Welcome to The Resistance, or I should say, welcome back. Augusta Free Press has been an “enemy within” for 10 of the 22 years we’ve been in existence, so the next four years will be familiar.
It kinda goes with the territory, being a left-of-center news organization in one of the redder parts of the country – Augusta County, Virginia, the Augusta in Augusta Free Press, went 73.1 percent for Donald Trump this year, putting our neighbors out our way to utter shame with our utter Trumpiness.
We’ve been at the Resistance game for quite a while. I remember one of our earliest battles, back in 2005, as Virginia was on a course to vote on, and ultimately approve, a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and we began a series of stories featuring local gay and lesbian couples, to illustrate the impact of what state voters were about to do.
I just assumed that we were going to be put out of business, because surely the few advertisers that we had would run fleeing.
Whatever; it was a fight worth fighting.
And sometimes you do the right thing, and it works out, as was the case there – we survived that one, anyway, and survival emboldened us to do more to get people thinking, and to want to take action.
I ran for a seat on Waynesboro City Council in 2008, and naturally got trounced – people in Waynesboro didn’t want to hear about how we needed to take steps to repair our crumbling infrastructure and improve our public schools; they just wanted their tax bills to stay where they were, quality of life be damned.
It was a struggle to stay afloat during the Great Recession of 2008-2010, but we made it through, barely, and with longevity in the news business came a wider audience, expanding outside the Shenandoah Valley to Richmond, D.C., and eventually spanning the globe.
We keep fighting the good fight – last year, we took on the Augusta County Board of Supervisors over how board members handled sexual-harassment allegations made against one of its members; we lost the battle, naturally, because the deck is stacked in favor of the government in those kinds of matters, but somebody needed to fight the fight anyway.
We’d like to think that we had something to do with keeping Waynesboro City Council from going MAGA in yesterday’s elections. Our dogged reporting on the efforts of the homophobic vice mayor, Jim Wood, to stack City Council with Republican cronies had to have had a role in keeping two of his three hand-picked MAGA candidates from winning seats on the City Council, preventing Wood from having a majority on City Council when it reorganizes next year.
That’s pretty much what we’ve got from our efforts over the past 22 years.
One lousy quasi-win.
Other than that, Augusta County is as red as ever.
People here – and elsewhere – still use the LGBTQ community as pawns in a sick political game.
Powerful people still abuse their positions and get away with it.
It shouldn’t be, and doesn’t have to be – and this is why we continue to fight.
If you were to ask me to assess our chances to achieve meaningful change, I’d point you right now to the results of yesterday’s elections, which aren’t as out of bounds with the rest of American history as your high-school civics teacher would have you believe.
These United States were founded on the lofty premise that “all men are created equal” even as its White founders were turning a blind eye to the institution of slavery and the rights of women, and were focused on expanding the borders of the new nation at the expense of the Natives who had been here for millennia before the first White man had ever set foot on North America.
The next couple of years will be the most challenging in our history since World War II, as those of us in the Resistance will have to fight tooth and nail to preserve what we can of our system of checks and balances against a government that was elected on the promise that it will be tyrannical.
That we’ll be fighting to save what we can of our great nation not just for our side, but also for the millions who voted for a man who has threatened to throw the “enemy within” into internment camps – history suggests that free peoples don’t willingly sign away their rights and privileges under the law, but they can be hoodwinked into doing so against their self-interests in the name of economic security – is not lost on us.
And, yes, it would just be easier to sit back and call it a day.
Speaking just for me, I’m not wired that way.
It’s going to land me in a gulag, but even so.
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Chris Graham
