People often mistake violence and anger, as if, when your anger escalates, so might your violent actions. The truth is that violence is on a totally separate scale. I can go from one to ten on the anger scale above without ever leaving my chair, or, saying or doing anything violent.
| 10. Extreme Bodily Harm |
Violence
| 9. Broken bones |
| 8. Kicking and Punching |
| 7. Shoving |
| 6. Finger jabbing |
| 5. Physical Intimidation With No Physical Contact |
| 4. Threatening physical violence verbally |
| 3. “Fuck you” |
| 2. “Fuck Off” |
| 1. “Piss Off” |
This is absolutely not a scientifically accurate list, just something I vaguely remember from college, eleventy hundred years ago. (Back when we smoked in the lecture halls and ashtrays were provided.) What is true, is that anger and violence are two separate things. One is a variety of feelings and the other is a variety of actions.
A whole lot of people are angry about the outcome of the Presidential election and I’d like to suggest some actions to take, some ways to channel that angry energy, and I just wanted to be clear that none of them have anything to do with violence, but, they can work great to relieve the pressure of angry energy.
Anyone who knows me is going to know the first thing I’m going to suggest and that’s:
***Register Voters ***
The more people who are registered to vote (and then do vote) the more Democrats win. Ask any Party official about that.
It’s the reason 90for90 was formed. In 2015 when Dr. Ferguson Reid, the first black man elected to the Virginia Assembly since Reconstruction, turned 90, his friends wanted to throw him a birthday party. He said he’d rather register voters, something he’d been doing since there were poll taxes and literacy tests.
So a voter advocacy group, 90for90, was formed. The groups intention was to register 90 new voters in every precinct in VA.
¼ million for the Old Dominion!
Dr. Reid turned 91 this year and the group didn’t exactly achieve their intended goal. They surpassed it.
Over 600,000 new voters were registered in VA!!!!!!!
Now, what if we did that in every state? What if there was a group for every state here on Daily Kos that made it their mission to register voters? What if the management of this blog got behind this idea? What if they helped crash the gates at the Registrars offices? What if we really did elect “more and better Democrats”?
What if Daily Kos put a lot of focus on this? Voter Registration on the front page? Contests for the individual and state who could get the most voters registered? A new task for the web design team; something that will delay the loading of the page, and display numbers of newly registered voters? I would gladly wait 10 seconds for that every time.
50 states x 250,000 new voters = 12½ million new voters. Anyone up for saying “I helped Daily Kos do that”?
There are a lot of ways to register voters and I bet everyone can find a way to do it within their own comfort zone. I did it once by having a birthday party for myself and handing out registration forms and challenging everyone to register 10 voters.
I went into some schools here and gave kids literacy tests. Now that was really fun, and right in my comfort zone, I’m an ex teacher. The kids walked in, I had Sam Cooke playing (because you can never go wrong with Sam Cooke) and as they walked in, they were handed the literacy test the state of Louisiana used to give.
I told them what they were taking and that they had 10 minutes. The 10 minutes goes by really fast and there is a lot of talking, and, I don’t know what you call it, “chuffing and huffing”, around the room.
Of course no one finishes the test in 10 minutes, and I send the kids to their phones to watch a video of Harvard kids taking the test. None of them can do it either. It’s not a test of literacy, it’s an obstacle.
The best part for me? I did this in Catholic schools because that’s what I have the easiest access to, my neighbor is a Principal at one. So, when the kids are done with the test and are at least at 4 or above on the anger scale, I tell them that many of these tests were originally designed to keep Irish Catholics from voting. Irish Catholics just like them. That always moved them up the scale a bit. That’s when I hand out the voter registration forms.
Most parents and teachers know this; if you want a kid to do something, show them how someone is trying to stop them from doing it. Show them that big wigs are conspiring to keep them from doing it. Their anger turns into energy real fast.
This takes about 30 minutes each time I do it. An hour maybe including drive time. It’s only one of thousands of ways to register voters though. Check out the Daily Kos Asheville group for inspiring ways. Photo ID laws in TN are what originally got me pissed, then I saw what the folks in Asheville were doing and started talking to them about it. That led me to Dr. Reid.
Other things you can do to focus your energy:
~Write a diary about one of the Special Elections or Races too close to call.
~Volunteer to work in any of these campaigns or recount efforts.
~Write a diary about one of the newly elected Democrats down ballot.
~Write a diary about one of the candidates who ran and lost by a narrow margin.
~Write a diary thanking a candidate who lost for running (if we want better Dem’s we need to show them some love.)
~Write a letter to a the Editor of your local paper.
~Find out what precinct you live in and if they are active, join them.
~Find a group in town that registers voters and join them
~Join your local Democratic Party (if you have a lot of patience)
You can do a lot of this on line from the comfort of your own home. The time to do it is now, though, when a lot of people are angry. You can use your angry energy to channel their angry energy and start actions that will change the world. Hopefully for the better.
Everything I write, including, but not limited to, my name, belongs solely to me. Tracy B Ann
