The worse things get, the more optimistic I become.
Politics isn’t broken. It’s working, but it’s working only for the people who are working the politics. Ergo, an antidote to political despair is knowledge that politics works. Change the inputs, change the outputs – no matter how small their weights and sizes.
Investing one hour per week towards saving one school board from even one fascist mushroom is an infinitely greater accomplishment than attending twenty protests and getting tear-gassed and beaten up by poster cops for Dunkin’, or Captain-obviousing on social media and feeding the wrong kind of dopamine stimulation.
There are 3,000+ counties in the US. If each county had just one small group of just three people working quietly together to make tiny changes in their region’s political infrastructure, that would be 9,000+ focused, disciplined, and strategic citizens making tiny changes in 3,000+ counties across the US. They could flip seats, they could begin to correct gerrymandering, they could redirect funding from stupid memorials to local childcare initiatives, they could oust terrible judges, and so on. They’d have successes behind them, taking them to new levels of politics-working, propelling their confidences and accomplishments forward.
Small, do-able, and measurable initiatives accomplish more than grand reactive events because small cumulative outcomes eventually start to work among each other to create networks that grow in size, influence, and effectiveness at compounding rates.
Media organizations aren’t going to do this work. Archaic Democrats and cringey Liberals aren’t going to do the smart things.
We’re on our own. We can still make these smallest of differences. It’s in our reach. Until it isn’t.
Go: call up a friend or trustworthy acquaintance no matter how distant. Form your own private political party. Run for an uncontested election and grab that office, regardless of your cluelessness – you’ll block a rook and make a move because you’re at the table. That’s a win right there.