Rodney Anonymous: We Need to Organize. Now.
Rodney Anonymous is a member of the legendary Philly punk band The Dead Milkmen. He crafted this essay for our DISSENT issue.
Remove your shoes / laptop in a tray/ Trade a little freedom for a little safety.
– Angelspit, “Thanks for Your Cooperation”
In an alternate reality, Bernie Sanders won the 2016 presidential race. And if we’re going with an alternate reality scenario, we might as well dream big. So let’s also give ol’ Bernie a talking golden unicorn sidekick named “Living Wage”and have Assemblage 23 play the Inaugural Ball. In this world, Prince, David Bowie and Florence Henderson (TV’s Mrs. Brady) are all still alive and doing just fine.
Ted Nugent is settling into his favorite buffalo hide chair to type out a piece on his made-from-baby seal computer keyboard about how to fight back against the coming changes to our government. And that’s OK. Or, at least, it would be OK if Ted Nugent – even alternate reality Ted Nugent -weren’t such an asshole.
Photo by Charles Wrzesniewski.
For many of us, it seems like we’ve been waking up every day since the morning of November 9th in a nightmarish dystopian alternate reality, one in which the new president/reality show producer is an ego-maniacal bigot with misogynistic tendencies and ties to White Supremacist groups.
It’s a world in which former Texas governor Rick Perry, the man who forgot the name of the Department of Energy during the Republican presidential debates, has been tapped to run that very same agency. A world where Cindy Brady is apparently a raging homophobe (et tu, Cindy?).
The irony being that, for years, the Other Side has been living in a strange alternate reality wherein the president of the United States was a secret foreign-born Muslim who was planning to outlaw Christmas, confiscate all guns and force dissenters into FEMA camps while Hilary Clinton conducted Satanic rituals beneath pizza parlors.
Crazy, right?
Now, keep in mind that Alex Jones, the man who helped peddle many of these nutjob conspiracy theories, now has the ear of the most powerful man in the world. No wonder Uncle Henry believes that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the presidential election and that thousands of Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks by dancing upon New Jersey rooftops?
Alternate reality Ted Nugent would probably tell his readership that the most logical response to a massive political shift would be to arm themselves and to wave their guns around whenever and wherever possible. But that’s not our way, and it sure as lack-of-shooting wasn’t the way of Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Gandhi or Bobby Brady (so I assume, as Bobby was always the yin to Cindy Brady’s yang).
Our way is to organize.
After all, our organizational skills ended Jim Crow laws, brought about same-sex marriage and have kept Creed off the radio for over a decade so far.
And we need to get organized NOW.
We need to do this for the sake of the most vulnerable among us. I’m a straight white man with a college education (or “An Elite Libtard,” a term I now wear as a fuckin’ Badge of Honor. Shit, Luther! I’m having Elite Libtard business cards made) and I’m worried.
I can’t even begin to fathom the apprehension my Muslim, LGBT, and immigrant friends, neighbors and family members must be feeling right now.
They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers/ Gonna win / yeah we’re takin’ over
– The Doors, “No One Here Gets Out Alive”
Do you know two or three people who are as concerned as you are? Good. You now have a starting point. The next step is to organize your friends into either an email or Facebook group. Hell, there may already be an existing one that you could all join.
Yes, it’s a small start, but remember that it only took ONE person to turn to another and say, “Damn, we really need to get Creed and Cindy Fuckin’ Brady off the radio.”
Once you have your group together (you’ll want to grab the name “The Sane Bradys” early because once word gets out about Cindy, EVERYBODY is going to want to call their group that), you’ll want to set a weekly goal. I suggest something along the lines of “Call your senator and/or congressperson and ask that they do X”.
No, don’t call them and ask them to do Xtasy. The “X” is just an Elite Libtard way of saying “fill in the blank.”
By the way, when you call your representative, try to leave a succinct message like, “Please vote against the confirmation of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Thank you.”
DO NOT leave a message along the lines of “Rex Tillerson is an evil tool of the Fascist Corporate Establishment and must be STOPPED before he breeds an army of Exxon-approved Lizard People.”
That’s not helping. Although it probably wouldn’t be the craziest call your representative gets that week, especially if your representative lives in Ted Nugent’s voting district.
What? You don’t know the name of your senators or your congressperson? That’s nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you go online and fill in that gap in your knowledge. And it can actually be kind of fun if your representative has a silly name. My congressperson’s name – I shit you not – is Bobby Brady.
Did you also know that your representatives have local offices (which I assume where all designed by famous architect Mike Brady) and that you and your friends can turn up there and ask for a meeting with your representative (Be polite! Don’t rant about Exxon-approved Lizard People).
That’s because you are your representative’s boss. And people tend to get shit done a lot more quickly whenever the boss will be coming around.
OK, people. We’ve got Social Security and Medicare to save and the registration of Muslims to prevent. Let’s get to work. In the words of Ted Nugent, “If you don’t crush evil, then evil will get you.”
The people have the power/ The power to dream / To rule / To wrestle the world from fools/ It’s decreed the people rule
– Patti Smith, “The People Have The Power”
JUMP: The Philly Music Project 
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