No desperation

Sorry it's taken me so long to post, and sorry this post will be so short, but, hey, who really reads this anyway?! :)

I spent some time yesterday calling senators asking them to support the filibuster against Samuel Alito, which has apparently failed. Since it's almost impossible for the democrats to muster enough votes to actually overturn Alito's nomination, given a minority of members, and some of whom actually support Alito (Ben Nelson from Nebraska and Robert Byrd from West Virginia, to name two) this makes his appointment essentially certain.

I was disappointed that only 25 senators voted against cloture, but as someone recently pointed out, 98 senators voted to confirm Scalia, and that was in a democrat controlled senate. The other thing that gives me heart, or rather, a sense of perspective, is this article by Howard Zinn. The summary of it is basically that, in the long term, its important to remember that our rights are not given to us by the supreme court, but are demanded from it, and from elected officials.

Brown vs. Board of education was the culmination of decades of civil rights work and grassroots organizing. The supreme court dealt the final blow (or lit off the fuse, depending on your point of view) to old-style segregation, but they did so because a whole lot of people got together, organized, and made it happen.

I'm certainly terrified of Samuel Alito, and the power he'll have over my life and the lives of the people I care about. But his confirmation is not the end of the world. It adds an extra step in the path toward true freedom, but no system of power is insurmountably vast, and any time we want, we can dictate the course of our own lives, and take what is ours from those systems..