EPISODE 339: MAKING AN ELECTION, PART II--THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

I know Halloween was the day before yesterday, but is it me or does it seem like the real horror story is ahead. Tuesday is Election Day, and I feel like many of us have been looking toward it since oh, I don’t know, two years ago? And after the surprise that was the 2016 election, there’s no trusting polls or one’s own instincts. We don’t know anything until we know everything.

Many of us on the left are asking variations of the same question: my fellow Americans, are you as callous or blind as we fear you are? And you know, as much as that question sort of presumes the worst, I actually think it comes from a place of belief in those voters. Our fear stems from a general belief that people are better than we might expect or sometimes see. That the real America is the one that shows up to catastrophes to pitch in to help one another without a moment’s hesitation, the one that gathers at Marvel movies and enjoys one another’s company without ever even wondering about the politics of one’s neighbors, or spends a Friday night on Twitter with a million strangers kidding about the ridiculous length of the World Series game.

Did you get to see any of the social media commentary around Game Three? I just sort of stumbled upon it as I was about to go to bed, and I’m so happy I did. It was just a ton of people sitting around exhausted in the 7thhour of a baseball game trying to make each other laugh. And doing it pretty well.

I got into the act a bit myself.

(Was really getting tired at this point.)

Literally no one liked this tweet, but it is my absolute favorite.

And the thing that really hit me was, this is kind of how Twitter used to be before the last election. Imperfect, absolutely, and deeply problematic in some corners, but also less frenzied and outraged and more...fun.

On the one hand maybe it’s just another sign of how much things have deteriorated, getting that little taste of what is no longer. Except, there it was, you know, not gone at all. Right there, pumping on all cylinders. Instead of bittersweet there’s something hopeful about that. The good stuff is all still there, buried deep perhaps but eager for the chance to rise back to the surface.

Things may generally be garbage, but there’s other than that, more than that going on beneath the surface. As in, it’s not going to be like this forever.

But will it be like this for the next two years though? That’s the question we’re asking. And more generally, will these people whose tweets about Joe Buck we love so much disappoint us – no, not just disappoint us, hurt us again?

It’s such an interesting thing. We vote individually, and yet our fates are completely tied up in one another. No matter how well we’ve worked to protect ourselves from the issues or challenges of our fellow human beings, come Election Day we are still vulnerable, and always will be. It’s terrible and also an essential part of how we believe this country should work.

So that’s us Tuesday, I think, gathered around televisions populated with news anchors standing in front of very expensive screens/monitors/walls. Are you all as bad as I thought, we wonder. Say it ain’t so.

++

I don’t know really have any sense of how Tuesday is going to go. 2016 has been such a mess I don’t know that I can handle the possibility that it might stay the same or get worse. That people will somehow not see or just not care about what’s going on.

A friend I haven’t seen in many years recently stopped through LA; “This country,” he said, shaking his head.

“I’ll tell you one thing, I am definitely not voting for Trump again.”

We now cut to a live feed of my internal reaction to this comment.

But I do believe there’s more going on around us than the bad stuff. Even in the world of politics, there’s people like Jerry Brown, outgoing governor of California, who scoffs at politicians’ talk of legacy as “a way to make people feel they’re a little more important than they are and their life is not as empty as it actually is.” Or there’s Beto Rourke, the Texas sweat-drenched Democrat who has no pollsters, refuses PAC money and stumps not just to win but to try and convince people to believe in our country. Or there’s Senator Heidi Heitkamp, the North Dakota Republican who voted no on Brett Kavanaugh, recalling the Native American survivors of domestic violence she’d fought for, and in the process perhaps tanked her chances of re-election.

There are good news stories all around us, actually, with record numbers of women running for office, Muslims,Native Americans, LGBTQ candidates, and many other people of color and first time candidates. They won’t all win, maybe even most won’t, but all of them running at the same time is exceptional and also inspirational.

And this is just 2018. Who can say what 2020 holds?

++

It’s a short one today. But I did find a couple really exceptional links.

This is the first person storyof a Swedish girl who found a 1500 year old sword in a lake and some people are saying that makes her the King of Sweden. She responds: “I wouldn’t mind being queen for a day, but when I grow up I want to be a vet. Or an actor in Paris.”

This is a tweet about a doctor who dances with the children he does surgery on to help cheer them up.

This is a site where until November 6th you can officially oppose the proposed Trump Administration policy of the indefinite detention of immigrant children and families. The government is forced to accept comments as part of its evaluation process until election day.

And this is a clip from a wonderful British show “Would I Lie for You”, in which famous people try to fool one another with stories that either really happened to them or did not. This particular clip, starring a British comedian called Bob Mortimer, is one of the funniest bits of television I have watched in a long time. (And no, I don’t know who Chris Rhea is either; nonetheless I have now watched this video three times.)

Keep your head up this week. Don’t lose heart. No one has the right to steal your hopefulness from you. I’ll be sitting right here watching the returns by your side.

Here we go.