To anyone on the fence,

We know what it costs to refuse complicity.

It costs the comfort of going along to get along.

It costs the approval of people we respect who will tell us we're being naive, that we're helping the other side, that this is not the moment for a principled stance.

It is always not the moment for principles. That is how we got here.

The courage to hold a position when everyone around you is negotiating themselves down requires a special kind of courage.

When the pressure to be pragmatic is dressed up as wisdom, when we are told that our moral backbone is a liability the moment cannot afford.

But we do not accept that framing.

When the demand is that we stop fighting for babies blown to bits, for families torn apart by deportation, for a planet being destroyed by the military machine our tax dollars fund — that is not pragmatism. That is capitulation.

And we have capitulated enough.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” - Angela Y. Davis

Not sometimes. Not when it's comfortable. All the time. Even in a swing district. Especially in a swing district, because that is precisely where our leverage is real and because it is where the establishment is counting on our silence the most.

You are not being asked to throw your vote away. You are being encouraged to make your vote mean something before you give it away.

You are being encouraged to stand with a few thousand progressive voters moving as one body—publicly, visibly, in coordination—as a negotiating force that cannot be dismissed or taken for granted.

That is not idealism. That is power. And it is available to us right now if we choose to use it.

#BabiesNotBombsNY17