Yeah, me too
For lack of anything pithier and more timely, I created a sign for yesterday’s rush-hour preach: “REMEMBER DECENCY? | YEAH, ME TOO.” (It was an oblique reference to the fallout from Donald Trump’s post on Rob Reiner’s murder.) “I do!” one woman shouted out her window. My most joyful responses seem to come from women.
Policy advocacy signs are too easily dismissed. “Fund Public Education,” “Defend Social Security,” and such, declare what policies the protester advocates and directs others to support as well. They’re forgotten in seconds. I prefer to ask commuters to think instead. If they have to ask, “What’s that about?’ then mission accomplished. Rather than tell them what I think, messages like “ARE YOUR GROCERIES CHEAPER?” invite them to engage the question. “YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD” asks them to consider why and what might be done.
I’m thinking of this as highway deep canvassing. I don’t knock people’s doors. Their car doors come to me, week after week. We’re building a trust relationship over time in a world where it’s broken down.
Jo Carducci (JoJoFromJerz) ponders the wearing down of the spirit we’ve suffered. Post-Biden, she’s thinking about decency too:
We had a four year decency vacation. A real one. A stretch where the presidency wasn’t a daily exercise in humiliation, where moral rot wasn’t the organizing principle of the news cycle, where the person occupying the most symbolically powerful office in the country didn’t wake up every morning spoiling for a fight. Four years where restraint wasn’t remarkable, where empathy wasn’t radical, where leadership looked like adulthood. And then we were dropped right back into it, like the floor vanished beneath our feet and muscle memory took over before our minds could catch up.
What still stuns me is that even now, after everything, people still find themselves thinking there’s no way he’s that cruel, no way he’s that broken, no way he’d go that far, as if nearly a decade of evidence hasn’t already answered the question, as if we haven’t already learned, over and over, that his capacity for moral depravity has no bottom.
She recounts what a godawful excuse for a human Donald Trump is and how his followers excuse it. Then Jo segues into how Reiner’s work “was never about dominance, or conquest, or spectacle, or the hollow gratification of winning. It was about connection, about finding ourselves not as we wish we were, but as we actually are, messy and contradictory, tender and ridiculous, earnest and unsure, and locating dignity there without apology.”
I felt joyful yesterday asking commuters to remember what decency feels like with a sign that had only the faintest political angle to it. They had to make the connection. The guy who spun his finger at the side of his head in a “You’re a lunatic” sign just made me smile. For 75 minutes I felt like a character in one of Reiner’s movies.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!