FILIBUSTER SEASON

"Well actually it wasn't technically..." SSHHHHH

As you saw in my last post I’ve been thinking about green shoots. Winter was hard, especially in the north, but protests against the administration have been happening anyway. Now that Spring is here, and the Trump admin has been doing actual, demonstrable harm to the country for several months (no longer simply theoretical) the backlash has arrived. Senator Cory Booker's filibuster yesterday was a massive emotional boost to us all. This Saturday April 5th the anti-Trump protests will be huge. May 1st they will be even bigger. The Left warned the Center that Trump would be a dictator on day one and he's done everything he can to prove us right. To be fair he told us he would be dictator on day one but the Center didn't understand or wasn't paying attention. They are now. It’s sad that it took massive layoffs, a crashing stock market, betrayal of our allies, and the end of due process to get us there.

I started to think I was out of the optimism business but there remains a large part of my brain, the hard-wired American, that believes the U.S. is more Senator Cory Booker than Donald Trump. I wonder though, if there’s not as big of a gap between the two as it seems. Americans like people who demand better than the status quo. We like people who send that message in unconventional ways. We have always championed the underdog challenger. The magical trickster god. We invented Bugs Bunny after all. The GOP found their trickster god in Trump. Now it’s our turn. The Civil Rights movement was built by using the status quo against itself. White America woke up to the horrors perpetrated against Black America by Jim Crow laws as activists challenged them on live TV. The response, as Black America knew it would be, was horrific. They put their bodies on the line and tricked racist Americans into revealing who they were without room for parsing language or making excuses. Civil Rights icon John Lewis called this, “good trouble.”

Cory Booker got in 'Good Trouble’ yesterday as he, with the support of his staff and Democrats in the Senate, dominated the news cycle ahead of the Wisconsin and Florida special elections by speaking in detail, for 25 hours and 5 minutes, about the outrages perpetrated against the American people and our allies by Trump. He also demolished the long standing record for speaking on the Senate floor, held by staunch racist Strom Thurmond. How racist was he? Senator Thurmond was so racist he filibustered the Equal Rights Amendment for 24 hours and 18 minutes, even after watching Americans beat other Americans to death merely for asking for equal rights. Even after secretly fathering a child with a Black woman.

Cory Booker’s speech wasn’t technically a filibuster. As a card carrying member of the pedantic wing of the Democratic Party I support weighing down every argument with the politics of “Actually it wasn't …” but gang, let’s just stop. Filibuster is the better word. It’s the word people can connect to. Trump dominates politics these days because he understands the limbic trumps the semantic. While the Left is tripping over itself trying to define things correctly to avoid trouble, Trump is running circles around us using language that connects emotionally to certain Americans. What Senator Booker did yesterday seemed like the correct path to me. Be real. Be emotional. Be committed. Be truthful. And by shutting down the Senate, cause trouble. Good trouble.

I’m not saying Cory Booker reads this blog and saw my silly but heartfelt plea to rise up and shut this nonsense down. But he definitely does and did. Now it’s our turn…