I’m taking an organizing course remotely through DSA. It’s about labor organizing and includes a new book about organizing efforts at Starbucks and Amazon. I bought the book and read some – the first class is coming up. I got to DSA through Reddit, where there was a post.

I was watching US institutions collapse one after the other – something I have been watching since January 6^th, 2021 with an increasing sense of foreboding - and was looking for some activity, some action that a person who lives in rural Ohio and has a job could manage. I saw Indivisible and MoveOn online and could have gone to them, but the idea of once again joining a group of volunteers who mostly exist to elect Democrats when elected Democrats have shown no interest in joining or supporting the volunteer opposition exhausted me. I did it in ’16 I did it in ’20 and I did it in ’24 and here we are.

I’m not a socialist or a Socialist but here I am studying with the comrades (gratefully!) because I need to be with people who see that the system is fundamentally failing, has failed, and we need to organize against fascism. Funny old world, right? I’ll return to this with more as I take the course – I think all of these labor organizing ideas are applicable and workable to an anti fascist movement (that we probably need to get ready for) but I wanted to mention one thing that struck me immediately:

Nice, right? Respectful, calm, like I’m actually part of this thing instead of just unpaid labor. Maybe Democrats could do educational events like this - they could explain Medicaid or Social Security or the Civil Rights Act- how those things came about, how they’re funded, how Republicans oppose all of them. Maybe then everyone I talk to here in rural Ohio wouldn’t say they’re not worried about Republicans gutting Medicaid because they’re not on Medicaid, they’re on “the Buckeye” which is the name of Ohio’s Medicaid program.