Battles may be lost, but the fight continues

Written By Neil Offen

      Our side seems to keep losing every battle. We have to keep believing we can still win the war.

      Yeah, things are bad and they do seem to be getting worse. Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, the Gaza travesty, the trashing of the Kennedy Center, the Ukraine sellout, the deportations, the indiscriminate firings, the cuts at the CDC and the NIH and on and on.

      One after another, the battle for rationality, legality and common sense ended in defeat. And yet, the war isn’t over. In fact, it may only be truly beginning.

      At the protest demonstration I attended recently, there were 500 or 600 people in the small town where I expected to see 30 or 40. The protestors were angry and determined. The sense of community felt empowering. The speeches were fiery.

There were similar demonstrations on Presidents’ Day across my state, and across the country, and they attracted tens of thousands.

      An activist group calling itself 50501 (short for "50 protests, 50 states, one day") is scheduling another national day of demonstrations for March 4.

      At Congressional town halls all over the U.S.—including in deep red pockets—Republican enablers of Trump and Musk and their ilk are now getting sharply questioned and roundly booed. Federal workers are joining unions in groves.       

      Some Democrats, like Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Rep. Jasmine Crockett and Maine Gov. Janet Mills, are now standing up and doing something. Constituents are urging their Democratic representatives to do more, say more.

      Organizations like the ACLU and Indivisible are now filing lawsuit after lawsuit and organizing resistance. Phone lines to Congress are now overflowing. A nationwide corporate economic boycott—targeting businesses like Target and Walmart that have retreated from DEI plans—is scheduled for Feb. 28.

As Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes, “Something is shifting. They are still breaking things and stealing things … but the propaganda magic … is fading.”

      Maybe it took all those losing battles to finally get our dander up. Maybe we are starting to realize that it doesn’t matter how many battles have been lost.

We need to keep trying to win the next one. We need to win the war.  

Neil Offen

Neil Offen, one of the editors of this site, is the author of Building a Better Boomer, a hilarious guide to how baby boomers can better see, hear, exercise, eat, sleep and retire better. He has been a humor columnist for four decades and on two continents. A longtime journalist, he’s also been a sports reporter, a newspaper and magazine editor, a radio newsman, written a nationally syndicated funny comic strip and been published in a variety of formats, including pen, crayon, chalk and, once, under duress, his wife’s eyebrow pencil. The author or co-author of more than a dozen books, he is, as well, the man behind several critically acclaimed supermarket shopping lists. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.

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