‘No’ is a complete sentence.
| Anne Lamott, Plan B - Further Thoughts on Faith
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This week's mid-term elections can be interpreted in hundreds, maybe thousands, of ways. I know, because I have heard or read dozens in the past few days: some overlapping, some contradictory, some about demographic shifts, some about international economic markets, some about election trickery backfiring, some about hard-core grassroots organizing paying off.
But Anne Lamott — writing on a completely different topic — states a principle that shines through the fog of explanations, recapitulations, and analysis. The people have spoken, and simply said… ‘No’.
‘No’ to the illegal tariffs, which are a tax on Americans.
‘No’ to the unnecessary war half a world away.
‘No’ to selling the government to billionaires.
‘No’ to ethnic cleansing under the guise of immigration policy.
‘No’ to data centers and unbridled AI.
‘No’ to the tax cuts for the wealthy, paid for by healthcare losses for the most hard-pressed of us.
‘No’ to the hare-brained, clown-car politics of MAGA.
‘No’ to the efforts to sway the elections through gerrymandering, Supreme Court backsliding on civil rights, voter intimidation, and legal claims of voter fraud.
Just, ‘no’.
And now we can start to talk about what we say ‘yes’ to. A much longer conversation, I expect.
Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired.
The senate race in Mississippi is still unfolding, and at the time of this writing, Scott Colom, the Democrat, is ahead by 2000ish votes, leading the incumbent Republican, Cindy Hynes-Smith. If he wins, Colom will be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Hiram Rhodes Revels in the 1870s. Wikipedia:
Elected by the Mississippi legislature to the United States Senate as a Republican to represent Mississippi in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era, he was the first African American to serve in either house of the U.S. Congress.
During Jim Crow, Black Mississippians couldn’t serve in elected office, or even vote. Which led me to track down the story of Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black woman who attempted to run for Congress in the 1960s, almost a hundred years after Revels was elected:
From the house on the dirt road there now comes a person to challenge Jamie Whitten: Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. Mrs. Hamer is a Negro and only 6,616 Negroes (or 4.14 percent of voting-age Negroes) were registered to vote in the Second Congressional District in 1960. But in 1962, when Whitten was elected for the twelfth time, only 31,345 persons cast votes, although in 1960 there were more than 300,000 persons of voting age in the district, 59 percent of them Negro. Mrs. Hamer’s bid is sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations, a Mississippi coalition of local and national civil rights organizations.
Hamer worked with others to form an alternative party, the Freedom Democratic Party, creating a parallel organization and voting arrangement, with the intent to challenge the legitimacy of the official vote at the US House.
Until Mississippi stops its discriminatory voting practices, Mrs. Hamer’s chance of election is slight, but she is waking up the citizens of her district. “I’m showing people that a Negro can run for office,” she explains. Her deep, powerful voice shakes the air as she sits on the porch or inside, talking to friends, relatives and neighbors who drop by on the one day each week when she is not out campaigning. Whatever she is talking about soon becomes an impassioned plea for a change in the system that exploits the Delta Negroes. “All my life I’ve been sick and tired,” she shakes her head. “Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Years later, Hamer’s efforts were rewarded:
Although the MFDP did not gain the recognition it sought at the 1964 convention, it continued to pressure the Democratic Party to create a policy that would prevent the seating of a segregationist delegation and later campaigned for Johnson, recognizing that a Goldwater victory would have devastating implications for the civil rights movement.
For the next three years, MFDP continued to agitate on behalf of disenfranchised black Mississippians. In 1965, the MFDP led a challenge to unseat Mississippi’s congressmen on the grounds that they had been elected unconstitutionally. In remarks that were later read in the House, [Rev. Dr. Martin Luther] King declared, “I, therefore, again pledge myself and the SCLC to the fullest support of the Challenges of the MFDP and call upon all Americans to join with me in this commitment” (King, 17 May 1965).
In 1968, a group of former MFDP delegates, calling themselves the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, succeeded in being seated as the sole Mississippi delegation to the DNC.
Now, sixty years later, we may see a Black senator elected in Mississippi, again. But the struggle began in the 1870s, and returned in the 1960s, with Hamer and her colleagues.
I think we are all ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’.
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