Are you a thermometer or a thermostat?

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote about days gone by when “the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”

Dr. King’s perfect distinction can be applied today in our politics.

Too many people in the progressive community are behaving like thermometers, looking at polls, gauging popular opinion, listening to what “they are saying,” etc. and treating this information, not as useful and changeable data points for shaping messaging and strategy (which they surely are), but as static and unalterable immutable facts that will determine all that comes next. And based on that, they are now ready to throw in the towel and kick our staunchest allies to the curb in hopes of finding someone else they believe is more in line with the atmosphere as they assess it to be in this immediate moment.

But true activists know that licking your finger and holding it up to the wind is not activism.

Concluding that people will always think a certain way because they think that way todsy is not activism.

Deciding you can’t win a fight because you’re not winning it now is not activism.

Activism means staying in a battle even when, in this exact time and space, we are not ahead.

Activism means not just looking at what is, but determining what will be.

Activists don’t simply measure the temperature. We change the climate.

So please, stop listening to the polls and pundits and “insiders” and what someone told you “people are saying,” and then trying to convince us we’ve lost a fight that hasn’t even really begun.

We don’t need any more thermometers – there are far too many folks giving us minute-by-minute and (and more often than not, inaccurate) weather reports. We need thermostats working for change. And it will be the thermostats – the true activists – who will make the difference this November and beyond.

Which one will you be?