Redstate

By Erick Posted in Endorsements — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Samsphere Chicago where I gave a speech about political activism. Below the fold, you can find my remarks (slightly edited to more match what I said than what I had written ahead of time).

Samsphere, put on by the Sam Adams Alliance, is a really brilliant way to network between state and local bloggers around the country, share resources, pick each other's brains, and learn how to build your blog into a tool for education and activism in your area.

I highly recommend going to a Samsphere conference. As luck would have it, there is going to be one in Denver in a few weeks. You should go if you can.

Let me say personally that I have been to two or three conferences a month since December. Samsphere is one of two or three that I sat there the whole time enjoying it, not wasting my time. The return on investment in your time and cost of getting there is well worth it.

And now, my remarks:

Now, I had prepared a great speech only to find out I had an assigned topic: “The State of the Internet.” So, here’s my thinking on the State of the Internet: It sucks. The internet is filled with spam, porn, pedophiles, and well organized, well funded leftists -- not to mention a bunch of conservatives with better things to do who bitch and moan about not being competitive, arguing with each other on how to get stuff done, and otherwise being pessimistic. Ladies and Gentlemen, the state of the internet is that it sucks.

Without further ado, I’m now going to transition into my original speech, which presupposes the internet sucks and seeks to offer some helpful solutions on what to do about it.

For those of you who may have gotten confused and shown up here with a Bible, you can turn it to the Book of Matthew. In Matthew 6, Christ preaches about worrying. He says, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

In James, the Apostle writes “you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”

I want us to focus on is the concept of today.

C. S. Lewis captured this idea of today so well in Letter 15 of the Screwtape Letters. If you’ll remember, Screwtape is a demon tutoring Wormwood on how to corrupt the soul of men to eternal damnation. In Letter 15, Screwtape writes this advice:

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. … It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities.

To be sure, the Enemy [that is, GOD] wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts …. We do.… We want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

I can’t say it any better than that. We plan today, we prepare today, and we collaborate today to prepare for tomorrow. We should not dwell on tomorrow because, as Christ himself says, tomorrow will take care of itself.

Too many of us are frozen by inaction today because of our visions of tomorrow. I can’t tell you how many friends I see sitting around, plotting web strategy and how to crush the left online only to sit on their hands or twiddle their thumbs and give up hope because they don’t have the funding or the knowledge or the connections or the skill set or the message hammered out — great ideas on the ash heap of history because they spent so much time taking stock of tomorrow that they never took stock of today.

Even here this weekend, several people have mentioned the money advantage on the left. We have become fixated on the money advantage. I’ve got to point out that 200 plus years ago a rag tag group of Americans using their own rifles and bullets beat the best organized, best funded army the world had ever seen to gain freedom. Online, it’s time for us to do it again. The money, like the French and Spanish did 200 years ago, will come. But first we need to show what we are capable of with our present tools.

Most of the people fretting about the money we don’t have, have something in common with another set of people we know — the ones who are in the conservative movement and think their project is the cause instead of the cause being their project.

These two groups perfectly encapsulates where the right is online right now. We are, as Screwtape wanted, hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth. We are perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, ignoring every real gift which is offered us in the Present.

You know, RedState may go away or I may go away from RedState. But the cause remains. The cause is and must be our project. RedState is just the means by which I fight for the cause.

It does not matter if we know nobody or can pick up the phone and get Rush Limbaugh on it. It does not matter if we have 100 readers a day, 50 readers a day, or 50,000 readers a day. It does not matter if we can’t find funding sources -- blogspot is free. We are in it, or at least we should all be in it, for the same thing. That thing is not to be the best, though that is admirable. It is not to be the biggest, though surely that is a worthy goal.

We are in this because we believe our ideas are the best way forward, our cause is just, and our cause is a cause worth fighting for. In five years, our project might not be so great. But our cause will be. Our cause is our project, not the other way around.

Back to the Bible now for you pagans who want to tune out, in Hebrews Chapter 2 verse 1, the writer says that knowing what we know about Christ, we should embrace him lest we drift away. The importance of that verse for our purposes is the word choice. Two Greek words were used of particularly common knowledge in the day Hebrews was written. The first word, representing “embrace based on what we know” had a specific meaning of sailing into a harbor and anchoring down with other ships. The second word, representing “lest we drift away” also had a very specific and more important meaning. It meant to those Greek speaking Jewish Christians who were about to face the full might of the Roman Army that they could have all knowledge of where the harbor was, how to get into it, and how to tie up with other ships for strength and security and, solely because of their own carelessness, drift away and out to sea.

There are some, hopefully not in this room, who would be happy to drift away and fend for themselves. There are some, we all encounter on a daily basis, who would rather pontificate from on high than get their hands dirty through activism. There are some who would cast aspersions on the motives of those of us who seek to engage in online political activism as being a mob of retarded poseurs who must be led by Rush Limbaugh.

More troubling, in each of those groups of people there are some, in fact I’d venture to say most of them, who know that it is better for us to unite, to organize, and to collaborate -- to tie our ships up together in the harbor and sail out together. They drift off alone expecting us to show up at any moment behind them, when they don’t realize they’ve drifted off.

It should be encouraged that we should have independent thoughts and independent actions. We are not all headed to the same destination. Our principles may be in common, but not necessarily our daily issues. But we owe it to ourselves to help each other out.

If I’ve moved you to the Lord, please go find a preacher. That wasn’t my intention. My intention was, in case you missed it through in-artful wording or thick accent, very simply this:

Do not dwell on what we might be able to accomplish tomorrow or you will be sorely disappointed. Tomorrow never works out the way we dream it and we are left resenting it.

Focus on today. Focus on the tools we have, the connections we have, the resources we have, the technology we have, and what we don’t have that we need to compensate for based on our present inventory. Then work together remembering that our cause is more important that our blogs or ourselves. We already have powerful tools and we have common sense and the heart of the American people in this center-right nation. What we don’t have is, to be sure, equivalent funding. But more importantly, we lack a spirit of cooperation and we lack a willingness to do regular systematic mechanical things on our blogs like focusing on candidates, sharing links, and putting up PayPal buttons. Fix those two areas and we will have gone along way toward solving the problems we face online.

After all, our goal is not to reach parity with the left, but to beat them. So let’s stop worrying about what we need to match them. Let’s think about what we need to beat them. A mind toward servant leadership and cooperation from each of us will be one of several trump cards. The left, after all, does not believe in servant leadership, just servants and leaders.

Let’s not sit around dreaming of what we need. Let’s use what we have and, in the course of this fight, set aside some time to build those things that are most useful. Above all else, let’s not fail to act because we think we need money or a tool that does not exist.

The state of the internet today is that it sucks for us. But if we play our cards right today, tomorrow we will win. Thank you.