Came Up Swinging

A few years ago I was hit by a snowboarder on the first day of the season. I was standing in the lift line when a snowboarder, going too fast, caught an edge and fell. He came screaming toward me, caught me in the legs, and I caught my cheekbone on the edge of his snowboard as I fell. And the guy cursed me out. He wasn’t apologetic or anything. I came up bleeding like one can only bleed from a face wound and swinging. I was furious. I grew up fighting my brother and my seven boy cousins and that smug little asshole calling me a bitch after he took me out was more than I could bear. I came up cursing like a sailor and I went for the guy.

That’s how I felt this morning. I came up swinging. It’s time to get focused. Time to get over thinking these are decent people who can be reasoned with. These are bullies. They showed their true face this time around — there was no pretense about “compassionate conservatisim” — these people voted for bigotry, for an expansionist foreign policy, for the deliberate dismantling of our civil rights.

It’s time to come up swinging. It’s time to get them thrown off the mountain, just the way I had that punk kid’s pass pulled all those years ago. No more conciliation. No more attempting to deal in good faith. No more mollification. It’s time to get down and dirty. Time to organize. Time to frame in clear and simple terms what our civil rights are, why they are important, and to go out and fight like hell against the evangelical religious right.

We can do this. We must do this. We cannot let these people roll back the rights for which the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evars sacrificed their lives. We cannot let these people roll back the life’s work of the thousands and thousands of people who fought for the rights of women and minorities and the poor. We must stop pissing and moaning and whining and making dire predictions for the future and we must focus, get to work, and take back our country.