#250notes

Dean making no choices is also important because I think we all know (and Jensen knows most of all) that if Dean were making choices in that scene, it would have gone completely differently. And that’s not something that we have to interpret out of thin air. We know Dean would choose to do whatever he could to stop Cas, to save him.

I mean, the man had to be dragged bodily out of apocalypse world by Sam, screaming Cas’s name the entire time. He had to practically be thrown out of Purgatory by Cas himself, staring in horror as he was swept away leaving Cas behind. Even when he was angry with Cas, when he felt they were on opposite sides, he still had to be told to run as an army of demons was sweeping toward him, and even then he couldn’t stop himself from one look back at Cas, trapped in holy fire. He followed Cas to the river even though the Leviathan were dangerous and unstoppable, he couldn’t do anything but witness his death but witness it he did.

The thought of losing Cas literally brought him to his knees just a few episodes before, and once had him praying, shamelessly begging God and Amara both when we know he never prayed to anyone but Cas before that point. He stood before God and said I’ll fight my brother to the death to save the world, but you have to save one person for me, and who was that person? Who was it?!

If there’s one thing we need to take away from the last four years--or the last couple of decades--it’s that democracy is not a self-maintaining system. We need to continue the process we've started here. We must let go of this idea that if we can just find and elect the “perfect” candidate, all our problems will be solved.

I honestly think that’s part of what drives a lot of this “don’t vote for the lesser of two evils” stuff during election years. There’s this idea that if we could all somehow come together and break the two-party system to vote an ideologically pure, far-left progressive third-party candidate into office, we wouldn’t have to be so plugged in and aware of politics all the time.

But creating and maintaining an equitable, just, and compassionate society takes work. It takes everyone engaging and being aware and involved, and it doesn’t stop, ever. Even if we elected that perfect candidate, we would still need to inform ourselves and elect good state and local officials as well. We would still need to engage with local politics and activism. We would still need to stay involved and hold our leaders accountable. We would still need to call out injustices and inequalities and push for a better world, every day.

I’m willing to admit that during the Obama administration, I got complacent. A lot of us, especially those of us with white privilege or class privilege, got complacent. Looking back, it couldn’t be clearer that things in the U.S. were always far from perfect, but while we were in it a lot of us--not all of us, but many--let ourselves believe politics didn’t require our close attention more than once every two to four years. After all, we had good leaders! And our good leaders would handle the messy business of making democracy go, right?

But democracy doesn’t go without its people. Even the best leaders--and again, in retrospect it’s so clear the U.S. has never had the best leaders--need to be held accountable by the ones they lead. By their supporters, not just their detractors. An active, engaged population is harder to deceive, harder to control, harder to abuse.

So even if the election results make you breathe a sigh of relief...remember. Democracy is not a self-maintaining system. Some of us may have survived this storm, but we haven’t recovered from the damages yet. And many, many people did not survive the storm at all.