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A tweet from the George Takei Twitter account which states:
"A Democrat was in the White House when my family was sent to the internment camps in 1941. It was an egregious violation of our human and civil rights.
It would have been understandable if people like me said they’d never vote for a Democrat again, given what had been done to us.
But being a liberal, being a progressive, means being able to look past my own grievances and concerns and think of the greater good. It means working from within the Democratic party to make it better, even when it has betrayed its values.
I went on to campaign for Adlai Stevenson when I became an adult. I marched for civil rights and had the honor of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King. I fought for redress for my community and have spent my life ensuring that America understood that we could not betray our Constitution in such a way ever again.
Bill Clinton broke my heart when he signed DOMA into law. It was a slap in the face to the LGBTQ community. And I knew that we still had much work to do. But I voted for him again in 1996 despite my misgivings, because the alternative was far worse. And my obligation as a citizen was to help choose the best leader for it, not to check out by not voting out of anger or protest.
There is no leader who will make the decision you want her or him to make 100 percent of the time. Your vote is a tool of hope for a better world. Use it wisely, for it is precious. Use it for others, for they are in need of your support, too."
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The last paragraph I find particularly powerful and something more people really should take into account.
I fully agree that politics have changed, I'm just arguing that having a sympathetic President and Congress in office makes it significantly easier to get legislation passed by protest.
Generally I agree with the idea that "great people don't make history, but sometimes history produces a great person." There's a few points in US history where individual people's decisions did impact a lot though, thinking of Andrew Johnson during reconstruction. The economic system now and what America is to the world isn't really up for debate anymore, some have referred to this as the post-political era where more and more issues are culturally focused since both parties are consented on the economic system where meaningful change actually happens. Obama really embodied this because he was so powerful a figure yet change didn't really happen, he's like the best case scenario in this current arrangement, and look what happened after him... all of this is part of the slide to the right because it's via the economic arrangement consented to by both parties that this happens.
With Civil Rights era I think the battle was really won in the courts and through labor organizing. Economic pressure was put on the system in this way and the system had to deal with it. Then you had those individual moments of bravery, like after segregation laws were struck down, "Freedom Riders" tested the laws by riding desegregated busses to the south, getting mobbed and jailed but unable to be formally charged.