservative free-market happy talk and the structural strengths inherent in our system of government, have transformed the political landscape of America. And we did it all in just five years.

Go ahead. We've all earned the right to spend a few days basking in this well-earned glow. But the moment will be over soon enough. The very fact that we won has brought us to a fresh moment of reckoning. We are no longer the loyal opposition; we are now the people in charge -- and our next act of transformation will be to come to terms with that fact. Our movement is about to morph into something else—and the quality and duration of our leadership will greatly depend on what new form we choose.

The opening quote describes the way this has usually gone down in the past. Time passes; goals shift. Effective movements start out with the goal of creating change. When they succeed, they ossify into organizations, and the goal becomes self-perpetuation. Big, powerful organizations need money to survive, so then the goal becomes finding a workable business model. Invariably, the business devolves into some kind of scheme in which they trade their major asset—power—for money. In other words, a racket. At this point, another movement will usually rise to challenge their corrupt status quo and seize their power for other ends.

That's what happened to Democrats in the 1970s. We're in power now in no small part because it happened just that way to the conservatives, too. The bad news is that, some time in the future, this is most likely what awaits us as well. The good news is that we do have some choices here—and between now and the inauguration, we should be talking about how we can structure ourselves to forestall this fate for as long as possible.

From Movement to Community
Recently, I discussed this looming dilemma with a group of friends—one of whom suggested that, rather than repeat the past model of creating a progressive order dominated by a set of big organizations that will inevitably become change-resistant and ultimately corrupt, we might choose to think of this transition as the transformation of the existing progressive movement into a large and diverse "progressive community."

What does that mean? We came up with a short list of critical distinctions:

Movements are essential for gathering and directing the energy for large-scale change effort. However, that same energy and transformative power also makes them unstable and volatile. Achieving their goals requires members to conform to a set of tightly-coordinated beliefs and behaviors; and they often become ideologically dogmatic and socially exclusive as a result. Furthermore, making a big impact requires people with big visions—and often, big egos and a big appetite for drama to match, which in turn fuels the rise of personality cults and power-hoarding leadership. These inherent instabilities explain why many movements don't outlast their founders.

Also, as the conservatives learned the hard way, in the heat of battle, it's easy to lose touch with your own principles. You can justify anything if you're doing it "for the cause." So far, our movement has shown tremendous discipline in resisting this impulse, because we understood that our progressive principles were our core source of moral strength in opposing the conservatives. Everybody understood that compromising those principles was a fatal error, because it would make us just like them.

Unfortunately, it's going to be much too easy to relax those standards as our opposition wanes, and our group identity no longer depends highlighting the sharp contrasts between us and the conservatives. And things could devolve very quickly once the infighting starts over who's going to actually wield our newly won power. (Don't be too surprised if those fights start breaking out within a matter of days.)

It's not uncommon for movements to fall prey to the old Zen principle, "What you resist, persists." We're all familiar with lefties whose battles against The Man eventually left them every bit as authoritarian and paranoid as the power structures they worked to overthrow. The eternal tendency to become that which we most despise makes permanent opposition an inherently unsound way to organize a group for the long haul.

Communities have a different purpose, and different internal dynamics—and this model may be better suited to the new environment we find ourselves in now. Like organizations, they're built to last. But where organizations are founded to achieve goals that they too often outlive, communities are living, renewable, organic entities that are held together by a workable social contract, a common cultural identity, complex social and family structures, dependable bonds of trust, and a strong set of shared values. They're about inclusion, not exclusion; and exist for mutual support and survival, not status. They are an end unto themselves, not in opposition to anyone. And they can endure for centuries, if not millennia.

A good community is a creative shared space in which we can work out practical ways to live out our values in every area of life, and plan together for our common future. Communities are more about people and the environment than they are about money. They perpetuate themselves by raising and educating children, looking after their elders, and caring for the sick and disabled. They create spaces and rituals where they can share in celebrations and life passages together. They support artists and businesses, and make collective decisions about security, investment, and infrastructure. The flexibility of the community's boundaries and agenda allow it to take a more holistic view that transcends the narrow organizational preoccupations of power and money. The community provides a larger context in which organizations can form, re-form, and disband as they're needed to get the work done; and stands ready to hold those organizations accountable against corruption and entrenchment.

Street Prophets' Pastor Dan Schultz, who was also part of this conversation, blogged his take on this idea:

Communities...are focused on persons and the relationships they manifest. Movements succeed when they accomplish their objectives, but communities succeed when they nurture the members they have - and when they expand their circle. Movements are short- (or at least limited-) term and transactional, communities play the long game and are transformative.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that communities are particularly better than movements. We need both.

Nor am I going to pretend that I've always been some sort of communitarian advocate. I have happily rejected the idea of creating a bipartisan political consensus as a false and unjust community, for example.

I've always been in this thing for the community, and willing to put up with the movement for its sake. My patience with that movement has always had its ebbs and flows. Now, in the midst of a high-stakes presidential election where everybody is tense and grumpy and throwing sharp elbows at their political opponents and one another, it's definitely ebbing. It took some time to put a finger on that change, and that's what's had me gobsmacked.

Still, I wouldn't say that it's time to reject the progressive political movement as such...But the context of all our struggles—emotional, spiritual and political—is the community, [to quote Paul] "striving side by side with one mind."

The abstract community of progressives that I am trying to bring into reality along with many others has also been pushed to the side for too long. Too many of my friends and colleagues seem to have forgotten that we are seeking more than a political win in November. At heart, we are looking for a new way of doing business, perhaps even a new way of being...Now that I am reminded of my priorities, it's much easier to keep my eyes on the prize and do the work I am called to do.

What America wants, more than anything else right now, is to recover its larger sense of itself as a national community. (Fortunately, we elected ourselves a community organizer to help us do just that.) Yesterday, we gathered together to overwrite the old conservative fiction that "you're on your own" with a new message that "we're all in this together." The best kind of leadership leads by example; and reinvesting our formidable energies into the task of building a vibrant national progressive community will be an act of leadership that reminds the whole country how it's done.

How do we do this? What will it look like? That's the stuff of a long conversation that can be had on these pages, across the blogosphere, and everywhere else progressives gather. The most important thing to bear in mind right now is that the organizations and institutions we're about to build are not the end-all and be-all of who we are. They are simply tools that express the shared ideals and goals of a large and diverse progressive community.

The first rule of navigating the transition ahead is this: Every decision we make, from here on out, needs to be made with the deeply-held values and the long-term viability of that community front and center in our minds. Our time in power will last exactly as long as we do that. And our season will end the day we allow anything else to come before those priorities.

H/T to Dave Neiwert, Nicole Sawaya, Rev. Dan Schultz, and Jesse Wendel