As nearly always happens, people brought their own perspective to the late night rant I recently wrote. I had no idea it would strike such a chord, lol. It was something that needed to come out of me, it took about ten minutes to write… (and add CAPS and bolds and emphasis!!!)
…and as sometimes happens when the muse strikes like that, it seemed to either inspire or provoke people right when they needed it.
Enthusiasm, guilt, (leading to condemning it, haha) inspiration, and approbation….condemnation and appreciation appeared in roughly equal measure as each person read it through their own Lens of Perception and responded as their view of it required.
Sure it was light on substance. After all the whole thing is summed up in the two words in my sig line.
Yell Louder.
And of course some people think Yell Louder and Stand The Fuck Up means to scream incoherently into someones face. To be irrational, not unreasonable as I stated. People thought I was “telling them what to do,” or trying to make them feel bad. They thought it was accusatory, instead of just being a ranty pep talk….
Or as it turned out, lol, a bloggy Rorschach Test!
Of course I wasn’t trying to condemn anybody, that is a waste of time…..except when it comes to holding politicians accountable.
I was trying to motivate people….to activate people.
Because as everyone who has ever thought much about true democracy agrees…
“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. ” –Thomas Jefferson
“We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.”
Albert Einstein
Be assured, fellow citizens, that in a democracy it is the laws that guard the person of the citizen and the constitution of the state, whereas the despot and the oligarch find their protection in suspicion and in armed guards.
Aeschines
“Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.”
Dr. Carl Sagan
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
Thomas Jefferson
“The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.”
William F. Buckley, Jr
Only a knowledgeable, empowered and vocal citizenry can perform well in democracy.
David Brin
Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or balance. The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen.
John Ralston Saul
Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There’s no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn’t a gift. It’s a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo
“The ‘well-informed citizenry is in danger of becoming the ‘well-amused audience’.”
– Al Gore
It is the citizenry Standing The Fuck Up that makes democracy work.
And that is the only way it CAN work.
Edward R. Murrow: ‘A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.’
And to drive that point home allow me to add that……….sheep cannot Stand The Fuck Up!
I am not telling you what to do.
I am telling you that you must…if democracy is to work……do.
I am not telling you what to Yell, I just want to make sure that you are heard.
Each person is unique, each person is special, each person is valuable. No matter what the Republicans say! That is the basis of democracy itself, to protect the rights of each individual. That is the basis of all human rights efforts as well. And indeed the basis of all religion….Do Unto Others As You would Have Them Do Unto You. It is the basis of civilization itself.
But in a democracy it is even more critical.
Each citizen is unique, each citizen is special, each citizen is valuable. In fact each citizen is indispensable. Each citizen must stand up IF s/he wants change.
You are an individual. I am an individual. I don’t like people telling me what to do and neither do you. But I WILL tell you to do something! That is my right and my responsibility as a citizen. To do what I can and to tell you to get of your ass and do something.
And it is your right to tell me to go to hell!
I may however make suggestions, lol.
But it is up to you. Do what you want, how you want to do it. And that is what Yelling means. It means making sure YOUR voice is heard, your needs are understood. That you representatives in our representative democracy know what YOU want.
It does NOT mean be shrill or join Code Pink, fer gawds sake. Jeez. I know very well, lol, that some of you are uncomfortable with anyone raising their voice above a polite level. But …fer gawds sake…. politics does NOT reward the polite. Really. Look it up. Politics is about being heard. To be effective politically you have to be heard. Which means the Louder you Yell, the more effective you are. Being effective politically means…..Standing The Fuck Up. And really I don;t care HOW you do it. But your voice needs to be heard and counted.
So BE counted, however YOU want. It doesn’t matter what you do, it matters that you do something.
History Is Made by Those Who Show Up.
Show up! Stand UP! And each of you in your unique way….Yell Louder.
For eight long years, it didn’t matter too much what anyone said. Now it does…..VERY much matter.
Even if it is just Standing Up from behind your keyboard!!!
The inspiration for that rant came from this quote….
“My hope is that our Democratic colleagues – if you start listening to the bloggers – if we’re going to let the bloggers run the country, then the country’s best days are behind us.”
That one quote means that what we are doing on the blogs IS being heard, it DOES count, we ARE making a difference dammit.
We are scaring the hell out of them.
Because?
Because we are Standing The Fuck Up!
If it is working, we need to do it more, and better and yes……LOUDER!
I am apparently good at blogging, lol. So that is what I do. Physical limitations prevent me from doing much more, though. So just as some folks rely on me to blog, I rely on other folks to do what THEY do best…..I rely on you to do what YOU do best.
There are 300 million Americans. There are seven billion human beings. If we ALL Stand The Fuck Up and Yell Louder we WILL change the world. Each person is unique, each person is special, each person is valuable. NO ONE can replace you. You bring your own unique, speacial and valuable gifts to the party.
But it is indisputable, if each of us Stands Up and “Yells,” each in our own unique, special and valuable way….things will change.
And isn’t that why we are all here in the first place?
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You mean like “Please sir, Mr. Obama, fix my world for me and be proud of myself for me?” while scratching ground with toe and looking up pleadingly from a supplicant position?
Like that? Or should it be all caps, maybe? Bigger font? Red?
😉
You don’t really want me to stand up for myself and DEMAND CHANGE!, do you? Somebody might think I was being too… too…too… unreasonable?
Maybe we could, like, give him 3 more years to get a running start, and not complain?
… from yesterday’s discussion at the orange.
Btw, I like Code Pink even though it’s not my political style (requires a lot of energy!). I’ll never forget the picture of Condi Rice staring ahead while a woman stood in front of her with bloody hands. That picture ought to be in the history books.
I don’t see any conflict between community work, advocacy work done throughout the country (i.e., pro-migrant), educating, even personal spiritual development in order to help make the world a better place.
But this is the blogs, we’re all here typing away, and I think blogging has proven to be a voice that is indeed heard in our halls of power. No one thing is the supreme answer. But that doesn’t diminish all these kinds of efforts.
Of one thing I am sure — the pressure from the PTB on our elected representatives will never let up. Without counter pressure from individual citizens, there’s no hope at all for change in the political area that affects all of us — legislation.
in the first place.
Say what you want about the hate being personal, but I assure you the political grounds are more warranted.
It’s no secret the place is big for most liberals but they have a lot of say in which direction the wind gets to blow and they accept money for political consulting and favorable blog posts.
Standing up requires the will to look in a mirror as much as it takes to voice opposition.
Elect Democrats worth electing, not in monetary terms like the DNC insiders at the Daily Kos, but ones with political worth.
The internet is the new street protest, call out the undercovers or we’re all in danger of getting co-opted, or worse, smeared and banned from the discussion.
They chased off David Sirota (a man that actually had causes behind him other than himself) and they embarass the left leaning blogosphere when they can’t even take the time out to teach Nicole Judd how to use the site after asking her to blog there.
My suggestion is to raise the heat across the blogosphere on the voting down of the “Cramdown” Bill, put the names of the people that voted against it out there, ignore the GOP members but heckle the shit out of the Dems that crossed the aisle.
I’ll be investigating those Dems who did vote it down, analyzing their campaign contributions, and looking at how they vote on certain pieces of legislation.
Something not done at mainstream sites that worry about pissing off a potential client.
for example, there are people in the peace activist movement who like to try to claim that you’re not truly committed to the movement until you get yourself arrested.
And I don’t intend to get arrested to please them.
I do not think the GOP is done for.
It isn’t that I object to people dancing on their graves, I just think that people are mistaking all those public opinion polls in which Americans blandly agree that “Obama is doing a good job” with “Woo hoo the rebubs are dead” because many of their feeble attempts at smearing the current president and leftyism have failed up till now.
There is not significant support among the general populace for any of the change many progressives support. Sure many Americans are awake enough to note health care in this country is broken for example but wait until Obama actually attempts to pass some kind of legislation.
We are still a country in which democracy is tightly controlled by corporate interests who routinely hedge their bets by giving both Republicans and Dems. They don’t really care who is in office as long as their lobbyists are allowed to continue to basically write most pieces of major legislation.
There is still a segment of the American populace who are reactionary and authoritarian and who don’t like the fact that the girls and non-white folks are in on the action.
This country had a change in presidency we did not have a social revolution that radically altered roles or institutions so until that happens I am not going to be one of those people going Ha Ha the GOP is dead because I see it as a miscalculation.
We had a far more vocal though just as unorganized “left” in this country in the 1960’s and early 1970’s and they made the erroneous assumption that they had managed to actually help lead deeper more fundamental change in society and then we got the 80’s and white dudes managed to parry away the few rights women got with little more than mockery and start the whole sale dismantling of unions.
So. Pardon me if I don’t celebrate the idea that the GOP is dead. If the GOP is really dead people should be screaming for and clamoring for massive changes to environmental legislation, health care,education and on and on because it would mean their do nothing, let the market fuck everybody attitude was utterly gone. They aren’t screaming. Sure we are….
Show me some real change which in defense of Obama, he hasn’t had time to even enact yet before you crow about the GOP being a rotting irrelevant corpse. And even if it is a corpse does anybody watch George Romero movies? They can come back…
It all starts and ends with with what I want, right?
🙂
you’re saying there was no cause and effect or telling people what their job was in the previous essay STAND. THE. FUCK. UP.?
intressssssting. 😀 i don’t buy that because i can read words almost as well as the next person but you know, we all mean what we say until we don’t mean what we say.
i can understanding wanting to clarify things in a new essay. keeps everything one link removed.
class warfare against working people in this country, it’s a disgrace that there are still some progressives at Daily Moulitsas who have to have the theme and intent of Stand. The. Fuck. Up. explained to them.
They like to portray themselves as sophisticated observers of politics, they parade around as “realists” while ignoring the glaring reality that nothing is ever going to change in this country unless more Americans get angrier, stand the fuck up, and fill the streets of Washington to confront the liars and corporate hacks in both parties who keep shitting on us.
It’s going to have to happen sooner or later, so we might as well get on with it.
just wandering around randomly reading at GOS over the last day or two, in comments, quite a few that echo your STFU theme. QUITE a few. heh.
example: