This is from one of the public education sites that I read, out of Chicago.
I thought this was a great interview:
For the past 4 months in Raleigh, every Monday is Moral Monday. Late in the day, as people get off work, they surround the Statehouse with rings of protesters. Mass arrests are scheduled, followed on Thursdays by well-organized press conferences by those arrested. Every Monday the protests get largerânow exceeding 15,000 in Raleigh, with big rallies throughout the state. The movement is multiracial and has spread well beyond North Carolinaâs capital out to the mountainous west of the state, to small towns and tiny hamlets. The leader of this movement is a Disciples of Christ minister, the Reverend Dr. William Barber III.
I had the pleasure of meeting Rev. Barber earlier this week. With the NAACP as its nucleus, the Moral Monday Movement is an expansive coalition embracing an impressive number of organizations in all fields, labor unions, religious congregations, professional societies, and even fraternities and sororities. And they are on a roll.
âWeâve got a strategy. We never expected this thing to take off as it has. But we had to sit down and say, âwhere are we going with this?ââ Barber explains. âWe started off with one rally, and now weâre at the point of having 13 mass rallies in all 13 Congressional districts across the state. Weâve even had one of the county Republican party chairs renounce his own party,â as the result of the backward legislation the GOP has rammed through the North Carolina Legislature.
The Moral Monday folks have put their heads together and done the math. This will require a massive voter registration effort designed to boost the percentages of African American registered voters as well as a shift among a portion of white voters.
The plan involves mass participation in voter education and mobilization. Unions and professional societies will play a big part, by having their members trained to register voters (and to deal with the new and exceptionally stringent, obstructive regulations about voter identification). âIf each of us does 50 registrations, we can make our goal of 45,000 new voters,â Barber explains. âThatâs why we must start now. Itâs totally attainable.â
Last month, Barber told us, the movement spread to some of the whitest, most heavily Republican parts of the state, where the Tea Party had until recently held sway. Now that people are beginning to experience the effects of budget slashing including removal of protections for teachers and other public employees, the picture is changing. âWe were invited to speak up in rural Mitchell County, way up in the mountains,â Barber said, âand we found ourselves at a church way up there, in the evening, packed with several hundred peopleâan all white crowdâwaiting for us.â It used to be Klu Klux country up there, and Reverend Barber admits he was somewhat apprehensive about what kind of reception he might receive. He was greeted by the assembled joining together to sing Blessed be the tie that binds/Our hearts in Christian love. âThey were fired up for Moral Monday.â
âWe are tired of the Christian Right which is so wrong trying to dominate the moral high ground,â Barber explains. âWe challenge them: Are you really ready for a moral debate? Are you ready to defend what you have done? Of course they donât want to debate. It most certainly is a moral issue. Cutting people off from health care, from their jobs, taking food off their tables. They have no integrity and they hide from debate.â
eldorado
bravo
Rex Everything
It’s beautiful. It’s essentially an anti-ALEC movement. I hope it spreads. When it hits NY/NJ I am THERE!
piratedan
@Rex Everything: great observation, the anti-ALEC movement and it’s done in the open, not in some corporate legislative clearing house in Kansas.
Kay
@Rex Everything:
I love this:
Because it’s as if someone (Art Pope?) said “it isn’t a moral issue”
Preemptive :)
karen
I may be thinking of Florida but isn’t it against the law now for groups to register people?
MomSense
Wow, that is great. I am so moved and inspired by Moral Monday.
Patricia Kayden
Great post! Good to hear that progress is being made in North Carolina. Hope this continues right up to the next elections there. As usual the Repubs overreached and may pay a political price for doing so.
c u n d gulag
I dealt with the Rev. Barber many times back when I was organizing and leading anti-war/torture/rendition rallies in the mid-late 00’s, down around the Fayetteville, NC, area, and he is THE REAL DEAL!
And a very worthy man to carry on the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy.
If we called him early enough so that he didn’t already have a scheduling conflict doing some other great work, he was always more than happy to show up – AND WHAT A GREAT SPEAKER!!!
And he had to travel about 1 1/2 hours, to get there – and the same amount of time, to get back. And that’s if there was no traffic – which, in the Raleigh area, was pretty rare.
KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK, REV!!!
YOU, are very worthy of carrying on the work of the great MLK Jr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Roger Moore
@karen:
Even if groups aren’t free to register people themselves, they can still participate in the registration process. They can encourage people to register, drive them to wherever the registration takes place, answer their questions, etc.
shelly
I am so in awe of people like this.
Rex Everything
@Kay: It’s just like, everything people are taught by authority figures who teach in good faith—and that includes Christian morals—applies to the current situation, and should apply. It emphatically should. It’s such a crime that the Right has been able to hijack religion for so long. But once this ball gets rolling they won’t be able to oppose it. Making this explicitly moral is SUCH a smart move.
I’m not a religious person, but the fact is that the Left implicitly has Jesus and Moses, as well as Confucious and Buddha and Mohammed, on our side. And our opponents have no morality whatsoever to stand on, except that of Ayn Rand. That won’t stand up for 2 seconds.
Kay
@karen:
The Florida law didn’t prohibit registering voters. They could never do that. It made it much more difficult, because the groups had to turn in the regs w/in 48 hours and they added all sorts of penalties so volunteers with the League of Women Voters were reluctant to go in there. It was litigated and stayed at one point. I don’t remember if courts barred the new regs completely, eventually.
Kay
@Rex Everything:
What I like about it is that’s where he comes to it, but the people he’s attracting come at it from all different places and he’s fine with that. In that sense it would be much broader and more inclusive than the religious Right, who really only ever allied with the Money Party GOP faction.
A marriage of convenience, religious Right and Money Party. Transactional and grim. YOU outlaw abortion and WE’LL support vouchers for Medicare. Like that.
13th Generation
I’m a resident of NC. We used to be proud of this state, and it’s distinction of being a progressive and moderate standout in a sea of southern Derp. I can’t tell you how encouraged I am that so many people are working to reclaim the statehouse. It’s the perfect example of why folks NEED to come out and vote in midterm elections, as well as pay attention to every local election, right down to dog catcher.
pacem appellant
OT: Why are there Newmax headlines being advertised on the right? John gets a cut from that, right? Otherwise, it’s a bit of an eyesore. Also, why is Newsmax so pro-papacy? I feel like all of a sudden everyone is pretending the Reformation didn’t happen.
Seanly
This is how we win. The outrageous laws & blockades to voting can only go so far. Bring the Sherman Doctrine to bear on getting folks registered to vote & making sure people get out & vote.
GOP thinks they can win by restricting a couple of percentage points of traditionally Democratic voters? You bring out 10% more and thump them everywhere.
And any WATB lefties who sit home because both sides do it & they didn’t get their new My Little Pony personally delivered by Obama can go f*ck themselves.
NCgumbo
Dr. Barber should be given all the credit in the world for getting us up off of our fannies here in N.C. and putting the GOP General Assembly on notice that we won’t let them destroy our state without one hell of a fight.
The Moral Monday crowds are diversity personified – a great mix of races, ages, religions (and non-religious), genders AND income brackets, and they are spreading throughout the state and gaining momentum. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the “legislators” return from summer break.
The vote-suppression legislation just passed is really unbelievable, but there is a massive effort underway to try to get people educated, registered, and supplied with the proper IDs, just in case it is upheld in the courts. In fact, one of our most progressive senators, Ellie Kinnaird, just resigned her seat to focus her energies on this voting problem. She has seen 17 years of work undone in one legislative session – work on voting access, women’s rights, racial justice, economic fairness, and health-care access. She is over 80 years old, and is an inspiration.
Thank you, Kay, for highlighting Dr. Barber and Moral Mondays. We need all the help we can get to fight Art Pope and his millionS.
Rex Everything
@Kay: I know! This is organic and real. And Barber is so clearly sincere—it was nice to read c u n d gulag’s testimony to that. You can tell he’s not interested in excluding or judging others.
I just have a feeling about this. It seems like it will get huge.
giterdone
I see the usual ball juice suspects which of course includes wr0ng way Cole have suddenly turned into NATO global warfare experts with their usual childishly simplistic analysis as if it was a game of checkers.
Just stick to subjects that are not above your intellectual abilities Cole. Like describing what color hairball your cat coughed up and what you ate for dinner. And fuck off with your Greenwald bullsheit.
As for mixturemiss and ball juice doug. Just the usual talking out of their asses armchair quarterbacking BS.
Roger Moore
@pacem appellant:
Yes, it’s a paid advertizement. It’s also a convenient way of getting some idea of what’s going on in the fever swamp imagination of the right without having to dig deeper than a headline.
geg6
This is so awesome! I want it to come here! Now! Reading this story after watching The March last night Has me fired up and ready to go! If the crackers in the NC mountains are on board and have finally figured that the GOP has screwed them, surely the crackers here in the Pennsyltucky mountains should be able to figure it out, too. They need an alternative and we (liberals and Dems) haven’t even tried to reach out to them in a meaningful way. Yes, they are ignorant but they almost always live incredibly difficult lives as the rural poor. It has to be a grass roots effort and this Moral Monday movement could speak to them.
? Martin
@pacem appellant:
Bishops oppose abortion and Obamacare. Newsmax will be back to hating on the church when they go back to supporting the poor. The winds, they blow.
If you click on my name it will take you to a Stylish theme that will hide the Newsmax headlines and clean up other aspects of the page. It doesn’t block them, so Cole still gets his cut (he says they pay well), but at least you don’t need to see them.
Origuy
I’m no longer a believer, but I was a member of a Disciples of Christ church as a kid. Good to know it’s still one of the liberal denominations. I’m sure they’ve had some pressure to move to the right.
Baud
As the President said today:
Thanks, Kay.
? Martin
I’m going to call my uncle tonight regarding the Rev Barber is doing. He and his wife are pretty hippy and moved to NC not long ago (they feel duped, btw). I think they’ll want to jump in on that.
Kay
@NCgumbo:
It’s funny, because I think the smear campaign early on backfired. Putting their pictures up like mugshots? Wow. Which think tank genius came up with that?
pacem appellant
@? Martin: I’m so glad that pedophiles and their enablers are anti-Obamacare. It fits their denigrating morality. Also OT, who is Ben Carson and where does he get off knowing what Dr. King would or would not do?
Chris
If the Christian Right’s grip on American religion loosens, I might even start going to church again.
The Fat Kate Middleton
Two of my sisters live in North Carolina – one in Raleigh, the other in Asheville – and they (and I) are so inspired by the Moral Monday movement. They also moved there from the Midwest, thinking the state was a center of southern progressivism, and were horrified all too soon by what they saw happening. Thank you for sharing this, Kay.
Baud
@pacem appellant:
Black neurosurgeon. Apparently quite gifted at neurosurgery but a wingnut in all other respects.
hoodie
From the article:
This may have been the strategic blunder by the GOP. Education is a third rail like SS in NC; it has been pretty much a bipartisan issue in NC over the past few decades and previous GOP pols have been smart enough to avoid going full wingnut on that issue. This current GOP crop has a real hard-on about teachers for some reason, even though teachers in NC are not unionized and there has never been any collective labor action by teachers. They’ve been stiffed on compensation for several years, even when Dems were in control, and I think most folks know a teacher or two, realize what they deal with and don’t hold any particular animosity towards them. I think a lot of the current GOP pols are ideologues that live in a bubble and have a tin ear when it comes to the issues of regular people. Jesse Helms wasn’t that stupid.
celticdragonchick
Damn it all. The Moral Monday protest in Greensboro was moved to today and it is just a few blocks from my house (at South Elm and Lee)… and my back pain is bad enough that I cannot go.
Not happy right now.
pacem appellant
@? Martin: The layout is nice, but Newsmax still pollutes my desktop. I’m getting over it. It’s just that every time I wander into wingnut land, I learn something I didn’t want ever to know. That Ben Carson exists is my accidental knowledge today. I’m going to go scream in an empty conference room now.
pacem appellant
@Baud: His training in neurosurgery didn’t teach him not be presumptuous about other fields. Many smart people I know and like know that they’re smart about their chosen field of study and are quite willing to be humble in subject matter that isn’t their purview. Dr. Carson strikes me as the sort of smart person I severely dislike because their expertise in one field makes them think that they are therefore an expert in all fields.
MattR
@pacem appellant: We always talk about how conservatives discover compassion for those they had previously denigrated as soon as they are personally affected (ie. anti gay until their child comes out). Carson is the flip side of that. He is the conservative who overcame adversity in life and rather than having empathy for others in a similar situation, he uses his success to justify why there is no reason to assist anyone else.
daverave
“…out of Chicago.” Can you believe ANYTHING that comes out of Chicago?!?!? /s
? Martin
@pacem appellant: Try it again. The last BJ update changed somethings and I forgot to update the file.
The Other Chuck
@pacem appellant: The newsmax headlines are generated via javascript from newsmax’s own domain. Install noscript and you’ll never see them again.
pacem appellant
@? Martin: boo-yah! Thanks boss!
? Martin
@The Other Chuck: I’m not sure Cole gets credit for the ad in that case. My way the ad still loads, but is made invisible.
gogol's wife
@Kay:
Let this be the new image of Christians in America! That would be so great.
greenergood
Amazing, inspiring – please let Moral Mondays flourish – how to publicise them and learn from them without them being killed by the MSM?
gogol's wife
@Rex Everything:
Absolutely right.
fuckwit
@hoodie: They hate teachers for several reasons I’ve seen so far:
1) Straight up misogyny. Most K-12 teachers are female. A lot of wingnuts have terrible, obvious mommy issues so severe that it’d even make Freud’s head explode.
2) FREE-DUMB! We’s free to be DUMB! Proud of their ignorance. And, as kids, they were stupid, and they never got over resenting being called out on it by teachers, and now it is time for their revenge.
3) Religimous FREE-DUMB! We don’t want no pointy-headed intellectuals telling OUR PRECIOUS CHILDREN that gawd didn’t create the universe 5000 years ago like it says plain as day right in this here bible! And our precious bible churches can teach better than any of these godless communist public schools!
4) In most states, teachers are unionized, so there’s the union aspect (tho I guess that doesn’t apply in NC).
5) Finally, plain old Macchiavellian power politics: not only do teachers tend to be liberal, and vote and organize with liberal/progressive voting blocs, but they educate people, and educated people tend to be more open-minded and less conservative. Bluntly: conservatives must destroy education because it manufactures voters who will vote more progressively; an educated electorate that has critical thinking skills is a direct threat to conservatives own continued voter base and power
Ugh, reading that over, if people are really as horrible as I’ve laid out in the above, that’s depressing. I feel like I need to take a shower now.
gogol's wife
@Chris:
I am sure there is a liberal church right in whatever town you live in. Try UCC or Unitarian. You don’t have to wait.
danimal
@Chris: I have little patience for the anti-religious negativity on progressive sites like BJ. It’s a real blind spot for many progressives. Religion can be a force for good or bad, depending on how it is practiced. You don’t have to be a believer to respect the good works of Rev. Barber and others who are fighting the good fight.
Don’t let the ‘religious right’ drive you from the pews!
Patricia Kayden
@pacem appellant: Isn’t it funny how Ben Carson turned out to be a rightwing freak? Had no idea until he started making anti-gay remarks earlier this year. I was shocked. Prior to that I actually admired him as a successful and smart African American role model (especially given his impoverished background).
Oh well.
raven
@danimal: Too bad. I have little patience for organized religion.
NCgumbo
@hoodie – I think you are right on the money with the mistake the GOP made in going after teachers and education funding as a whole.
I live in Chapel Hill – one of the wealthiest and most liberal and most educated places in the state. When the GOP cut all funding for teaching assistants in elementary schools, our wealthy school district moved funds around, and my kids will still have a 12-to-1 student-teacher ratio. Kids in poorer, rural, conservative districts, however, will be at 24-1 ratio. Anyone who has been in a classroom with 8 year olds (heck, anyone who has met an 8 year old) knows what an immediate and negative effect that is going to have on those kids’ educations.
I want to tell all those parents who look at us as horrible liberal elites here in the Triangle – “Well, our kids are going to be fine. Your party didn’t hurt our children one bit, but they did take an axe to your kid’s chances for a bright future. Still think they’re looking out for you?”
Patricia Kayden
@gogol’s wife: Or the Quakers.
Davis X. Machina
@fuckwit: It’s more thoroughgoing that that. These are public schools, and that is intolerable, because there’s no such thing as a public.
The only real things in the world are atomistic individuals, all pitted against each other in endless economic competition, and corporations — which after all are just a superior form of individual, one better suited to that endless economic competition.
That so many Americans who pride themselves on their godliness, and profess so deep an attachment to Scripture, can so easily prostrate themselves before Golden Calf 2.0, in the name of team spirit, is profoundly depressing.
They have been presented with the same choices as that presented to the ancient Israelites in Moses and Aaron’s time, and failed in the same way.
All that is, can be bought and sold.
Anything that cannot be bought and sold, is not.
Everything that can be bought and sold must be bought and sold, for the highest price obtainable.
That is the whole of the new Law, and the new Prophets. The rest is commentary.
mclaren
Pay attention, folks. This is how you do it.
kdaug
Point-blank, damned straight.
Roger Moore
@Davis X. Machina:
Shorter: There is no god but Mammon, and Ayn Rand is its prophet.
Davis X. Machina
@Roger Moore: Or in the older formulation, Baruch atah ha Shuk, dayan ha emet.
mclaren
@fuckwit:
Number 4 is the big one. After Reagan destroyed unions for most private industry in America, the only remaining union membership comes from teachers, poilce, and firefighters. So in their effort to destroy unions entirely in America, root and branch, the Republicans must go after teachers. Firefighters will be next, with poice bringing up the rear.
Republicans want to save police unions for the last so they can use the police against the teachers and the firefighters. It’s the old divide-and-conquer strategy.
Ultimately, all regimes collapse because the security goons defect. That can occur for one of two reasons in America: either because the security goons are given orders to shoot or beat or pepper-spray non-violent protesters and the security goons realize that their own parents or brothers or sisters or children are among the protesters; or because the security goons stop getting paid.
Either way, Romania had a much scarier group of security thugs than the pissant American police or DHS or Army National Guard. And the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu wound up getting executed by an enraged mob.
If the Republicans keep going this way, that’s the direction their leadership is headed for.
pacem appellant
@Patricia Kayden: I’m still washing my eyes out, but that “editorial” he wrote for the Washington Times reads like a high school freshman’s naive thesis. If written by a 14 year old, I’d give him or her credit and encourage them to continue cultivating their critical-thinking skills. But from an adult, it reads like Carson failed logic 101 and didn’t do well on his verbal SATs.
I’ve seen this syndrome in very smart adults before. They think that they’re good, really good, in fact, at their chosen profession–in this case neurosurgery. Ergo, the person concludes that their opinions in other realms must be just as good, or else how did they get so good at what they’re really good at? So they half-bake a thesis, dumb it down to make it easy for their intellectual inferiors to understand, and stand back and watch in horror as their reputation goes to shit and they have no idea why. William Schockley is the most famous example of this that I can think of. And of course, many towering intellects get there precisely because they learned to avoid this error of thinking, and the world was made better for it.
Rex Everything
@Davis X. Machina: Now that is what I call a good post.
Davis X. Machina
@Rex Everything: Ain’t a patch on Rev. Barber.
Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.
Kay
@hoodie:
I keep coming back to the fact that GOP initiatives are national now. I think that’s why they sometimes meet such fierce resistance at the state level. The attack on teachers (well, public workers) was driven by national GOP pundits and media. We don’t hate public workers in Ohio. We don’t hate teachers. We used that national campaign they ran against them in Ohio with the collective bargaining fight.
We said “this has nothing to do with YOUR welfare, it’s coming from OUTSIDE”
It was fun to turn it around because that’s the old right wing civil rights/labor attack, “outside agitators”
We said Lynne Cheney and the Koch brothers were outside agitators, which, ya know, they ARE :)
geg6
@danimal:
Some of us have every reason to be negative toward religion. I really don’t much care if the religious that surround me don’t like it. It makes us even.
That said, I welcome any and all opportunities to work with worshippers for common goals. And I have done so many, many times and will do so in the future. I’m happy for any political allies I can find and as long as they respect me, I’ll respect them. He’ll, the fact that I can still deal with practicing Catholics without any animosity on either side shows it’s possible to get beyond believer/non-believer divide. Just don’t preach to or evangelize me. Show your religious commitment through actions and not words. Celebrate our common morals. And condemn those who use your religion as a cudgel. I’ll do the equivalent (without the religion stuff) and we’ll get along just fine.
Poopyman
@pacem appellant: Just make up your own stories to go with the headlines.
“Hello? … Yeah, it’s me … Listen, about last night ….”
Poopyman
@Davis X. Machina:
Nice finish. You really stuck the landing.
Shakezula
Dear me, the GOP’s years long war against everyone who isn’t a White male millionaire seems to be having some unintended consequences. Who would have guessed that middle/lower class whites wouldn’t be consent to starve to death for the cause?
Oh well, I’m sure that once the Conservatives reveal Obama’s latest plot to have Black Panthers sell white people’s fetuses to gays and lesbians everything will go back to normal.
Dumb fuckers will never even begin to understand what they have wrought.
hoodie
@Kay: Yep, their whole movement is national, dominated by activists and largely funded by a very small group of rich folks. They’ve forgotten the old adage about all politics being local. Most of the Republicans who actually did know the truth of that adage have by and large been run out of office by primarying. In some ways they’re fulfilling the old Republican stereotypes about limousine liberals — they’re limousine conservatives. One thing keeping them afloat is residual racism.
Another is the Reagan fantasy world that some suburbanites and exurbanites still occupy, you know, the one in which you can send your kid to good private schools on your government vouchers because you live in a world of unlimited bigbox retail choice. I send my son to a local catholic high school. It’s a great school, but I know we’re lucky and harbor no illusions that something like that can scale effectively across even a fraction of the student population of the county. That is even more the case in places like rural areas of NC. The public school and Walmart are the only game in town in a lot of those places.
Kay
@hoodie:
It was so clear in the midwest. It started with Mitch Daniels and just went from Indiana to Ohio to Michigan to Wisconsin. We ARE national, all highway strips look the same with chain stores and restaurants, we all watch tv, but I think there is a very strong sense that state and local government should be state and local. It’s expressed most profoundly here with public schools. Hell, we have lots of people who feel very loyal to a particular school system within the county (we have 8 separate systems).
I think it matters too that public employees “live among us.” Listening to the idiots on Morning Joe attack “teachers” is one thing, it’s whole different thing when we’re talking about “our” teachers. We know them. They’re not lazy, horrible people. They’re not abstract.
Lawrence
@pacem appellant: I spent a decade working in healthcare administration and I assume doctors are assholes until they prove otherwise. Especially surgeons in expensive specialties, like neuro or orthopedic surgeons. They often work in bubble wrapped cocoons of ass kissing sycophant medical groupies. The ER docs and GPs, in my experience were not as bad. And the psychiatrists and psychologists were crazy, but mostly pleasant. Dr. Ben is probably not used to people failing to defer to his majesty.
pacem appellant
@Poopyman: That helps. I read stun as stun gun, and all of a sudden, the headline makes more sense, and even makes the pope seem somewhat modern by not relying on the Swiss guard but his own prowess at phone hacking to taze the stuffing out of someone unfaithful enough to be the subject of god’s special wrath.
serena1313
What I love is when voices of reason & compassion counter & challenge the far-right’s divisive rhetoric, vitriolic slogans and empty talking points, people listen. They hear the message. They feel it. It gives truth to power. That is one key to the Moral Majority’s success.
Public education, wages, healthcare, government assistance programmes, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, voting rights, pensions, etc. are all under attack. Communities, counties, cities and towns are being decimated by Republican policies.
A lot of folks who normally are only subjected to the conservative point of view have been conditioned to tune-out or ignore any countering ideas from the left. But all of a sudden, many lives have been and are being turned upside down. It has become personal. Now they are yearning for real solutions not rhetorical slogans and bumper stickers.
When reality comes crashing through the door, people are much more inclined to be open & receptive to messages that offer hope over disparity; unity over division; community over individualism; justice over injustice; compassion over indifference; pragmatism over ideology; solutions over rhetoric; and action over inaction. Remember these are not just idealistic words but universal words that have defined who we are, not just as Americans but as human beings. We’ve put these words into practice and lived by them for over 200 years.
We do not want to re-litigate the same issues that were settled decades ago. We’ve come too far to turn back now. And we still have a long, long way to go.
If Republicans think that they can continue dismantling the advancements made over many decades without a fight, they are sadly mistaken. This is a fight they cannot and will not win …not as long as we, the people, are united together.
While Moral Monday is a success in North Carolina, for it to be successful elsewhere, there must be a general understanding that this is about all of us, not just you or me or a select few. There is something much, much larger at stake. And we know what that is…
Betsy
@Chris: or you can help that happen by going now!
NCgumbo
Came back this morning to comment on what is most likely a dead thread because I had one more thought on why Moral Moral mondays seem to be catching on, and that is: NOBODY can say “both sides are doing this.”
Because of the historic flip of the General Assembly to GOP super-majorities and the election of a GOP governor, (and all of the publicity that political reality generated), it is crystal clear that it is the Republican Party dismantling our state for the benefit of a few. Shills in the media can’t paint this as “see, government fails you again” (which ALWAYS plays into the hands of the anti-government party) because everyone knows exactly who is responsible for these policies that majorities of North Carolinians don’t support.
It is still going to take a lot of boots on the ground to swing elections, given voting restrictions and gerrymandering, but at least we’re not also fighting basic misperceptions of what basic party positions are on issues.
Rex Everything
Both sides CAN’T do this. Only our side can do this! Things are finally getting down to brass tacks.
J R in WV
Yesterday we had to make a parts run for some remodeling (installing a power’s off water supply) and stlopped for hot dogs on the way to the lumberyard. ESPN was on their TV, but the coverage was of the 50 Year anniversary March, which we both felt was unusual and a good thing.
ESPN makes a lot of money from Black American atheletes, and most often has no political coverage going at all! So I was pleasently surprised to see some exposure to progressive groups and causes on the all golf/NBA/NFL network.