What We’re For

The country we’re owed, and how we’re going to build it

What’s next for this country is up to us. A dare to anybody who wants to keep us from reclaiming it, and a dare for us to live into our generational responsibility.

One way to define what’s next is to name what we’re against. One way is to declare what we’re for. I say we do both.

We’re a country that takes care of all of us. Period.

For a long time, the loudest thing our side has been able to say with alignment has been “no”. No kings. No to racism, no to raids, no to the mass firings of federal workers, no to the purging of voter rolls, no to the men who act like this country, its resources, and our bodies belong to them, and more.

Our no is necessary. It’s important to name what we’re against, what we’re fighting to dismantle and uproot. To be abolitionists of the 21st century. There’s plenty of blocking work to do to prevent and end harms impacting our communities. Three of the largest single-day protests this country has ever seen ain’t nothing to ignore or downplay. And still… a no can’t tell our people what their lives look like on the other side of the fight. We can’t build a country out of what we’re against. We can’t imagine what life will be like if we can’t describe what good things exist on the other side of the absence of a bad thing. This is another critical part of our work. This is what we’re for.

The promise

Again, we’re a country that takes care of all of us. Period.

We build the country we want ourselves instead of waiting for it to be handed to us by some greater authority.

The first is the promise. You make this country possible just by being one of its people, so you’re owed a real life in it. Enough to live on. A home nobody can take. Care when you’re sick. A real say in how the country runs.

The second is what makes it ours. We’re not asking for this from people who’ve never once delivered it for us. We’re building it where we live, with what we actually can control, and we’ll make anybody who wants to break it through exclusion, discrimination, or oppression have to come through us to do it.

Call it freedom if that’s your word. Call it money, power, and respect, if that’s your vibe, the money being your security, the power being your say, the respect being your dignity. It all points to the same thing: a life worth living in the place you’re from or now call home, and the power to govern and sustain it.

This means you

If you can’t work, you’re not outside of this. You hold the country up, whether or not you can clock in. The one caring for a sick parent. The disabled folks who won access and rights that the rest of us enjoy without acknowledgment of their fights and sacrifices. The elder, the kid, the one just trying to get through the day. A country that only takes care of you while you’re “useful” to it is their deal, not ours. You get a life worth living. Period.

If they’re already coming for you, you’re not the exception to this promise; you’re the center of it. Undocumented, Black, disabled, trans, poor, all of us that the authoritarians decided to make an example of first. All of us. The ones every party has been willing to concede while catering to corporate interests. The people targeted hardest are the ones contributing the most and getting the least support back. The ones of us living at the intersections of all of these things. A “for” coalition whose demands don’t start with us isn’t a “for” at all. It’s the same old deal wrapped in movement jargon.

And if you’ve been locked out of the vote, then hear this plainly. This isn’t just about the vote or choosing a name on a ballot. It’s about building the power of an organized people. In the United States as it exists now, those of us with a vote use it partly to protect those who can’t vote, until we have enough power to enforce democracy (one person, one vote; reenfranchisement of currently and formerly incarcerated people; etc.). Nobody gets left to fight alone.

What we’re owed

As the United States moves toward its 250th birthday, the midterms, and the hope that we even get a presidential election in 2028, folks are going to be dropping all sorts of demands, platforms, and proclamations about what we’re for. Ask a room what we’re for, and you’d get a hundred different, good answers. But first there’s a struggle to get past what we’d concede to. Past naming what wouldn’t be without ever naming what would. Past the fear that preempts us from imagining what some describe as impossible and others idealistic, because we don’t want to fail. But then the answers come, every one of them somebody’s real-life deserved dreams and desires, and usually not impossible at all to achieve.

Some want the list to be everything. We start with five things. Not fifty. The floor, not the ceiling. We’re not the only ones landing here either, smart people and people’s organizations are getting more focused by the day, recognizing that the immediate priority isn’t the whole of any one of our fights, it’s the ground every one of them stands on, the common good underneath it all. Whatever yours is, ending wars and genocide, your land, your kid’s school, climate justice, all of it belongs, because a country that takes care of all of us was big enough to hold it from the first line. So we don’t make each other choose. We agree on the floor and hold it together, we each carry the fight that’s ours, and we show up for the fights that aren’t. That’s not watering anything down. It’s the discipline that lets us be broad without going to mush or fragmenting any more than we already are.

So here’s the floor. Five things you can see in your own life.

A job you can live on. Pay that makes a life possible. The right to a union without losing your job for it, and a guaranteed job for anybody who wants one, because there’s always real work that needs doing, even when private business won’t hire for it.

All work is sacred.

A home they can’t take. Rent you can afford. No more mortgage traps built to bleed working families. Nobody priced out of where they live.

Care that doesn’t break you. Medicaid and Medicare, protected and made real. Your healthcare cut loose from your job, so losing the job never costs you the care. Nobody goes broke getting and staying well.

Hands off our people. ICE and military forces off our blocks. The people they’re coming for don’t get traded away under the lie of safety and security.

A bigger say, not a smaller one. Easier to vote, not harder. No more purging people off the rolls. Money out of the deciding. A real hand in the decisions, not just names to hold your nose and pick between.

Where you take each one

We don’t beg the people in office for the life we deserve. We build the power to put people’s champions in those seats, then use that power to hold them to delivering it. So when you walk into an office, you walk in to collect, and you ask that office for the thing it can actually deliver. A city councilmember can’t fix ICE. A senator can’t fix your eviction court. Bring the right ask to the right level, and they can’t send you on a random run around somewhere else.

Your city and county is where a home you can’t lose and hands off our people sit closest to the ground. Just cause eviction, so you can’t be put out for no reason. A lawyer when you’re dragged into eviction court. Sanctuary rules, so your local cops and your county jail don’t do ICE’s work. More places to vote, and someone at the polls who speaks your language.

Your state is the biggie, where most of this gets won or lost. The real minimum wage, in most places. Whether your state takes the Medicaid expansion, and ten states still refuse it, most of them in the South. Driver’s licenses, no matter your citizenship status. The voter rolls, because the state runs the rolls, so stopping the purges starts here. Same-day registration, mail and early voting, the vote given back to people coming home from incarceration, and an end to the rigged maps. State-level Voting Rights Acts.

Washington is for what only the federal government can touch. ICE is federal, so the raids and the detention, and fixing the broken immigration laws live there. A national floor under voting rights, so one state can’t quietly purge people from the rolls. A federal jobs guarantee and the right to organize a union without getting fired. Protecting Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security from the people trying to gut them.

In a lot of states, the legislature has banned your city from raising its wages or passing rent control. At least 25 states block a local minimum wage, and more than 30 block local rent control. If you live in one of those, don’t waste your breath asking city hall for something the state has already made illegal. You go to the state to lift the ban, and at the city level push the things they didn’t take from you, the eviction protections, the sanctuary rules, the elections. Know which fight is actually yours, so nobody sends you home without a win on a technicality.

What it means for the people who want your vote

Simple, and they won’t like it. You work for us now, not the other way around. You don’t get to stand on a stage and hand us a better life like a gift, or lecture us on what we should be doing when much of what we need you could give with the flick of a pen. You’re not the hero of this story. You’re how it gets done, or you’re in the way of it. You’re only a hero if we say so.

So when one of them asks what we want, tell them plain. Deliver the real thing where we can see it, jobs and homes and care, in our actual towns and not in a press release or a promise that never comes true. Stand in front of the people who are under attack instead of staying on the sidelines. More of us with a vote and a voice, not less. Anybody working to take that away from people is an enemy of democracy, and we name them. And know that we don’t disappear after we vote for you. We stay organized. We keep score. We’re the reason you win and the reason you lose. We govern with you, and we both come out better for it, or you don’t govern at all.

We’re not waiting

We build it where we live, with the people who live right next to us, and then we defend it. Voting is one of the ways we take ground, not the place where we hand our power over to someone else and go home. We vote, and we stay in the work. That means joining an organization or building a crew of your own, and linking forces with the ones already coming together to ensure, win, prove, and enforce our elections. Staying in it isn’t only something we do when we agree or when it feels good. It’s because we’re committed to a body of work that this moment requires. A crew you actually belong to holds you to visioning and accomplishing that work excellently. We do it now because the time is ripe with the necessity and opportunity for the work required. Everything our elders and ancestors, hell, much of what we’ve fought for in my lifetime, is under attack and being dismantled, at the exact moment more of us are awake and paying attention. This window of opportunity and necessity isn’t promised to stay open forever.

So we build. We bring our people together to do this sacred work. The country that takes care of all of us is ours to build, and it’s ours to build right now.

That’s what we’re for. A country whose identity and values we’re defining. A country we’re already building.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson