I cannot help but confess some measure of dread at the sight of what Republican legislators and Governors are trying to do to organized Labor. I don't anticipate, really, our side winning all these battles. Elections have consequences, and the 2010 election, as I warned, had some pretty bitter ones.
But we have a number of emotional and political choices here at hand, even if we don't win this round of fights. We can be discouraged, or we can become emboldened and motivated to act. We can become cynical, say, "Of course it must happen this way, our society is screwed, etc."
Or, we can take our fate into our own hands. The Republicans have shown us that nobody has to accept a "political reality". They battled back from historic losses to a win of historic scale. We can do the same. We can move to change the direction of this country, its mood, once again. Heck, we did it before in 2006 and 2008.
What we're seeing could be the beginning of the end of organized labor, or any number of important priorities of ours, if we decide to just lay down or give up.
Or it could be the kick that finally gets us to stop worrying about our party's inferiority complexes, and gets us to finally do something real and permanent in this country about Republican Power.
I would rather be motivated by these outrages, rather than defeated. How about you?