So Gov. Walker won... damn. We are trouble but remember people: "Democracy is the battle that never ends. You are either fighting for something or losing everything. Don't you be the prick-rat-bastard that gives away the rights of someone not even born yet; because you could not get directly involved in democracy today. Get off the bench, get your head up and stay involved. Fight these pricks on whatever issue you're fighting them. If you don’t have an issue, find an issue. If you don’t have a handy GOP legislator to plague make it your business to plague one nearby. Be constructive, be active and never give up because the battle never ends.

You feel depressed. You feel defeated. You feel like the days at the capital didn’t matter and the recalls didn’t matter and all you did was slow the bastard down… yeah, you did and that’s good but it’s not done yet. It’s never done. If you had won you’d all would have been forced to be on Barrett like a cheap damn suit. This isn’t a game, you can’t go home and take your ball, you are the ball and our conservative friends won’t be happy until you have nothing and are nothing. So yes, you can’t quit. You have to fight them. Even if it means all the way to the Gates of Hell; fight them. Even if it means you have to the fight them until Hell freezes over; fight them and then fight the bastards on the goddamned ice. The battle never ends.

Yeah, this is news from Hell and it means that Citizen's United is a poisoned cup that will keep on allowing organized money to beat the life out of organized people. But the people don't get to give up. Susan B. Anthony, Mother Bloor, Sojourner Truth all died in legal chains but did not give up. Be the link the chain that does not break but grows stronger. We still have lives to live, children to feed, houses to pay for and still need wages that do that and pensions for our old age and healthcare for now. We have things we have to fight for like Eugene Debs, nearly died in prison, Joe Hill innocent and executed and Big Bill Haywood who died in exile did not get to give up and so don’t you dare… don’t you do it. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X… shot down dead but defiant right down to the last second. Power is what it always has been and it always thinks it is going to win and it always looks like it’s winning… that’s why it’s called power. This is no time for despair. The battle never ends.

The other Governors like Gov. Walker,  will now be bold and brag about how their superior ideas won, but to hell with that. These people disenfranchised students, robo-called to drive down participation, own the voting machines and outspent a weak standard bearer by a factor of seven and still almost didn’t win. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn would understand that you do not get to lay it down or walk away. August Spies and Lucy Parson would get that we can’t let it go because “it” is us and “it” hungers for more and more is what we have and we’ve no more to give. So you get to stand up and keep on standing up. It took them sixty years to break the New Deal but we know and they fear is that the New Deal did not go far enough. Obama is going to have a hard time of it from here on out if I'm reading the media right. The media people will continue to take Gov. Walker's bad ideas as just the right ideas to turn around an economy that his ideas are killing; frick-frackin' great. But we don’t get to lay down now do we… because the battle never ends and we are in it.

The preely-concocted storyline is going to suck for the next six months but Progressive forces will have to get over being crushed and get off the damn ground. No time for crying because even President Obama, who is going to REALLY have a hard time of it because he's not even exactly on the side of the angels... is going to be coming at us with Simpson-Bowles the federal version of what Walker is doing in Wisconsin even if he wins. We have fighting to do and we cannot let the lynched Ralph Gray down or the hounded but eloquent pen of John Swinton or the voice of Paul Robeson. We don’t get to give up or give in. What we get to do is get in someone's chest and make difference in little ways alone and big ones all together; we don't get to win every day, or every fight but if we are not in them then no one else is. The battle never ends.

So get off the mat because it’s not safe to stay on the ground because these people, the billionaires who have bought our system are intent on stomping all of us into it if we don’t get up and get back into the fight. You do so because the battle never ends; not now not ever; Ed Kelly and William Sylvis; Harriet Tubman and Caesar Chavez didn’t get to give up and you had better not. The battle never ends.