2020 NOV 7 ISSUE: 2020 NOV 7 ISSUE: ‘CORRALES INDIVISIBLE’ RE-DOUBLES

By Meredith Hughes
One group riveted on the results of this election is Corrales Indivisible, created on February 15, 2017, and today comprised of 545 members in its Facebook group. The site states, in part, “We model the values of inclusion, fairness and justice.”  Three of the many Corrales members who have been actively getting out the vote this year are Mary Ellen Stagg Capek, Terry Eisenbart and Bert Coxe.

Capek reported with some level of sardonic certainty that she had been mulling “Packing up our camper and moving to Canada,” if Trump prevailed. But her vision post-election is that she “will keep up the ‘town crier’ emails, with input from a lot of folks, and emphasis on local, county and state issues that will need a lot more of our attention. So we can get back to concerns like banning fracking and banning carcinogenic chemicals in public places, especially on school grounds.”

She also ponders how corporate interests may shift under a Biden presidency. “They’ve had free rein under Trump and in my opinion that’s why they took over the Supreme Court: to strip FDR and the Warren/Burger courts’ safety net and civil rights laws, sending us back to the roaring Twenties with no corporate oversight or regulations.

“So unless Biden packs the court, and soon, the focus of organizing and protests will have to shift to the courts.” She adds that it appears that “many Trumpers in his inner circle have given up winning, and their efforts are focusing now on making it much harder to overturn all those executive orders and policy changes they’ve been able to make protecting corporate interests and pillaging the environment. We will have plenty to do.”

Eisenbert sounds as fired up as ever. “After November 3, we’ll switch our energy to the upcoming legislative session. That is, as long as we don’t have to hit the streets to protest a president who won’t leave! “Corrales Indivisible is not going away no matter who wins,” she added. “We will fight on for progressive issues at the federal, state and local levels. We will continue to hold all our representatives accountable. As one of our steering committee members, Steve Conrad, said, ‘I’m just getting started,’ and we believe that’s how most of our members feel. I certainly do.”

“I can tell you that if Trump wins and the Republicans hold the Senate, I do think that we are in for darker times and a real serious move toward authoritarianism,” Coxe said. “There will also be a serious let down and a lot of personal depression if that were to happen. It will be tough to pick up the pieces and swing into action for the 2021 New Mexico legislative session.”

He went on to say that of the people he knew who were clinically depressed after the 2016 election, “The Women’s March and groups like Indivisible allowed them to come together to work toward something positive and feel better about themselves and their country.  “The crazy thing is, that if Trump were marginally competent, and could at least fake empathy for the greater electorate, he probably could have coasted into a second term.  A lot of the people involved in ‘the resistance’ would have not been able to keep up their energy for four years. It is really a testament of how miserable he is that we are even having this conversation.”

“A win by Trump, especially if he loses the popular vote by a big margin, almost a given, will drive home how truly undemocratic many of our country’s institutions actually are, from the Electoral College, to the U.S. Senate and the federal judiciary.” The Corrales entity is one of many inspired by Indivisible, today a national organization, which began in December 2016 as a 23-page online document written by former congressional staffers suggesting ways to peacefully resist what they viewed as the anti-democratic Trump agenda. “We have to build a democracy that reflects a broad, multiracial ‘we the people,”‘one that works for all of us and is sustained by all of us.”

What began as a document swiftly became “a movement of thousands of group leaders and more than a million members taking regular, iterative and increasingly complex actions to elect local champions. And fight for progressive policies.”