Back in 2006, when Camp Democracy was being created, I drove out to help make the stage that Howard Zinn was going to be speaking at. I pulled up to the driveway and it was just Neil Swanson (David Swanson's father) out there cutting and assembling stairs for the stage and no one else. I had expected more people, but it was just Neil and I. I had started to form doubts as to whether Camp Democracy would matter. But honestly, it was what I had learned from The People's History of the United States that kept me going. We have to keep struggling for this country to progress, and sometimes it's tedious, thankless and feels hopeless. That's ok, that's nothing new, it's how it always goes. I've seen too many people leave this site over small things. I'm not leaving and I catch hell from this crowd over many of my positions. Follow me over the fold for a little hope and a lot of love for Howard Zinn.
Like I said, at first it appeared to me that it was just Neil and I, but when we pulled up in that big van with the stage in DC, I realized how wrong I was. Hundreds of people from all over the country helped us unload and assemble that stage, not to mention the countless organizers and coordinators that had been working in the background for months. I was just a small cog that couldn't see the whole picture and was thinking too small, too negatively.
Days later I drove out to DC with a close friend to watch Howard Zinn speak on the stage I helped to build and it felt really satisfying. He spoke eloquently of how real change happens, from the bottom up and not from the top down. You can't plan on your leaders enacting the change you want, that's not how progess is made.
It defies history to think that we could elect a new administration and then sit back and let them fight, for us, to change the system to our benefit. I'm not sure that's ever happened in world history.
We could get our second wind, we can beat these tea-baggers, we could use them to our advantage. We have a much better ground organization, we have the real message of change and freedom that resonates with independent minded voters. But we need to quit relying on Obama or the Democratic Congress to do it. They will have no choice but to follow if we got back to organizing and agitating, just as if the Bush administration were still in office.