hey that was the cuyahoga river, lake erie is clean besides the algae blooms and the farm runoff and after a storm when it turns brown :(

however, the river fire led to the founding of the epa and the fish have been safe to eat for like five years now

Dawg you seriously need to chill out. Why are you being all “gotcha, there’s that blind hope you stupid idiot.” I don’t think hope = faith. Hope can physically manifest, hope is a force. I am placing hope in the party that half of voters vote for because it is a popular party. Political parties have the capacity to change, they aren’t stagnant. A couple hundred years ago democrats were fighting for chattel slavery and republicans were seen as liberal comparatively.

I don’t like the Democratic Party, I don’t like most of its elected officials, most of its policy, but I refuse to give it up and let it become completely fascist. Because if that happens, then almost every single voter is supporting fascism.

I wish it was different (and I think it can change further down the line) but third parties don’t work in America. We need to be working to fix what we currently have.

Yeah I get what you’re saying. I think that on the one hand the Democratic Party is awful. On the other hand, the democrats are by far the largest political party that has the capacity to fight the current administration. Zohran is running as a democrat, but he is starkly different than status quo democrats. I think a democratic party filled with socialist thinkers is going to be more successful (and palatable to the average citizen) than a relatively obscure socialist 3rd party. I also think that a socialist 3rd party would be ideal, but given the current timeframe it’s not going to work until it’s a critical mass w/in democrats.

I don’t think you understand what hope is. The Hedges quote reads like an oxymoron “there is no such thing as hope and determination / here are a bunch of solutions that rely on hope and determination.”

Like you obviously want things to change, and you just listed how to change things, yet you aren’t hopeful in them? Like do you think all the solutions you’re talking about will never work? Hope isn’t an abstract concept. To hope doesn’t mean you think “man I wish things were better, but I guess they’ll never change.” Hope is the driving force behind change. If you weren’t hopeful, you wouldn’t be calling for arms against fascism.

Cmon bro don’t start with some “it’s too late” doomer bs. We should’ve been preparing in 2016, we should’ve prepared when Bush got elected, we should’ve prepared when prisons began to expand, when they passed the Civil Rights Act and it wasn’t nearly enough, when women couldn’t vote, etc, etc.

Obviously we can’t go back and change that, but we can take back what was stolen. We have the power now to affect the present as a reflection of the future. Like god damn the thing you should never let them take away is hope.