Good news for the worker uprising

And some bad news for basic human decency

Welcome to a premium Wednesday evening edition of Progress Report.

I’m sure that recency bias plays into this assessment, as does the hyper-speed at which the internet delivers the most horrific of headlines, but I still feel comfortable saying that we are living through the most consistently miserable era of nightly news since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not a day goes by that we aren’t inundated with brain-melting dispatches from all across the country, from seats of immense power to otherwise anonymous small towns.

The past 24 hours alone have been devastating. Last night, local media released footage of the Uvalde police standing idly by during May’s mass elementary school slaughter, and by this afternoon, the headlines had shifted to the confirmation that there was indeed a 10-year-old child that was raped in Ohio and forced to get an abortion in Indiana. The next 24-hour cycle has begun with the goonish Attorney General of Indiana declaring on Fox News that he will try to hunt down the doctor that performed the abortion. I shiver at what tomorrow will bring.

And yet, there are also plenty of positive developments unfurling across the United States. They just don’t usually earn the sort of column inches or social media attention that the truly heinous stories are afforded. If it bleeds, it leads — and then goes viral.

So tonight, in the interest of relaying the news without fully depressing you, I’m going to switch back and forth between good stories and bad ones. I can’t promise that the world is quite that balanced at the moment, but this newsletter is a safe space.

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Good:

Black churches in Georgia are banding together to form a new voting rights group ahead of the midterm elections. Dubbed Faith Works, the group will include 1000 congregations from all across the state.

Faith Works will emphasize get-out-the-vote efforts ahead of this November’s election, potentially reaching hundreds of thousands of parishioners.

“We are rising together because our democracy has come under attack from within — and like generations before us, this moment in history and our faith are calling for us to act,” said Bishop Reginald Jackson, who leads more than 500 African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia.

In the spring of 2021, Georgia passed the first of what would become a red state wave of voter suppression laws. The law was pretty explicitly designed to make it harder for Black people to vote, and because Congress failed to pass voting rights protections, it once again falls to the communities most affected to rescue democracy. As is often the case, this is very bittersweet good news.