Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.
Telling our story.
cross-posted from itsgettinghotinhere.org
Obama graced the House chamber yesterday with a speech reminiscent of his candidacy rather than his presidency. That’s a good thing, because his so-called base needed a reminder that he’s in Washington not just to wade knee-deep into the political swamp of DC, but to affect change from inside out. He wasted no time before really digging into Congress:
To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills. And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that sixty votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well.
I sincerely hope congress takes at least this piece to to heart, because for clean energy advocates, the rest of the speech was a mixed bag. He bulked up his language on nuclear, coal and offshore drilling, a questionable political move in support of questionable technologies, while at the same time rightly highlighting clean energy legislation as a jobs-creator.
As the cap and trade bill, mired in a bi-partisan swiss-cheese factory, limps towards the finish line (or not), I look at our friends and colleagues in the labor, immigration, LGBTQ and other movements and I notice their coalitions growing impatient. The campaign promises Obama made to those groups, and the subsequent moving parts (chief among them health care, financial markets reform, don’t ask don’t tell…etc.) are all stalled.
Many pundits blame this on Obama and his lack of leadership - which to some extent is true, especially on climate change - but I think we ought to look within our own movements to discover what happened during 2009.
Remember back to those heady days a year ago when Obama was inaugurated? Millions of Americans, despite a failing economy and a decade of do-nothing politics held hope in their hearts, thanks in part to candidate Obama’s inspiring campaign. Right at that moment, as a progressive constituency, we made our first tactical error: we let the Obama administration shape our own narrative.
While there will always be civil society groups who align themselves with the positions of politicians, the progressive wings of our movements drank the kool-aid, and our political power has suffered ever since. How could we expect concerned Americans to swallow emails from top progressive groups calling on them to “Pass a climate bill” with huge giveaways to polluters or “Support health care reform” without a serious public option? It’s about time we stop taking our talking points from White House press releases and start telling our own story.
It turns out that having a progressive President is only part of the equation — In 2010 we need to rethink our strategy, and tell our own progressive story that activates concerned citizens and voters around the country, far away from the transactional politics of Washington. The youth climate movement, more than any other group, has the ability to define what a clean energy future means to us.
Our friends and colleagues working on health reform, immigrant and human rights, GLBTQ issues and finance reform have a responsibility to do the same. A perennial discussion among climate activists is that we need to “reach out” to other progressive constituencies. I hate the word “outreach,” but I do like making friends, so I suggest we all get busy making friends with organizers and campaigners who are ready to shape a new kind of progressive vision, not tied to the White House and Congress as much as Americans’ desire for a better world for themselves and their children.
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