RE: https://mastodon.social/@indivisibleteam/116304025088851693

A comment for those who are frustrated with #NoKings one-day mass #protests and would like to see Americans seriously shutting things down for weeks or months, as successful protesters have done in other nations: I understand — and sympathize with — your frustration and exasperation, but you are NOT going to get better results by dismissing what IS happening as useless or counterproductive. Work with what you have, and keep encouraging further steps.

Also: I keep seeing comments that state or imply that the root problem with American protesting is lack of courage. Our history does not support that at all. Antislavery activists in 1855 might have been tempted to offer the same explanation for slow progress, but if so, they would have completely misjudged what the country would look like in 1865.

So if not cowardice, what IS the issue? I believe that just as for so many other problems with the #USA, the issue is American #exceptionalism, and in particular, acceptance of an elaborately fraudulent pseudo-democracy as the real thing. Americans are slowly shaking off a quarter of a millennium of faith in a traditional framework of laws and conventions. It's hard to see that this framework impedes, rather than aids, progress toward genuine reform — but we ARE starting to see it, and our enemies dread what might happen thereafter. They fear that 2036 might be as different from 2026 as 1865 was from 1855 — or even more so.