All the money in the world...

...is no match for what we're building

My wife and I voted yesterday morning. By that point, a Senator had been already been talking all night long. I recognize all the critiques, about performative versus substantive politics and all that. And sure, I suppose we could all be a little braver, a little more reckless, a little more principled. But I’ve never stood that long for anything in my life, and I had recently begged elected Democrats to create more spectacles, so I was delighted. Like all things, it’s only a waste of time if it’s the last step rather than the first.

Compared to speaking for an entire day, voting is easy. Kjersti and I have lived in the same house for almost fifteen years, a true fact that I still don’t quite believe. The proof is in the muscle memory. Fifteen years in one house means fifteen years of walking to the same polling place every Election Day, dodging potholes in our alley, saying hi to the front yard chickens along the way, and opening the heavy front doors of our neighborhood elementary school. In those early election days, we still weren’t sure if we’d have kids. A couple years later, we hauled infants in front packs, lovingly placing “I voted” stickers on chubby baby bellies. These days, that school means far more to us than just a place where we vote every few months. That’s the thing about community. You can’t just buy your way in. It takes time.

Yesterday, we walked in those heavy front doors alongside our second-grader. We gave her a hug, dapped up the beloved gym teacher, and dropped off zucchini bread for the PTA bake sale. We cast our vote, knowing that far-flung eyes would be paying attention to the results. It’s an odd quirk of Wisconsin electoral life. I suppose it beats a life of political irrelevance, but it does get tiring being the nation’s bellwether. We try to do our best, both for our neighbors and for the rest of you all. Sometimes we come through, sometimes we don’t. We know the limits of these electoral games. We know that even when we win, there’s a lifetime’s worth of work still ahead of us, but that the work is so much harder after a loss.

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Two nights earlier, I watched a video feed of the richest man in the world giving out million dollar bribes in Green Bay. A million dollars! Can you even imagine? He even brought out a pair of silly oversized checks, the kind they give out on game shows. The whole thing was clearly rigged, the two winners closely connected to the local Republican Party apparatus. I don’t blame anybody who believed that the whole affair might be real, though. Times are tough, and most of us aren’t billionaires. Remember those contests where people try to win a car by keeping their hands on it for as long as possible? We’re willing to tolerate all sorts of indignities for the chance to hit a jackpot. Would I pretend to like Elon Musk for a few hours if it meant that I’d win a million dollars? Ask me after a particularly heinous medical bill shows up in the mail.

What was surprising about the event in Green Bay was how tiny and depressing it was. Sure, a couple thousand people showed up, but the crowd inside wasn’t much bigger than the protests outside in the rain. And remember, this is in a city where thousands of people show up to watch Green Bay Packers practices. Do you know who throws a party for themselves, advertises it on a social media platform that they personally own, promises attendees a million dollar prize and only gets a couple thousand folks to show? Not somebody who is winning.

Maybe my judgment is off here. I’m obviously a biased observer, and I wasn’t in the room. Maybe the livestream didn’t capture the electricity in the building. Maybe the crowd was fired up by Elon’s complaints about how unfairly he’s been treated. Maybe they reacted to the various spurious Powerpoints about Social Security fraud like they were seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium. But jeez the whole affair just felt phenomenally flat. The applause was muted. The program veered from one anti-climax to another. Nobody had much to say about Brad Schimel, the judicial candidate for whom the event was supposedly dedicated.

Last week was heinous, packed to the brim with photo ops from Salvadoran mega-prisons and college students being kidnapped on the street. It was a week where, thanks to a group text blunder, we saw how amped the fellas were to drop some bombs (👊🇺🇸🔥). It was a week, like so many before it, where our country’s authoritarians tried to make us love them through brute force. It’s all extremely horrific, but that doesn’t mean it’s working. Because here they were at the end of the week, these men who have cleaved everything from their life except for rage, ego and money. And what did they have to show for it?

The richest man in the world stood on stage with his cheesehead hat and his giant checks and the crowd applauded dispassionately and I thought to myself “Oh my God, they’ve got nothing.”

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After voting, I went to work at a coffee shop in my neighborhood, a place that offers free Narcan and meetings for community groups. I tuned into the Senator’s speech while addressing envelopes. I sent off stickers. Lately, it’s one of the first things I do every morning. I love imagining the US Postal Service as a web that we weave together. Each envelope of stickers was another strand. Milwaukee to Mississippi. Milwaukee to Manhattan. Milwaukee to Montana. A larger than usual number of strangers wanted to talk to me as I stuck on stamps and scrawled addresses. About the Brewers season (not good, no Uecker). About the election (we tried to play it cool). About what I was doing (making a mess). A younger guy eyed my unruly pile, hundreds of little rectangles that said “Musk and Trump don’t care about you.” He asked if I was selling them. I replied that they were free, as long as recipients promised to put them up somewhere where people didn’t already agree with them.

“Something’s shifting,” he replied. “My conservative relatives are starting to regret their votes.”

“Oh yeah, why’s that?” I asked. I assumed that Trump’s policies were hitting them personally.

“It’s the deportations, honestly. It’s breaking their heart. It’s clear that they’re picking up folks without any reason.”

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A few hours later, I went home. The Senator was still speaking. The Black Senator, it’s worth pointing out. People started talking about the filibuster record, how it was long held by one of American history’s most infamous racists, a man whose heart was hardened by hate and fear. I thought again about how all politics is performance, but also how performance shapes reality.

I took a couple calls from people I met in Barnraisers trainings— they wanted advice on community groups they’re starting. I took stock of the upcoming calendar. It’s getting fuller and fuller. There will be massive protests this weekend. Everybody, it seems, is offering organizing trainings. There are so many events, I can’t make them all. I’ve been busy during all the Saturday Tesla protests here in Milwaukee, but every week I get an update from a member of our Quaker Meeting. A few weeks ago, three people showed up. Last week it was nearly a hundred.

If I wanted to be cynical, I could say that if the billionaire was able to entice a couple thousand people to his rally, that by this point all our protests should be in the tens of thousands. But, Soros rumors aside, nobody has promised the Tesla protestors a million dollars. They’ve been promised dreary early spring weather and strip mall ambience. And yet they’ve walked away every week full of even more energy than when they began.

Again, some things can’t be bought. They have to be built. And I knew that, here in Wisconsin, thousands of my neighbors had been building for this election. Volunteers and organized groups alike have been knocking doors for months. A friend of ours, my daughter’s soccer coach, runs the local Working Families Party. She barely took any time off after November.

It was getting late. I went grocery shopping. I biked past the elementary school again, just to see what the lines looked like. A steady stream of neighbors kept showing up. Outside, a DJ played “Billie Jean.” I checked my phone. The Senator was still speaking. I remembered what I told myself earlier in the day, about how it’s only a waste if it’s the end of something rather than the start of it. I thought about all the organizers I was lucky to know across the state. Here in Milwaukee. In the Driftless. In the Fox Valley. Up on the rez. Moms, disproportionally. Taking the lead, as always, after the billionaires and the blowhards make a mess of things.

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Kjersti and I prepped ourselves for a long night of refreshing results. The kids, heavily invested, asked if they’d know by morning. As it turns out, they knew before they fell asleep. That’s how you know it’s a blow-out. We hooted and hollered so loudly. The texts streamed in. I gloated, because my heart may be full of love and empathy, but there’s a time and season for all things and holy cow did the world’s richest man really just light twenty million dollars on fire, in my state of all places?

We still don’t have their money. We still don’t have their power. We still don’t have their ability to disappear human beings and threaten violence and shower all of us with lies.

I am not pretending that we have seen the worst of what they have in store for us, but it’s just so crystal clear that they have peaked. They can’t make us love them. Not with their millions. Not with their threats. Not even with their guns.

Their power and influence is already waning, but we are just getting started. They are desperate, but we are still building. They want us to give up, to turn on one another, but we have our arms wide open.

Photo by Tork Mason, Green Bay Press Gazette

End notes:

1. It’s official! Thanks to high demand (and a lot of folks who couldn’t make the sessions in February and March), I’ll be offering two more sessions of the Barnraisers Project “How To Actually Build Community” class. Thursday, April 24th at 9:30 AM CT and Sunday, April 27th at 3:00 PM CT. Both classes will be free, virtual and two hours long. Registration opens soon, but you can sign up for the interest list now.

2. This week’s “Musk and Trump don’t care about you” sticker in the wild comes to us from outside a Florence, South Carolina Walgreens. Florence was once the home of Henry Timrod, the “Poet Laureate of the Confederacy,” an important reminder that not all poets are to be trusted, but all guerilla stickerers should.

   

   And yes, I am still sending out stickers. Just be patient if there’s a bit of a wait (so many of you want them!).

3. I can do all of this (the stickers and the trainings) for free thanks to folks like you chipping in for a paid subscription. Thanks, as always, for considering.

4. Pretty easy choice for song of the week this go around (quite frankly, I’m surprised I’ve never used this one). Elon, are you listening?

The full song of the week playlist is on Apple Music and Spotify.