The Importance of Being Irritatingly Persistent

Some of you know that this is not my first rodeo. Before I started posting to this blog, I wrote a daily letter to public officials trying to get under the skin of my targets. This was at the beginning of Trump 1.0, when I thought that people were still sensitive to ridicule.

One of my favorite targets was Senator Susan Collins, whose unique combination of performative virtue and prostrate capitulation led me almost to the brink of madness. If she played out one more episode of “extensive review,” I thought that I would need to be institutionalized. I sent copies of those letters to those who asked for them, along with occasional salutes to my personal heroes. There was the letter to Jamie Raskin and another to Brad Raffensperger. One of his deputies actually wrote me back. What I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t only brickbats.

The Biden election brought this all to an end. I had done my stint of service to the nation (?!), and I was ready to go on to other projects. All of us were finally coming out of COVID and I was eager to go to the supermarket without a mask. I didn’t even say goodbye to “my” readers. It was all part of an effort to quietly fade away. I also thought that I might come back to save the nation from its complacent stupor.

The result is that I let everything slide. There was stupor here, but it was entirely mine. I was so grateful that we were done with Trump that I just went back to situation normal. I noticed the sidelining of Kamala Harris and the piss-poor messaging of the administration. Biden arguably did very good things, especially in the area of infrastructure and the environment. Except for the herky-jerky withdrawal from Afghanistan, I don’t remember a significant humiliation. But you wouldn’t necessarily have known it from his team. At the end, Harris was undone by herself and the ridiculous deference paid to the incumbent president. Biden’s decision to run was not “up to Joe and Jill.” It should have been up to American voters.

I do not imagine that I could have done anything to prevent this (?!). That is not the way letter-writing works. You don’t win elections by snarking up Susan Collins. She actually won without my help, while I rooted fruitlessly from the sidelines for her crushing defeat.

But what I regret is that I let my guard down. A blog or a letter campaign is a useful discipline, a way of dropping into the groove of activism. I needed to stick with the program to keep getting stronger. At this point I’m forcing myself to begin again, so that I rebuild the muscles that atrophied during Biden. I’ll get started with campaign calls and postcards much earlier so that I can have some effect—however insignificant—on signature races in the upcoming midterms.

And I hope that all of you will do the same. Most days we will be up against our impotence and paltriness, but we have to keep pounding on the anvil of change. Day after day. Month after month. To quote one of the most famous dicta of Rabbinic Judaism, we are not required to finish the work, but neither are we free to desist from doing it.

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Please note that my next post will appear on Thursday, October 9, after the second day of Sukkot.