midterms
The election was certainly an amazing historic thing, the time when Texas finally flipped, when South Carolina got a democratic senator, when Mississippi got some black representation, when the US house and senate flipped to blue, when the religious left got in the game. Yet I am still fearful that this great upheaval will slide back into business as usual with no real change, that the corporations and billionaires will still be in control. The first test will be electing congressional and senate leaders. Meredith Shiner: "It is incredibly important to recognize that Democrats running up the score so high they exceeded the margins of fuckery is not a sign of democratic health. It is a time-limited reprieve to secure the government before we lose it....The persistent truth of America is that our institutions are not aligned to our popular will...we have to grapple with that truth, define it, set the conditions for massive structural change.."
I made a spreadsheet of the election results in Waldo County. The cities and the coastal towns voted blue, but Unity was pretty evenly divided as usual, and the surrounding towns were scary hard right. It seems like the smaller the town, the more republican it is, unless you are an island like Islesboro where everybody votes and mostly blue. That's just my neighborhood; the county voted blue, the state legislature got more liberal and we got rid of Susan Collins, and we elected a great governor. Nationally it's a great new beginning.Rebecca Solnit writes about the election as the dam breaking and the river roaring, and I share her vision of the ongoing evolution of society both American and world wide: "..we have at least since the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott living through an unfolding revolution that moves us toward more equality, more interconnection and desegregation, more recognition that we were never separate from each other or nature, toward a bigger more inclusive we when it comes to humanity and to our species among the many species and systems."
I live with the idea that the small seeds we are planting in our timeline (making a library) will be influential in the future.
Solnit tells how Peggy Flanagan stopped into the senate office of Paul Wellstone 25 years ago.
"And she said, that day changed my life. Fundamentally, I'm here before you today because of that, because of Paul Wellstone. And I will, if things turn out right in about a week, take his seat in the United States Senate... That's the long game. That's a seed planted in 2002 that bloomed in 2026."
The election was a huge correction and an important marker, but we are still in the long game.
