Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer-10-2-10 Rally Gives Progressives a Chance to Stand Up
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:52:05 -0400 (EDT)
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

10-2-10 Rally Gives Progressives a Chance to Stand Up  Straight 

This Saturday, a broad coalition of progressive organizations will hold a  
massive One Nation Working Together rally –  actually kind of a revival – 
aimed at allowing Progressives to emerge from a  defensive crouch, stand up 
straight and mobilize our forces to do battle in the  decisive mid-term 
elections. 
Due to a navigational error, the U.S. 4th Infantry Division landed on  the 
wrong inlet on Utah Beach in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. For hours they were  
disoriented and pinned down by German defenders.  Then the only general to 
accompany the  amphibious assault, General Ted Roosevelt (son of President 
Teddy Roosevelt),  personally rallied his troops from the beach, over the 
seawall and established a  beachhead that was critical to the successful 
invasion of France that  ultimately ended World War II.  
Saturday’s rally is aimed at energizing thousands of latter-day General  
Ted Roosevelt’s who can fan out across America and do the same for the  
progressive forces that can be successful on November 2nd if – together – we  
stand up straight, take the offensive  and refuse to be pinned down by constant 
attacks from the  right. 
The President’s speech to 27,000 in Madison, WI  last Monday night fired up 
all present.  It was a great start.  But  this weekend’s rally-organizers 
plan to communicate one central message to the  thousands of activists that 
will gather in Washington Saturday: the President and other  Democratic 
political leaders are not the only ones responsible for rallying our  forces. We 
are all the Generals who will rally our  troops off this beach.  It’s up  to 
us to take the leadership to prevent the Big Business, Wall 
Street-dominated,  Tea-Party-Republicans from reclaiming right wing domination of American  
politics.  
For forty years the right was on the offensive in America.  At least when 
Bill Clinton was  President, Democrats had a team on the field, but in so 
many respects the right  wing offensive continued until their crushing defeat 
in November 2008.   
For the last 18 months, the progressive forces have once again been on  the 
offense.  But the entrenched  corporate interests didn’t roll over and play 
dead.  They fought tooth and nail – they lied,  they bit, they poked eyes –
 they did everything in their power to stop  change. 
Progressives won a lot in the last 18 months.  We stopped the Great 
Recession caused by  the Republican’s policies from turning into the Great 
Depression.  Over the intense opposition of the  insurance companies, after 60 years 
of trying, we passed health care reform that  will finally make health care 
a right in America – and  begins to hold those big private insurance 
companies accountable.  We passed landmark legislation to rein  in the 
recklessness of the big Wall Street banks that collapsed the economy and  cost eight 
million Americans their jobs.  We created a consumer agency headed by 
Elizabeth Warren – a true  progressive champion for the middle class. 
Along the way Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Act to ensure women get  
equal pay for equal work.  It  expanded the State Children’s Health 
Insurance Program.  It completely reorganized the Student  Loan Program to end 
wasteful bank subsidies and guarantee that every kid can get  financing for his 
or her higher education.  It passed a budget that massively changed the 
spending priorities of the  Federal government. 
We did all of this in the face of constant, unrelenting fire from  
corporate interests. 
But as any  Progressive can tell you, there is so much left to do.  We can’
t stop now.  We can’t let the furious, intense  opposition from Wall Street, 
the insurance companies, big oil and the far right  fringe discourage or 
dispirit us.  We can’t allow them to successfully take over one or both Houses 
of  Congress.  That would bring any  opportunity for serious progressive 
change to a screeching halt.  
We have to get off the beach and get back on the  offense. 
Sometimes the day to day back and forth of politics can cause us to  forget 
what’s really at stake – and the massive gulf between Progressive and  
Right Wing values – the difference between our vision of society and the vision 
 of the other side. 
We have to remember the fundamental difference between the right’s belief  
in unbridled pursuit of individual interest and our commitment to the common 
 good; selfishness versus commitment to others; division versus unity; fear 
 versus hope; that we’re all in this together, not “all in this  alone.” 
For the first few  years after my wife, Jan, and I were married in 1980, 
her Great Aunt lived with  us during the week.  Jan and I both  worked, so 
Aunt Sylv looked after the house and was very involved in raising  Jan’s two 
kids and my daughter. 
Sylvia Lazar was a  warm, wonderful woman who by that time was in her 70s.  
She’d come to the United States as a teenager from the  Ukraine, and still 
spoke with a thick  accent. 
Silvia had grown up in a Ukrainian schtetle ––  a small peasant town where 
the family purchased water each day from a salesman  who carried two 
buckets from the river on a yoke over his neck.  Oxen and horses were the 
principal means  used to transport goods and people.  Life in her schtetle was very 
much as it had been for hundreds of  years. 
Her family moved to the United  States by way of Canada in the early part 
of the last  century to escape anti-Semitism and find a better life. 
By the time she died  in the mid-1980s, the world around her had been 
completely transformed.  In the place of oxen, she had flown on  jet planes, 
lived in air-conditioned homes with running water and indoor  plumbing.  She 
lived to see the  development of antibiotics that changed forever the treatment 
of infectious  disease.  She watched a television  as men landed on the 
moon. 
Worldwide, life expectancy had skyrocketed.  The standard of living in the 
developed  world had exploded. 
But Sylv had also lived through two great world wars that had killed tens  
of millions.  She had seen six  million of her fellow European Jews 
systematically slaughtered in the  Holocaust.  She’d seen pictures of  the explosion 
of the atomic bomb and lived through an accelerating arms race and  cold 
war between America and  the USSR that included her old  homeland. 
She watched with all Americans as the world approached the edge of the  
nuclear precipice during the Cuban missile crisis.  And she had cheered on her 
niece Jan,  who become active in fighting the growing environmental crisis 
brought on by  exploding human economic activity. 
Over the tiny span of one lifetime, Sylvia Lazar had been witness to the  
qualitative transformation of society its culture and technology.  She had 
seen both the breathtaking  possibilities and the horrific dangers unleashed 
by the accelerating march of  technology and human history. 
Whenever I think how hard it is to make social change, I think about Aunt  
Sylv.  
In the thick of political battle, it’s often difficult to see the  
qualitative change.  But all you  need to do is back up a little distance from the 
everyday struggle to see how  quickly our world has been, and is being, 
transformed before our  eyes. 
Only 155 years ago, America was ending its great Civil  War.  Human slavery 
was abolished in  America a mere eight generations  ago. 
That century-and-a-half represents .002% of the seven million years of  
human evolutionary development.  It  represents only 1% of the 13,000 years 
since humans made the critical  evolutionary advance –– agriculture. 
Politics is fundamentally the means through which human societies make  
choices about their futures.   
Radical conservatives like to argue that the world is a dangerous place –  
that the tough, hard-nosed, survival-of-the-fittest, individualist values 
are  necessary to protect our survival.  They claim that only by standing up 
fiercely for our own individual  self-interests will we be successful at 
defending America and the  values of “Western civilization.”  They claim that 
radical conservative values are tough, and that  progressive values are soft. 

But progressive values are the farthest thing from “pie-in-the-sky,”  “
soft,” “unrealistic,” “head-in-the-clouds” precepts for action.  In fact, 
right wing values are mainly  rationales for allowing the rich to become richer 
and the powerful more  powerful. In fact, progressive values allow us the 
best opportunity to survive  and succeed in the future world that is 
simultaneously bristling with  unprecedented danger, and beckoning with undreamt-of 
opportunity for our  children and future generations – if we go there 
together. 
Time for us all to remember that there is a lot more at stake this fall  
than who gets to wield the big gavel in the House of Representatives.  
For everyone who was inspired and energized by the 2008 campaign, who  
believed that they were making history: you were right. We took a lot of ground, 
 but the war is far from over. Now it is time to saddle up and report for 
duty  once again.  
Robert Creamer is a  long-time political organizer and strategist, and 
author of the recent book:  Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, 
available on _Amazon.com._ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Your-Mother-Straight-Progressives/dp/0979585295/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213241439&sr=8-1)

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "big campaign" group.

To post to this group, send to [email-masked]

To unsubscribe, send email to [email-masked]

E-mail [email-masked] with questions or concerns
 
This is a list of individuals. It is not affiliated with any group or organization.