[ [link removed] ]Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress


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| Alexandria shared her thoughts on the Uvalde shooting and where we go |
| from here on Instagram Live last week. Here is an abbreviated version |
| of her remarks below. If you prefer to listen, you can watch the IG |
| live [ [link removed] ]here. |
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This is such an embarrassing, shameful, deeply violent, and inexcusable
moment.

There are so many politicians defending AR-15s and the right of
radicalized teens to impulse buy an AR-15. They have more to say about
guns than they have to say about the kids who were killed.

It’s just ‘prayers, prayer, prayers.’ They love to talk about a book
they’ve never even read. “Faith without works is dead.” We don’t want to
hear it unless you are doing something about it. These politicians aren’t
trying. They’re only interested in defending themselves and the special
interests that they work for. There’s no money in protecting kids,
apparently.

I don’t like, as a leader, telling you this, but so long as a Party,
especially a Democratic Party, thinks there is some level of horror that
will convince Republicans to change their minds, this is going to keep
happening.

Everyone wants to reach for the easy solution. More police in schools does
not solve this problem. That is not an opinion, look at the data. More
money to policing does not do anything. If it did, it would have by now.

We have teachers who are not even making a living wage, who have sold
their blood plasma to make ends meet. And they are now sacrificing their
lives for the chance of possibly saving their students’ lives. And where
are we talking about putting resources first? Not to them. Not in health
care. But in the place, policing, that already has the resources that have
yielded the least amount of change.

There are no easy solutions here. And as long as we continue to ignore the
difficult issues, this is going to happen. Something we have to talk about
is the radicalization of young men. This is about an ideology of hatred
and violence, whether it’s the explicit white supremacy we saw in Buffalo
or simply the silos that young men radicalize themselves in online. People
like Mark Zuckerburg are busy having dinner with people like Tucker
Carlson, who’s airing “Great Replacement” theories and inciting violence,
and platforming the very people that mass shooters are citing in their own
clearly written manifestos.

Another issue we have, and the reason we can’t get these broadly popular
gun reform bills through Congress, is the unrepresentative nature of our
democracy. You have a presidency that’s often not determined by popular
vote. You have a Senate where tens of millions more people can vote for a
candidate or party and still be in the minority. Even the House of
Representatives, that’s supposed to represent our population, gets
gerrymandered to all hell. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for people
to defend the stance that we live in a true democracy.

So what do we do? I’m not going to be one of those ding dongs who tell you
to vote harder. But, hopelessness is not an option.

It’s really easy, when government doesn’t work for you, to say “screw
this, I’m opting out.” By giving into that cynicism, you become less
human. You turn off a part of your human experience. And, what all of
these special interests are trying to do is to extinguish the life out of
you. They want to extinguish your hope and desire to fight for a better
future.

There are so many things we can do. It’s just about getting creative and
it starts in one place. It’s not top down. It almost always starts with a
small group or one community that decides to take a creative action that
works for them. And it works on a small level and it inspires others.
Right now is the moment to try *anything.* Even, just keep an eye on the
young men in your life. Because you all are the ones who have the power to
deradicalize. And it’s never just one conversation, but it always starts
there.

I wish I had easy answers. I don’t.

It’s appropriate to feel rage at injustice. But the moment they take that
away from you, is the moment they get you to acquiesce. And we will not
acquiesce. We reject dystopia till the end.


 

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