Do you remember “Once More, With Feeling” — the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
If you don’t, no worries — this video isn’t actually going to be about that.
But also, what the hell? Have you seriously never seen that episode? Are you just not a Buffy fan,
or is it something deeper that’s keeping you from watching it? Because,
yeah, I know, Joss Whedon is all kinds of problematic, but, like, I’m not even that
big a fan of musicals, generally speaking, and I think that’s just a brilliant episode—
Not about that.
Anyway, the reason I bring it up is, we here in the United States had our general election,
which was scheduled for last week though it may in fact still be going on when you watch this
because that’s how close it was, because like 70 million people voted for Donald Trump,
because we’re a bad country, we’re just a bad, bad country, with lots and lots of ignorant, selfish,
small-minded, credulous, fearful and deeply prejudiced people who I guess are just okay
with the whole “rise of white nationalist fascism while the country slides into xenophobic,
isolationist decline and everybody dies in an uncontrolled viral pandemic” thing—
But! Hey! At least things didn’t turn out as bad as they could have, right?
Or, at least things look like they won’t turn out as bad as they could have — again,
depending on whether or not we know the actual result by the time you’re watching
this. And “not as bad as it could have been” is still kind of a victory, right?
So, that’s what’s got me thinking of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode, and specifically
the closing number of the episode, a cheerful little ditty titled “Where Do We Go From Here?”
At the end of the episode, the demon who has been forcing everyone to sing and dance,
has been defeated — well, he kinda just left, actually,
but whatever — and now the cast is all like, “All right, then! That’s over! What now?”
And they start singing (even though, theoretically, it’s no longer a Thing).
Giles sings, “The battle's done, And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer. Where do we go from here?”
And that’s where we’re at now post-election,
right? The battle’s done, we kinda won — Biden will be the next president, which,
thank god — as the song says, we sound our victory cheer. However, it was far from the
popular repudiation of Trump that many of us were hoping for. And in addition to that,
the Democrats may not even take a majority in the Senate, so... where DO we go from here?
The truth is, we still have a long way to go before our country lives up to the promise
in the Pledge to the American flag of “liberty and justice for all,” or the
“world-wide welcome” in Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus, posted on the Statue of Liberty,
much, MUCH less the goals listed in the preamble to the Constitution.
In order to achieve those goals and fulfill those promises, we have a LOT
of work to do. Today, I’m going to give an overview of what I see as the most pressing
matters, and in future videos, I’ll go into more detail about each of them. I’d love it
if you would include questions and suggestions in the comments (which is something that some
of you already do, so thank you), and I’ll do what I can to address and include those.
Repeatedly,
some might say incessantly, over the last several months on this channel I have encouraged, cajoled,
bullied and begged my fellow Americans to vote in this year’s election. And yes, voting definitely
matters — but the next congressional election isn’t for another two years, and there’s a lot
of work that needs to be done between now and then, and beyond. So where do we start?
One of the most fundamental things we all need to do is to educate ourselves,
not just on the issues and the problems people are facing, but on how our government actually works,
which level of government is best equipped to respond to a given problem,
and how the various levels of government interact with one another.
Our government would function a lot more effectively, and we
the people of this country would be a lot better off, if more of us came to view the government
as an extension of ourselves. That’s kind of the point of both a democracy
and a republic. Both words mean a “people’s” government – demos from Greek, and publicae
from Latin, although the way that they play out is different. In both cases, however,
the idea is that citizens have some control, and thus some responsibility, for government.
The truth is, government is a tool that we can use to do what we need it to do.
But in order to do that, we need to know how it works. It’s one thing to say
“call or write your member of Congress” — and I’ve said that, and I’ve written to
my Representative and my Senators multiple times just in the past several months — but
not every problem falls within the purview of a member of the United States Congress.
We need to know when to contact our federal representatives, and when to contact our
state legislators, or local officials. And we need to know, or to know how to find out,
who those people are. Knowing who we need to talk to, or which level of government we need to demand
action from, is a big help when it comes time to advocate for change regarding a particular issue.
And there are sooo many issues that need our attention, problems that need solving.
Some of those problems are related to our electoral process itself.
Beyond protecting the right to vote, we need to work on things like campaign finance reform,
ending partisan gerrymandering, and making ranked choice voting the standard across the country. And
again, some of that will have to happen at the federal level, but we’re going to need action
by state legislatures to accomplish these reforms, as well.
When we widen our focus beyond how to improve our government itself,
the problems only seem to get bigger.
The American prison system is a universe unto itself that is in dire need of radical reform.
And I don’t just mean improving conditions for prisoners, although,
yeah, that would be nice — I mean letting people out of prison, reducing the number of prisons,
and perhaps someday even eliminating prisons altogether. The United States has the highest
rate of incarceration in the world. According to data published by World Prison Brief and the U.S.
Bureau of Justice Statistics, 36 U.S. states have higher incarceration rates than any other
country in the world. The United States — the land of the free! And hopefully
we all know by now that mass incarceration disproportionately affects Black and brown people.
There are ways of dealing with criminals, even violent criminals, that are not only more humane
but more effective and less costly than simply warehousing them in penitentiaries for years
or decades at a time. We need to start exploring what those ways are.
And we definitely need to stop operating prisons and jails as for-profit enterprises. I’ll talk
about some of the ways that you, personally, can make a difference in subsequent videos.
You want another problem that needs addressed? How about homelessness, which many people face after
being released from prison, and for many other reasons. It’s been a problem in this country
since forever, it’s been a recurring topic of national conversation for as
long as I’ve been alive, but ... we’ve never seriously tried to do something about it.
We are one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on the planet, and we have over half a
million homeless people. It’s a disgrace, and it doesn’t have to be this way. Ending homelessness
in the United States is possible, if we make different choices and convince others to support
our ideas. It will be expensive, but that’s okay because — good news! — we’ve got the money.
Immigration is another area that demands serious attention, and has for a long,
long time. The crimes against humanity committed against immigrants and asylum
seekers by the Trump administration are horrific and inexcusable, but the truth is
the United States has been talking the talk without even attempting to walk the
walk when it comes to immigration policy for much longer than Donald Trump has been the president.
Undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed no crime in this country other than the
misdemeanor of an illegal border crossing, have been forced to live on the margins of our society,
always fearful of arrest and deportation. Refugees and asylum seekers fleeing persecution,
war, or economic collapse in their homelands have had to wait years in order to get here.
The United States, a large and prosperous nation with plenty of room to spare, has
never lived up to its moral responsibility when it comes to resettling refugees. It’s
not that we don’t take in refugees — we do. It’s just that we don’t take in nearly enough.
Not only is taking in immigrants and refugees a moral duty,
it actually benefits our country. Studies suggest that areas with large immigrant populations
tend to have less violent crime, and an influx of immigrants or resettled refugees can be a
boon to economically struggling cities and towns. Far too often we see immigrants and
refugees vilified as criminals, or looked down on as a burden, when they should be welcomed with
open arms, because having them here benefits them and those of us who were already here.
I’ve mentioned a few times how wealthy the United States is, but how about the fact
that the U.S. has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the world? The wealthiest
10 percent of American households controls 70 percent of the country’s total net worth,
while the bottom 50 percent of households controls less than two percent of the total net worth.
And that disparity is not an accident or a natural state — it’s the result of
decades of public policy, mostly driven by Republicans but helped along far too
often by Democrats as well, I must say — that favors the rich and disadvantages the poor,
cutting taxes for the wealthy while slashing funding to social welfare programs and opposing
reforms that would improve the lot of the working class and those living in poverty,
such as raising the minimum wage, and guaranteeing affordable access to education and health care.
There are many other specific areas I could mention, and will talk about in
more detail in upcoming videos, but I think that will do as a sampler.
It won’t be easy to solve these problems. I don’t pretend to have solutions, but I
do know that they warrant more attention than a relatively brief mention in a single video. So,
over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be making additional videos focusing more specifically
on what we, just as citizens, can do about the issues I’ve brought up here, as well as others I
haven’t even gotten to mention. Because there are so many areas where our society can, and should,
and must improve, and the best ways to accomplish those improvements aren’t always obvious,
but there’s definitely some shit we can do that would be helpful, and I’m gonna talk about that.
In fact, “solve” is the wrong word anyway, because it suggests a time when we just
won’t have to worry about this stuff at all anymore, and I’m afraid that isn’t how it works,
sorry. Addressing these issues will take a lot of effort, and probably a long time,
and it may not always be obvious what the next step should be.
Later in the song, the Scooby gang sings “Why is the path unclear / When we know home is near,”
and the song goes on: “Understand, we’ll go hand-in-hand, but we’ll walk alone in fear.”
A lot of the time, that’s what political activism feels like. We know,
or think we know, where we want to go, and it seems tantalizingly within our reach,
but we just can’t seem to figure out how to get there.
Those feelings of uncertainty have only been amplified by the election result.
Yes, Biden has been elected president, which is great, but Biden is a moderate who will need
to be pushed to support more extensive reforms than he has proposed in his admittedly extremely
progressive platform. And, what if the Republicans do hold on to control of the Senate? What about
the right-wing majority that sits on the U.S. Supreme Court thanks to Trump? How much progress
can we really make under those conditions? That’s why going above and beyond voting is so important.
The truth is, we can’t do this alone.
We have to seek each other out, find communities, organize, work together.
So where DO we go from here? We find each other, and we help each other. We find organizations that
are working to address problems that we care about and we join them, donate to them, volunteer with
them, support them, help to spread their message. And we vote when we have the opportunity to do so,
and we support others in exercising that right as well. Maybe a few of us even decide to run
for office ourselves. In fact, one of the few silver linings during the Trump years
has been the number of people, especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ people,
who have run for and been elected to public office for the first time.
So we do those things. And we push for change, and we keep pushing. That song from the Buffy
musical ends on an inconclusive note, as the cast asks at the start of the final verse,
“When does the end appear / When do the trumpets cheer.” And the thing is, the end doesn’t appear.
Because… there is no end. That’s not how this works. There will always be more progress that
needs to be made, new problems that need to be addressed but never quite solved.
Change is inevitable, and positive change can happen if we make it happen, but it takes time.
And the work goes on.