Old 2024 me would have said yes– part of the peaceful transfer of power, respect for the office if not the man, norms and institutions, blah blah. Even though Trump did not invite Biden to the WH or attend the 2021 inauguration, we go high when they go low. Maybe.
But now– I am saying “You are right to sit this one out, Michelle Obama.” Partly this is because I read Rachel Bitecofer’s book “Hit ’em Where It Hurts”wherein she points out that in American politics, nice and respectful politicians lose. And in order to govern for justice and equity, to get things done, you actually have to win.
It’s one thing to call the returning president tRump, or elderly golfer, or any number of clever pejoratives. You can dissect his “speeches” and comment on his addled goals. But it’s not funny any more, if it ever was. The man is immoral and malevolent. He’s going to cause a lot of damage and heartache.
So why is anyone duty-bound to stand by, quietly, and watch him take the oath of office?
Not showing up is a tangible, noticeable act of resistance. A statement of principles. Not today, Satan.
Hey, I know it’s the holiday season, the end of a long, incredibly stressful and disappointing year. You’re entitled to a few days’ respite and mindless merry-making before returning to your job, if you are lucky enough to have a job that offers vacation time off over the holidays. I get it.
But as we move into a loosely organized resistance to whatever the hell comes next—Measles? The end of special education? Further loss of reproductive rights?—I think it would behoove us to poke around in the causes of what made has now made us, the so-called Greatest Nation on Earth, vulnerable to the likes of Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.
That was not a rhetorical question, by the way. Who IS seriously listening to what Trump and his acolytes are currently saying they intend to do? Are we all just opening gifts and going to the movies, eating ourselves into a stupor, because nothing can be done? Why is the Titanic backing up, planning to hit the iceberg again?
Think back to a time when it absolutely felt like nothing could be done—and we (everyone on earth) were facing an existential crisis: March 2020, as COVID rolled around the globe, and its potential as history-making killer became obvious.
My working theory for why we were confused enough, as a nation, to vote Donald Trump back into office, centers around the divisions, deprivations and misconceptions we all experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We are still living with the repercussions, but pretending that it’s done, gone forever.
Here are six ideas about how the pandemic is still with us, impacting our institutions and daily life:
We totally underestimated the impactof a pandemic, before it occurred, and since, whenever we declared our personal liberation from living with a potentially mortal disease. We underestimated our capacity for coping with danger, and we underestimated the need to see ourselves as in charge, not helpless in the face of that danger. We underestimated the fear and lack of patience. We were panicked but—living in a rugged individualism/patriarchy—pretended not to be. We talked endlessly about when we could return to normal.
We especially underestimated the impact on children—on their emotional security, their need to play and learn with children their own age, their need to succeed at tasks set for them, as they built a mature personality. We’re still feeling those insecurities in our schools and often, responding with more pressure, rather than flexibility and the gift of time. We’re still having trouble getting kids to show up at school, a flashing red light for school leaders.
The pandemic was socially disruptive.It took families away from landmark gatherings—weddings, holidays and even funerals. It ruined existing workplace norms; we’re still trying to hire workers and adjust prices. The entire labor market has been disrupted, and the people in control don’t like the backlash of workers (including teachers) demanding more money. Mask-wearing (to keep either wearer or the people they encountered safe) became controversial.
The pandemic unsettled traditional religious beliefs and practices.Injecting the divine into a global pandemic was confusing to believers: Did God send us a lethal pandemic for a reason? If you trusted in Jesus, did that mean you didn’t need to wear a mask? Attendance at churches, which impacted their ability to stay afloat financially, dwindled—causing many churches to close, and others to put more faith in a Christian nationalism theology, where humans were in control.
The pandemic was politically disruptive.Donald Trump’s leadership style during the last year of his presidency—the Ivermectin and the bleach, the assertion that we’d be packing the churches by Easter, his drive around in a limosine to wave at fans while being treated for COVID at Walter Reed—was horrifying. But establishment of the Big Lie and the January 6th Insurrection at the Capitol ripped the fabric of American politics more than the previous hundred years’ worth of wars and rebellions. For every person who felt relief at having Uncle Joe in the WH, passing useful legislation, rebuilding international relationships and remembering the dead, there was an angry voter who thought he’d stolen the presidency (and pissed off that he still had to wear a mask in the grocery store).
Which brings me back to the last days of 2024, where we—like the heedless citizens in “Don’t Look Up”—are standing on the tracks of democracy, facing an oncoming train, but feeling too hopeless to muster a response.
Would it be too 2016 of me to suggest that this is absurd, embarrassing, worrisome stuff? As 2024 ends, the prevailing attitude toward the manic stylings and overheated threats of the once and future President, even among his diehard critics, seems to be more one of purposeful indifference than of explicit resistance; call it surrender or simply resignation to the political reality that Trump, despite it all, is twenty-five days away from returning to the Oval Office.
Or, as Paul Waldman suggests in a terrific piece, everything is just awful: You can date it back as far as you like, but the prime suspect is the covid pandemic, a trauma that still profoundly affects us. That’s true not just for those who lost family members or businesses, or whose kids basically lost a year of schooling, but for everyone, the way it blanketed the country in misery and left us at each other’s throats. One of the most revealing data points is that during the pandemic, pedestrian deaths skyrocketed. People were just driving angry.
Back in the early days of the pandemic, sitting here, lonely, at my computer, I imagined a dozen ways that surviving a global pandemic might lead to improvements in our habits and way of life. Read it—it’s embarrassing to imagine that I believed a country that chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton could turn the corner on a dozen issues and needs, courtesy of a pandemic that brought us together. We should all know better, now.
A couple of days ago, Dr. Vin Gupta (speaking of pandemic heroes) wrote this: I’d recommend everyone regardless of medical risk bring a mask on your airplane journey, a disinfectant wipe to clean the seat you’re in and hand sanitizer. It’s going to be on you alone to protect your health. Warning signs are everywhere.
There you have it. It’s on you. Me, too. Let’s work together.
If you’ve been paying attention to the DOGE Brothers—Elon-n-Vivek—lately, as they explain their personal theories around the failures of American parents to instill tenacity and a work ethic in our young citizens, you may have seen Ramaswamy’s rant on our deficit culture: A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell” … will not produce the best engineers. More movies like “Whiplash,” fewer reruns of “Friends.”
Ramaswamy goes on at some length, all Tiger Dad, about the virtues of immigrant parenting vs. native-born slacker parenting. As a veteran teacher, and thus long-time observer of American parenting, I think he’s flat-out wrong. True, there are parents who simply want to make things easy for their kids. But there are also plenty of non-immigrant parents who run a tight ship, academically, pushing their kids toward competitive excellence, breathing down their necks. The idea of hard work leading to a better life is not exclusive to immigrants.
It’s tempting to ignore the DOGE boys’ blah-blah on Twitter, although our incoming President has anointed them fixers of the entire political economy. It’s hard to see how your average Trump voter will suddenly decide that it’s time to claw their way to STEM careers via choosing the right TV charactersto admire, or deciding not to (Vivek’s words) venerate mediocrity any more.
But we’re not going to nurture talent and work toward genuine accomplishment via movies like Whiplash, which is possibly the worst movie about education ever produced.
OK, maybe not the worst movie ever. But a stylish, seductive acting tour de force based on All the Wrong Stuff. An excellent showcase for two major talents–J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller–but with precisely the wrong message, for young people who want to excel in spite of setbacks, for educators, and for anyone who ever hoped making music was a rewarding, life-affirming pleasure instead of just another competition.
Several years ago, I had a very talented drummer–call him “Zach”– in one of my middle school bands. Zach was a natural–great innate rhythmic sense, great unforced stick technique and most important, a kind of fearlessness you don’t often see in an 8th grade percussionist. When something went wrong in the music-reading process he–perfectly illustrating the cliché– never missed a beat. Zach was what teachers call a “good kid,” to boot–polite, friendly, and willing to let other kids have the spotlight often, even though he knew he was a better drummer.
Zach’s mother was a physician, and at our first parent-teacher conference, she let me know that my ace drummer’s biological father (someone he now saw only sporadically, once or twice a year) was also a musician. She was clear: her son’s formal musical education would be ending with 8th grade; it was “too risky” to have Zach get involved in the high school band program, even though he was interested in doing so.
Zach was bound for better things than music, she said, adding a few bits of folk wisdom about how musicians aren’t trustworthy, goal-oriented or even rational, and make terrible husbands and fathers. It was her story, and she was sticking to it.
When I saw Whiplash I remembered that conversation with Zach’s mother. Because Whiplash is pretty much a dishonest conflation of myths (the only way to pursue excellence is through cut-throat competition) and truths (a lot of music teachers embrace that myth, the blood-and-thunder school of music teaching). The artist as anti-social and single-minded, driven stereotype.
When I watched J.K. Simmons, playing Fletcher, the tyrannical jazz band director, scream “MY tempo! MY tempo!” I flashed back to all the petty dictators I’ve seen on the conductor’s box, over 50 years of being a professional musician and school music teacher. I’ve witnessed at least a dozen school band directors say the exact same thing, transforming into little Napoleans, using their baton as weapon, “proving” that students must be prodded into worshipful obedience in order to play well.
Here’s the thing: you can be a superb, meticulous, demanding music teacher without being a hostile jerk. You can also be a driven, determined, even obsessed music student, bent on creative brilliance and perfection, without being inhuman or ruthless.
In a movie supposedly about “what it takes” to achieve true excellence in performance, we never saw Fletcher teach, or drummer Miles Teller’s ambitious character, Nieman, learn anything about music via guidance, example or instruction. Everything that was accomplished happened via psychological manipulation: Terror. Lies. Tricks. Bodily abuse. Even, God help us, suicide.
It was a movie designed to prove Zach’s mother right: music is a rough, vicious game, filled with people whose talent means more to them than family or human relationships. It’s about ego–and winning.
Except–it isn’t, really. Music is available to everyone, from the supremely talented to the amiable, out-of-tune amateur. It’s what we were meant to do as human beings–sing and play and express our own ideas.
So—it was just one of those re-posted memes: a chalkboard suggesting that the “old days”—when the very rich built and named hospitals, schools and libraries—were preferable to whatever the very rich are doing with their money today.
There are a lot of ways to argue against that tossed-off sentiment: We shouldn’t have to rely on the beneficence of the wealthy in order to have good public services, for starters. Some of that wealth was ill-gotten, and some philanthropists were Not Good People, as well. Why can’t everybody be like McKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos)?
On the other hand, I was born in a hospital named for a local benefactor. I was a card-carrying patron of a Carnegie Library and attended college where every damned building seemed to be funded by someone with lots more money than I’d ever have.
Furthermore, Forbes magazine reinforced my belief that the 21st century uber-rich aren’t very forthcoming any more with dough for public buildings and programs: How generous are the super-rich, really? Not very, according to Forbes’ research. The members of the 2023 Forbes 400 list have collectively given more than $250 billion to charity, by our count—less than 6% of their combined net worth.
I’d rather have the theatres, hospitals, academic buildings and libraries. Or—here’s a thought—what about someone with fabulous wealth funding a climate change initiative? Or ending poverty?
Andrew Carnegie funded the building of 2,509 “Carnegie Libraries” worldwide between 1883 and 1929. Of those, 1,795 were in the United States: 1,687 public and 108 academic libraries. Others are scattered throughout Europe, South Africa, Barbados, Australia, and New Zealand. He also funded museums, established an endowment for international peace, supported scientific research, and other civic initiatives, including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He bought or upgraded pipe organs in over 7600 churches.
And, yup, Andrew Carnegie was a robber baron in the most derogative sense of the word, using violence and ruthlessness in controlling the ill-paid and exploited workers who built his fortune. He was also an immigrant, who came to America penniless, and you know how Americans love a rags-to-riches tale. Biographers suggest he had an attack of conscience as he aged, and spent more and more of his wealth on civic projects.
In posting the chalkboard meme, I drew a lot of commentary because I mentioned Carnegie and all those libraries. Surprisingly, a lot of the negative feedback came from librarians, who popped up with passionate responses about Carnegie’s insider trading, sending goons to beat up strikers and trying to suppress the uprisings of the great unwashed by building them libraries.
It occurred to me that those librarians were universally well-read and not about to blindly worship old, filthy rich, controlling white men. Although, you know, thanks for the library.
Still. Although nobody can exactly defend the Titans of the Gilded Age, they left a lot of architecture and institutions for us to use, more than a century later. What have our still-living titans done with their immense wealth?
There’s a deep-seated belief in libertarian-rampant Silicon Valley that the government and our political processes are slow and messy; to that end, many techies, mad with power, have attempted to start their own partially or fully-privatized cities. Gates’ entire philanthropic vision, exemplified by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is predicated on the idea that rich people and technocrats know best how to manage the levers of society, and the rest of us peons should sit back and let the rich techies run our lives.
Honestly? I’d rather have buildings and state-of-the-art equipment than Billionaire Ideas changing our fundamental institutions.
Which brings us to Elon Musk, who has promised his and Donald Trump’sproposed economic policies could lead to “initial severe overreaction” and “temporary hardship” in the economy if Trump wins the election. Trump’s mass deportations and Musk’s $2 trillion cut to federal spending could disrupt industries, lead to labor shortages, and increase prices.
Hmmm. Couldn’t he just build us a nice hospital or school or library?
But I really like tracking what I read. First, it helps when you’re intermittently reading a series by the same author, and the titles are interchangeable. It’s a lot better than taking a book home from the library, and 10 pages in, when it’s starting to feel familiar, wishing you’d kept a list.
Then, there are the easily confused books. The Woman in the Window. Or the train. Or Cabin 10. Or just… The Women. (I’ve read ‘em all—can’t recommend any of them.)
For about 10 years, I’ve been trying to read 100 books a year, and for eight of those years, I’ve made the goal, and sometimes significantly exceeded it. It’s a nice round number. I give myself credit for physical books read as well as audio books (usually a small percentage of the total—they take more time). Fiction and non-fiction. And I only log the ones I finish.
But this year, I’m way behind. I blame Donald Trump.
The only other year that I didn’t make the goal was 2016 (and got off to a slow start in 2017, what with the Womans March and joining groups and deciding to run for office and knitting pink hats).
This year, I was about 8 books ahead of my goal in June. When Biden dropped out of the race, and Kamala Harris quickly became The One, I found that the long stretches of time dedicated to reading were transferred to activities centered around politics. Including a ridiculous amount of time spent where I am right now: in front of my computer.
It’s summer, I’d tell myself. Check a big fat beach read out of the library! When I did, it would sit in my reading corner until I brought it back, a month later. A month filled with doom-scrolling, sign-delivering, attending debates, wading in hope, drowning in despair.
And in the last month? No books. Just endless commentary. Seventeen takes on the same depressing story (Matt Gaetz? Really?), each with its unique, snarky—and depressing—viewpoint.
Speaking as a person whose most-read column was a screed against the Pizza Hut Book-it Campaign, because it turned kids reading for pleasure into a competition where discounted pizza coupons were the prize, you’d think I could blow this off, and just be happy I read a lot of books.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” (R. Buckminster Fuller)
Buckminster Fuller’s well-known quote was a touchstone for me, in my 30-odd years—and some of them were really odd—of classroom teaching. Whenever things at school started feeling oppressive or dumb—there’s got to be a better way to do X—coming up with a new plan was always a better bet than complaining about the old way. Launch first, ask permission later.
Why fight back against typical practices, if you can devise a better way? School used to be the perfect place to institute new ideas. Let a thousand pilot projects bloom.
Our goal is not to switch places with the bully, but to end bullying. We focus on tactics—how do we beat the bully?—but don’t remember to prepare for the day when the bully is no more. If we don’t have a vision for our desired future, how can we plan to achieve it? When we confront the bully, we reclaim our imagination.
If we confront the bully, we reclaim our imagination. We can create a vision for our desired future. Makes sense to me. Feels a lot like Buckminster Fuller: Come up with something better, then make it happen. Stop fighting.
Now– McKesson, a decade ago, was a Teach for America alum, a charter school supporter, and later, a school administrator. He seems to have left public education (and all its flaws) behind, focusing on activism, BLM, social media and podcasts. He wrote a book. He fought with people on Twitter.
But– I think he’s right. If all we’re doing right now (guiltily raising hand) is re-posting that video clip of Linda McMahon getting body-slammed, we’re not helping preserve, let alone improve, public education. When our focus is on fighting bad policy, especially policy that hasn’t yet been enacted, we need to have better ideas—dreams, if you will—about what public education should look like in our back pocket.
Donald Trump’s vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America’s schools of perceived “ wokeness ” and “left-wing indoctrination.” The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports.
Trump’s first term was full of rhetoric and short on action, all Betsy DeVos and grizzly bears, when it came to education policy. Lots more anti-public education non-profits sprang up (and some died), and lots of charter schools also sprang up, using public funds, then failed.But the Department of Education chugged on, as usual, and 85% of kids were enrolled in a public school, a slow slide down from 90% a decade ago.
All human learning is interconnected. Depriving children of rich, complex experiences in the service of dull training for standardized math and reading exams actually stunts their math and reading development. Ironic and dumb.
Maybe it’s time to create that vision of what schooling could look like—for the same money, with the same workforce, in the same buildings. Imagining that future.
I have a few ideas about that. What does your vision for public education look like?
When I first retired (from the classroom, not from working in education), I moved away from the school district where I had lived and taught. I’d been there for well over 30 years and had seen—up close and personal– the power of school boards to impact educational climate in a school district. I’d been watching through four decades of local policy-making— the good, the bad and the out-and-out malicious.
I’ve got stories.
And I’ve written about the town where I lived and taught. In spite of its flaws, it was usually a good place to teach, if the definition of “good” is engaged parents, talented colleagues and kids who were encouraged at home to achieve.
The quality of school board leadership occasionally faltered over that time—with most of the squabbling over how to get by while spending a lot less—but there were long stretches where the school board served as a benign and supportive presence.
Board member says: This gets into the weaponization of empathy, where empathy is taught as the highest goal, the highest order. Do we teach empathy to the effect where students disregard parental authority—and accept anything and everything? Do we teach kids that any kind of judgment is bad?
Wait. What? Who is he accusing? And what is the weaponization of empathy?
Too much empathy leads to kids defying their parents, evidently. The moral ambiguity of school confuses students. That’s their big fear?
As a long-time classroom veteran who spent the beginning of every year working diligently to get kids to respect their peers, and care for other people’s feelings and property, this struck me as downright stupid.
A social media convo developed around the clip, with commenters suggesting the end result of too much empathy was Doctors Without Borders or the Peace Corps.
Eventually somebody remarked:
It should come as no surprise that the Heritage Foundation has taken this term and used it as its own way of fighting against Social-Emotional Learning, and any other academic tools to help students.
If one of your school board members uses this term, they are in some way being educated by, or they are using talking points from the Heritage Foundation.
Then, the other shoe dropped. Aha. Weaponizing empathy is a Heritage Foundation thing, the concept of their plan, so to speak.
But hey—if right-wingers get control of a school board, they can micro-manage a district, with thousands of students, turning it into a place where empathy—caring for and about their fellow students– is forbidden or scorned.
Last week, in Howell, Michigan, the town where I used to live, a local youth theatre group was putting on a production of the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank—probably the same version put on in my high school, back in the 1960s, when that kind of drama-club effort was considered a worthy stretch.
This performance was happening at—of all places—the local American Legion Post. And a few veterans were hanging around outside when some junior Nazis, masked and waving swastika flags, showed up. They called the cops, who arrived promptly, then escorted the flag wavers across the street.
There have been other hate marches in the county this year. Not going to link to articles, but the same group of masked dudes with Nazi gear and Trump flags have been showing up on the regular around town, on overpasses and at outdoor events in the summer, mixing a little terror and intimidation into life in a small, generally placid, Midwestern town. Among my local teacher friends, there have been quiet on-line conversations—some colleagues have had these young men in class and recognize them.
We’re in for trouble.
It was predictable, no matter which way the election went. All the disreputable talk and threats and violence have been set loose; the election just gave them a bump. The particular young men who were being babysat by the Sherriff’s men told bystanders that they were protecting “Pureville.” Doesn’t get more explicit than that.
And public schools, the stage on which society builds their hopes for the future, will suffer.
Nobody reading this, I’m confident, now believes that what’s been set in motion will die down quickly. To wit:
There is the ongoing flood of racist texts to Black students, including middle schoolers, across multiple states. These anonymous texts tell them to report to the plantation. Some of the texts address the students by name.
There’s the whole “Your Body/My Choice” assault: Over a 24-hour period following Trump’s election, there was a 4,600% increase in the usage of the phrase “your body, my choice” on X. The phrase has made its way offline as well, with young girls and parents across the country using social media to share instances of harassment involving it.
And they are undeniably in the just-getting-started phase.
Most of what I’ve been reading in Ed World over the past two weeks have been pieces on education policy. Will Trump close the Department of Education? What about Head Start, Title I and IDEA? Will RFK Jr. be crossing the country to destroy vaccine mandates?
In practice, both horrifying and devastating. But I’m more interested in the daily lives of schools, right now. As policies, guardrails and traditional practices fall, it will take time to vacate safety codes and equity-supporting statutes.
Fueling the racist, xenophobic, and homophobic attacks on public school curricula, teachers and school librarians, and on Black, Hispanic, gay and transgender children who are now portrayed by Trump and his MAGA crowd as dangerous or threatening.
On the first page of the introduction to Project 2025:America under the ruling and cultural elite … children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.
These are things that the chronic public school critics and disaffected students can address now: Redefining pornography. Tormenting kids who are trying to understand their own sexuality. Bringing a gun to school or taking one downtown. Terrorizing Black and brown classmates, for fun. Bringing that slut who refuses to go out with you to heel.
None of these involves changing policy or shutting down the Department of Education.
I read the NY Times daily (I know, I know…) and am an avid follower of their political focus groups. Little sketched heads with thumbnail descriptors (“Bill, white, Florida, 73 years old, voted Trump in 2020”) and their responses to some pretty good policy- and character-focused questions.
To which, they give answers which make me wonder just who their 9th grade Civics teachers were. Lately, the spotlight has been on “undecided” voters, nearly all of whom, IMHO, decided long ago whether to vote and which holes they’ll be punching, behind the curtain, but are anxious to be recognized and asked about their views.
In addition, the 67 million people who tuned into the debate on Tuesday got an incredibly clear picture of the candidates’ character and policy goals (or lack thereof).
Here are the people who interest me: The timid. The folks who claim to not be interested in politics. The ones who blanch at the critiquing of men too old and confused to lead the most powerful nation on the planet. Who just want to, you know, get along.
Some of these are people whose votes represent old habits, the influence of their social circles. Some of them are fearful.
Whether that’s fear of change (Will the country finally get a woman in the White House? Will a new president mean that I lose privileges I currently enjoy?)–or fear of breaking away from baked-in but no longer relevant beliefs (Republicans are pro-business and therefore better understand economics, right?), it’s hard to say.
Fact-checking engages only the most involved and informed voters. It doesn’t matter how many times you point out who wrote Project 2025, and how deeply they are enmeshed in the Trump campaign, if you got an oversized postcard from Trump (got four this week) saying he’s disavowed it, well—who are you going to trust?
Since President Biden’s withdrawal in July, I have joined three Facebook groups and re-activated my interest in another, all groups of women who are planning to vote for Kamala Harris. One group goes all the way back to the Womens March in 2017. Collectively, there are over half a million women reading and posting to these particular groups. And there are hundreds more of these pages, around the country.
And what gets posted and discussed—long, long discussion threads—is fascinating.
It started out with middle-aged women in pearls, blue nail polish and Chuck Taylors. The things they’ve made—hand-painted signs, KAMALA quilts, jewelry and So. Much. Blue. It was fun to skim, and thousands of new women were joining every day, calling out their towns and looking for friends’ names.
People would post stuff like: My husband says no yard signs, so I just made this blue wreath (beautiful photo) for our front door, and a few hundred women would compliment the wreath and a handful might wonder out loud why the wreath-maker doesn’t get a vote, re: yard signs.
The tone is generally upbeat—finding each other, sharing values—but there have been many, many thoughtful threads discussing how to deal with Trump voters among your friends and family. Some of those conversations are heartbreaking; you realize how divided we have become, and why.
There’s chat about issues, including but not limited to abortion. In every thread, there is someone who says Thank God for this group. I have nobody to talk to.
It all comes down to circles of influence. Who do we talk to? Who do we believe?
That’s why the post-it note campaign, reminding women that their vote is private, via a little fluorescent square in a public or business restroom, moved me to near-tears.
It’s easy, now, to think that my vote has always been my own, but I’ve lived through eras when women voted as their husbands told them to. My grandmother got to vote, for the first time, in 1924, at the age of 34. I asked her if she remembered who she voted for. She couldn’t, but she did remember asking her younger brother who to vote for. And she voted for that party for the rest of her life—another 70 years!
This may be the year that women decide to take back our rights.
Every now and then, I pull it up, shaking my head over the concept that an unprecedented global pandemic could shake loose great ideas and get folks to—tick-tock!—act on them, a kind of “if you only had six months to live…” scenario for the nation.
In my own defense, I had barely been out of the house for weeks and had been fixated on the horrifying numbers and clown-show daily ‘briefings’ from the White House. Doom-scrolling and baking aren’t conducive to embracing political realities.
I still think they were good, actionable options for change, however. Where I was totally wrong: the communal lessons that might be learned from surviving a pandemic, together. In fact, I was most wrong about the “together” part, which never really got a toehold, even as the virus took its terrible toll.
Some of us are uniters. And some are dividers. Lately, the dividers have been winning.
Response to the blog could be summarized as: I wish. People wished that the pandemic would lead to better health care, better air and water quality, renewed friendships. But they didn’t see even a global catastrophe moving the needle here in the land of the brave. The one good thing that came from the pandemic where I live? A third of my county finally got the internet.
How about a complete re-do of American elections? For once, the hype is true: this election matters more than any in your lifetime. If the Democrats hang tough (and they should), we might get national mail-in voting with other policies that make registration and voting easier for the November election. Americans overwhelmingly want this.
Thought experiment: Imagine that Congress passed a law limiting primaries to six months, still way longer than other first-world nations, and set a national primary date with top-three, rank-order voting. That would mean campaigning for November 2020 would begin next month! Knowing what we know now about the world—would debates be about more than the horse race and which state votes first and gotcha questions? If we overturned Citizens United, and set spending limits (again, like other nations), we might ultimately get ourselves a reasonable set of qualified candidates and a fair election.
Am I glad Joe Biden eventually prevailed in 2020? Absolutely. And I agree with all the commentary about his successful presidency and heroic decision to stand down.
But I am flat-out amazed at what has happened in the past week, with so little primary-like fuss and fanfare, soundbites, rallies and pounced-on gaffes. And I can’t help wondering why we haven’t shut down the perpetual campaign machine in favor of limiting the time and money spent, given the results we get. Is this about the media and revenue streams?
I wish I had a dollar for every time someone complained about TV ads, mailings, yard signs and repellent messaging. And if I had a dollar for every voter who didn’t pay attention to politics, I’d be in the Forbes 500.
The three-month campaign ahead of us feels positively refreshing. It will be intense—it should be—but it will be over soon. Michigan voters can send in their ballots 40 days before November 5th. The end of September.
Our national political narrative [is] finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don’t know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, under-polled, creative measures to change, grow and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us.
The word I like most here is “urgent.” Things can go wrong with a long, leisurely primary season where a party eventually settles on just the right candidate. (See: 2016.) They’ve gone wrong in any number of elections, convention or primary, over two centuries plus. Sometimes, making a good-faith choice and jumping off the electoral cliff works out.
Teacher in a strange land 