Every Wednesday Simon Rosenberg holds a Zoom get-together for paid subscribers of the Hopium community. I always find something inspiring.

Last night he told the community that this election cycle, unlike the last election cycle, republicans will be spending way more money than us. He advised that we need to be prepared for endless AI crap all over the internet and right wing media, that they will daily dump garbage on our candidates. That they will do anything to win, that Trump knows he is losing and is desperate. These things we need to brace ourselves for, he said, so that we don’t lose heart when they happen. He encouraged the community to resist getting caught up in the things that will not help our candidates and to remain focused on doing the work of winning the mid-terms.

And then he closed the conversation by reading aloud the Gettysburg address.

Some things we also need to be reminded of. Especially in these times.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate ~ we can not consecrate ~ we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ~ that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion ~ that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ~ that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom ~ and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

Simon pointed out that it was only 81 years between Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and D-Day.  And only 82 years between D-Day and now. Eighty years from now, what will America be like? What will be the legacy of the Trump era?

Will this be the end of democracy as we know it or will we have a new birth of freedom?