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Lake Chabot Park this morning

Grateful today for air I can breathe, rain-damp parks to walk in, a novella over the halfway mark, the small hopes of this past election. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.

I don’t talk as much about politics as I should. It’s disheartening, and frightening, to see that the causes I marched for thirty years ago are still the causes I’m marching for. This country has always been a dark place; anything built on a legacy of violence, of unaddressed violence, would be a dark place. But it’s also my home. It’s the macrocosm version of a toxic relative: you love them yet you can’t stand them; you dread confronting them yet you want to shake them and yell at them until they transform into the better person you know they can be. Perhaps that’s why Tr*mp, now: he’s what we can point to when we ask this country do you really want to be this? Remember who you were going to be when you grew up – is this how you see yourself, is this what you want to become?

We can be better than this. We can all be better than this. We can take those founding ideals – ideals meant for a certain class and race and culture – and show them that we “others”, we the unacknowledged, we the fractional, can not only be that but be better than that. We can be a true democracy, not a paranoid republic. I believe this because I have to, because I won’t give the bastards the satisfaction of forgetting we can be better.

So please, please vote. You can vote out of hope, you can vote to say fuck you, you can vote to express those two things at once. Claim your space. Claim your rights. Show them who we really are.

. . .  if you haven’t already done so.

This will be the seventh presidential election that I am eligible to vote in, and I have to say that never has so much felt at stake, as if our very future is at stake. I don’t think the world will end in January, whatever the outcome; but I believe we risk skewing our collective compass, and undoing that damage will be the work of generations. Do we inch forward or swing back? Do we choose the difficult path of upwards and outwards, or do we recoil into insularity?

Every vote matters. Exercise your franchise. May all our voices be heard.