By Nara Dahlbacka, Chair Lake County Democrats
Hello again. A year ago when I stood here and spoke to you, we were a humble hundred, then a couple hundred, then more. Today we have four organically organized events around this county. Organized by the indomitable Marie Schrader who then brought in the local Dems and Indivisible. To help us find community. To help us find each other. Remember that.
A year ago, when I stood here and spoke to you, I talked about how the cruelty was the point underlying every action the second Trump regime was taking in its early days. A year later, we have had a chance to see how that cruelty becomes policy. How cruelty becomes HR1, a bill that has just begun its devastating impact on our county. A year later we have seen what happens when you pardon 1600 insurrectionists and make them part of the most funded law-enforcement agency in the country. A year later, we have seen what cruelty looks like when it becomes immigration policy. We are only one year later and this country is already more cruel and more corrupt and more monumentally stupid than my wildest nightmares.
A year ago, when I spoke to you, it was about the doors to our government flung open to Elon and his lost boys of DOGE to chew on the wires running programs that were not perfect, but actually tried to do great things. With so many fresh hells facing us each week, it’s hard to remember that US aid has not been funded for a year. But the mark on our soul of hundreds of thousands of children dying and millions of others around the world who depended on us facing starvation, disease, and death. Do you know what else USAID did for us? It brought us allies. It raised our standing in a world, where many of our actions throughout our short history have been as questionable as some were honorable. The honor is gone. The respect is gone.
What is our standing in the world? A meme I saw during the Olympics asked: Which countries would want to boo the United States? And the image was Yakko from the Animaniacs taking a deep breath to sing his Countries of the world song.
What they did is, what we have allowed, has taken everything that arguably did make this country great and crushed it. Calling it waste fraud and abuse.
Well, the real waste fraud and abuse is happening blatantly in front of our eyes. A gold carpet was rolled out for every psychotic billionaire with a deep moral injury and a checkbook primed for corruption.
Waste is putting somebody like Pete Hegseth in charge of the department of defense. Never mind the $93 billion he spent in September on crab legs and steak and lobster, let’s talk about the $11 billion per day on an illegal war and driving up more prices that he was “elected to bring down. Who knows waste better than the guy who somehow inexplicably bankrupted a casino. But I’m not telling you anything your bank account hasn’t already.
Fraud is $1.4 billion of “wall” money disappearing to somewhere so inappropriate that not even Stephen Miller can find words to justify it. Fraud is self dealing, market manipulation and Qatari jets. Fraud is greatest transfer of wealth in history from 330 million Americans to 300 billionaires.
Abuse? We have an entire cabinet of abusers. Every day is abuse. Every day is a fresh hell of torturing immigrants, pregnant people, and excusing child sexual assault.
And after electing that man and our congress and courts allowing him to do what we have allowed him to do over the last year— I don’t know that we can ever win our allies back. The only way that happens is if we first show them that we can take our country back. That Americans are not complicit. That our revolutionary spark lives on.
Scot Nakagawa wrote this week something that I really love that “We are not trying to restore the democracy we had. We are trying to build the democracy that we were promised but that was never fully delivered.”
What can we hold onto. The idea that a nation doesn’t need a king sparked a revolution and inspired democracy around the world. The concept of freedom of religion being enshrined in a constitution was radical. Medicare and Medicaid. The labor movement. The women’s movement. The voting rights act. These were great things.
The tax rates from the 1950s made it possible that only one parent needed to work. And you could afford a home right out of college. We can hold onto that. We can hold onto that and leave the racism of red lining and sexism of the mad men era behind.
The 60s brought us the war on poverty and the policies that came out of that reversed crime rates. It created programs that acknowledged that poverty is not a personal failing and that every person deserves dignity. Deserves to be able to feed their children. There is an America worth fighting for. And we don’t live in it right now. But we can.
We can overwhelm them in June and November. We have to beat them so badly at the ballot box that it is undeniable. And then we have a lot of work to do. We have to overturn citizens united. We have to prosecute war criminals. We have to grind this machine of cruelty to a stop.
That doesn’t just happen by showing up for two hours on a Saturday. The actual work that changes the world is much harder than this. It is the Montgomery bus boycott. It is the Delano grape strike. It is organizing. It is mutual aid. It is showing up to volunteer on elections from who is running our local schools to who’s sitting in Congress representing us. You have to show up and do that work too. The work is not happening on Facebook or Twitter or Tik Tock. If it were, they would’ve stopped it. They wouldn’t be fixing the algorithm to keep you on there, fighting with bots and your neighborhood crazy guy, instead of making phone calls for a candidate that you believe in.
Let’s go build the democracy that we were promised. Let’s start here in Lake County. Let’s flip Congress and bring back the $3 million in SNAP benefits that they took from us to give to billionaires. Let’s fight for the Home hardening grants we had from FEMA. Let’s stop them from bankrupting our hospitals and our grocery stores and the hard-working people that live here and are just trying to survive.
In the next month, the local Democratic Party will be working for our endorsed candidates. Please sign up. Please rebuild democracy with us.