Django Grace spoke a version of these words at the No Kings 2.0 rally in Brattleboro on Oct. 18. "I tend to paraphrase a bit when I get as fired up as I did, but the following is generally what I said and 100% what I believe," he says in sharing the written version of his remarks.
"Today was an unbelievable opportunity, and I want to express my gratitude to all those who came out in support," says Grace, a Brattleboro Union High School graduate and current sophomore at Columbia University. "This is a daunting, uphill battle, but I have a feeling that the energy America felt today will never be forgotten. Thank you, Brattleboro."
BRATTLEBORO-I want to start by saying that I'm so proud, I'm so proud, to be from this community.
I'm so proud to see my peers and family and loved ones stand up for things that they believe in.
I'm so proud to have had the opportunity to grow up in a place where I was free to contemplate the state of the world I found myself in, to get angry, and to do something with my anger.
I'm so proud to live in a place where the people are not passive, where opinions matter, where people have their ears to the ground, where people are awake to the complex realities of America, where people see injustice and get angry.
But I'm here today because I believe that it is no longer enough to be angry. It is our responsibility to look further, to look past the actions of one demagogue in the Oval Office, for behind him lurks something much worse, something he is merely a product of.
And if we can take a step back and ask how the hell we actually got here, if we have the courage to peer deep into the heart of America, I believe that we will find a disease much more lethal than the actions of one man and his cronies - a force that we are all a part of. A force that even we who believe we are revolutionaries conform to every day.
I am talking about the force of polarity. A culture of retaliation, where everything has somehow become two-sided.
If we are left, we must hate right, we must constantly retaliate and condemn the other side.
The only debates occur over two-sided trends that are spit onto our plates, and political curiosity is supplemented with one-shot headlines and Instagram reels.
America is becoming a pendulum that is confined to swing on one axis, and the farther it swings into the extremities of left and right, the farther it batters down the concept of nuance and free thought that this nation is built upon.
* * *
How did we get into this state of absurdity?
I fear that this is not natural, that we have been tricked, incentivized, and herded to live under the rules of polarity, to play this game. And I'll tell you this: The demagogues you condemn, the kings you hate, the billionaires you want to make pay, they all want you to keep hating the other side.
They want you to play their game.
It's a game of distraction, it pits Americans against each other so colossal amounts of money can move unnoticed, it wants to pit red against blue, it wants to pit Vermont against Alabama and Florida, and, I hate to say it, but it wants to pit everyone who came to this rally against the people that didn't.
This is dangerous!
I see the tendrils of polarity already wrapped around the facets of this community.
I see elementary-school kids alienate a peer because his family voted for Trump.
I see teenagers threaten each other's lives over political Snapchat posts.
I see neighbors turn on each other over a lawn sign.
I see strangers screaming at each other in the street over text printed on a T-shirt.
I see people afraid to speak in meetings and classrooms because they are afraid to move against the popular current.
I see people losing the ability to speak to one another, because under this bipartisan gridlock, "disagree" is morphing into the word "hate."
Now, the only way to escape this bipartisan gridlock, the culture of hatred, is to re-learn how to talk to each other and to unite on common ground. Our children deserve to know that "disagree" does not mean "hate."
* * *
We need vitalized discourse, and we need it right here on the community level because this is ground zero. Now, more than ever, is the time for community-based democratic structures such as Representative Town Meeting in Brattleboro. How dare we say that we are politically concerned when the systems of discourse in our own town are unstable?
Right here we have all these beautiful little arenas for free thought, and they are ugly sometimes and frustrating to work with, but they are operationally free from partisan powers and they are being abandoned.
The only reason we should be altering this system of Town Meeting is to dismantle the barriers that prevent more people from participating. Your passion means nothing if you are unwilling to apply it.
We need civic discourse right here at ground zero - we need common ground.
* * *
Common ground is not reached by shutting down opposition, it is not attained through cancel culture. Common ground is not reached by sticking a lawn sign in the front yard, by buying a flag or wearing a provocative T-shirt, or by angrily reposting something on your Instagram.
We must completely abandon the ridiculous notion that social media is a platform for activism. These apps are dangerous - all they really do is give us the illusion of civic discourse, all they really do is put us further into ideological echo chambers. Their algorithms profit by dividing us, by feeding us what we want to hear and condemning the opposite.They allow us to feel like we are participating in civic discourse while sitting on the toilet.
And even worse, consider the top four social media platforms we use.
X is owned by Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet; Instagram and Facebook are owned by Mark Zuckerberg, the third richest person in the world; and a deal is in place for TikTok's algorithm to be regulated by Oracle, an entity owned by Larry Ellison, the second-richest man on the planet.
What a gorgeous roster that is.
These men have total control over the platforms we worship: They would love it if things stayed exactly the way they are right now. It is dangerous for discourse to occur under the algorithmic control of these few men. We need to take it back to the hands of the American people at the community level, where it belongs.
* * *
I may be young and naïve, but I still believe in the common sense of the American people! These are not partisan issues, even though we may have been convinced that they are.
I believe that no American wants to live in a reality where the top 1% of the population controls as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined.
No American thinks people working 60 hours a week should struggle to feed their families.
No American hopes for billionaires to receive tax breaks while 16 million working-class people are left without medical insurance.
No American wants to live in fear that their neighbors and loved ones may be abducted by masked agents at any hour of the day.
No American wants to live in a reality where politically motivated assassinations are applauded.
No American wants to live in a reality where we have given up on stopping climate change
No American want to live in a reality in which it is contentious to condemn terrorism.
And no American wants to live in a reality in which it is controversial to oppose the mass starvation, subjugation, and slaughter of thousands of innocent people in Gaza.
* * *
But the only way to come to these truths, to this common sense, is on common ground.
I wish I had a concrete blueprint to attain common ground, a policy plan to dismantle this bipartisan gridlock that blackens the heart of America, but I, like you, have no idea what this looks like.
I'm just trying to be a student. And you're just trying to be a carpenter, and you're just trying to be a dad, and most of you are just trying to enjoy your retirement, and you're just trying to be a soccer player, or a kindergarten teacher, or a lineman, or a farmer, or a gardener.
We're not politicians - we're just people. And it's so sad, it's so sad that the conditions of today drive us to have to come out here in anger and sadness, because the politicians in Washington can't do it themselves.
All they know how to do is play this two-sided game, and even the ones who truly have our intentions at heart are suffocated by its rules.
And I know this.
I know that many of us probably have terrible grievances with the ways that other people in this country think, but the only way that we can escape the perversion of democracy that is happening is to engage with those people. We must end this unspoken internal war.
Believe in this community, invest in your neighbors, put down your incessant Facebook-ing and TikTok-ing and look people who disagree with you in their eyes as you speak to them. Learn their language.
We can no longer view fellow Americans as the enemy because they fall on the opposite side of a contrived divide. We need to collaborate with them because they are the only way forward.
* * *
But to those self-interested individuals who profit from this divide, cultivating this disgusting political gridlock by undermining common sense, to those who turn a blind eye on atrocities to reap the fiscal benefits of war, to the man in our White House who lines his pockets by brutalizing and dividing the American people - to them, I say: "Let's go toe to toe.
"I do not fear you.
"I do not fear your money and your primitive rhetoric and the ease with which you forget morality. Without a distracted populace to use as fodder, you are nothing, and when we remove ourselves from this manufactured divide, when we take our hands to the gears and our feet to the wheels, the apparatus of hatred and political division will fall."
We owe it to our children and our children's children to stand against these forces; we owe it to them to rebuild trust in the American people.
No more will we allow ourselves to be played in their bipartisan game. Democracy does not belong in the hands of a minority, it does not belong in the hands of one side or the other, it belongs to all the people.
And I stood up here to say that when I was 13, I'm standing before you now at 19, and I will stand up here again and again until my hair is white if that's what it takes.
Democracy belongs to us, and that is final.
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