“Flooding the zone” is a strategy used to overwhelm opponents in politics or media. You throw so much information into the mix that it is nearly impossible for your critics to respond to everything, and eventually people stop responding to anything - they give up, they turn away, they can’t take it anymore. That’s the strategy being used, openly, by the administration in power in the United States right now. Something dreadful happens, and if you do speak up, you’re told the thing you’re upset about is fine, nothing to see here, just democracy on fire.
If you play the game this way, you’re in a constant state of responding to all the horrific things that are happening - and some of them do require your response and your passionate resistance. It can’t be all about resistance and trying to survive, though, because then they are controlling the narrative and deciding what the game is - and this is a terrible game with no winners. They want to plunder the earth, colonize Mars and let AI take over the world. Also, this is not a game, it’s our lives, the lives of our friends, our children, our communities, and our planet.
We need to be in a conversation about how we got here, what we want, and how we go about making it happen - and we need to bring as many people into the conversation as we can. We need our own 900-page document, or maybe ours doesn’t need to be that long. I think the things we want are simple, but it’s time to re-think our approach, get clear about our vision, and get to work. Yes, we’re late, but it’s not the first time in history a country was taken over by authoritarian forces before it decided to fight back and remake itself. We say “it” when we refer to a country because it’s a noun, it’s a thing…but it’s made up of people…meaning us.
If you start asking yourself, who are we to be having this conversation? we are the we in: “We the people…”
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