Reach out
As a lifelong cynic, I have always hated feel-good pieces like the one I’m about to write. I’ve even had a problem with the phrase I used in the headline, distrusting the usage of those two words nearly every time I read them in stories about people who claimed they had “reached out” to a person or a group for a completely bogus purpose, usually covering their ass.
But this state we’ve got ourselves in as a country is different. You’re probably as tired as I am of reading that our democracy is in crisis because of you-know-who and his MAGA you-know-whats. But it is. This week we’ve been hammered by Trump’s claim that he wants to “nationalize” the elections in 15 states. Not all the states, mind you. Just the 15 that he’s afraid will tip the balance enough that Republicans will lose control of the House and the Senate.
It’s not going to happen. The Constitution is perfectly clear in Article One that the states are granted the power to regulate Congressional elections, with Congress itself given the power to “alter” the regulations of the elections in the states by passing laws. Nowhere does the Constitution say that the president is involved in any way in the election of members of the House and the Senate in the states.
But…agita. What’s he going to do? What kind of scams does he think he can come up with?
We are beset by questions like this practically every day because Donald Trump does not seek to govern as president, he seeks to rule. And so we worry, and we organize, and we worry some more.
It kind of startles me to realize that I’ve been writing this column for five years, having begun in January of 2021, and I have endeavored to write a column nearly every day. What I noticed pretty quickly by reading comments from readers is that many people feel isolated and alone in their struggles to understand what has happened to us as citizens over the last 11 years. Way too many of us are feeling divorced from what is going on around us. Some of it is surely that we don’t recognize the nation we have become, with people given free rein to express racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia that we now realize was there all along, if tucked away in large part beneath the surface of our political life. We have watched the political leaders of one of our political parties exploit prejudice and hatred for personal and political gain.
It has been depressing; there is no other word for it.
Some solutions are emerging. I wrote last night about one – how the citizens of Minneapolis were able to pull together and run ICE out of their city. We’ve had No Kings rallies and marches. We have won special elections even in places like Texas and off-year elections for governor and other state-wide offices in Virginia and New Jersey. Things have been looking up. There are glimmers of hope. A great cloud may not be lifting, but it’s at least shifting.
But the hope that’s in the air isn’t great enough to have affected us personally, where it counts. The modern word for it is that we’re “siloed.” We tend to endure things alone.
There is something we can do, however. We can…here’s that phrase again…reach out. To our families. To our friends. To people we know casually, people we work with, even to people we encounter in our daily lives.
Pick up the phone, write an email, send a text. Get in contact with someone you haven’t talked to or heard from in a while. Ask them how they’re doing. Do something positive. Contribute to a food bank. Attend a meeting of a local Democratic political group. Campaigns for local and Congressional races will be starting up. Make contact. Ask if you can contribute in some way, volunteer for outreach to voters, whatever the campaigns are doing in the early days of running in a primary or for reelection.
It’s still cold here in Pennsylvania and elsewhere around the country, but I promise that spring is coming, both on the calendar and in our politics. There isn’t a pill you can take for the kind of depression we’ve been going through, but there is another kind of medicine. Act. Live your life. This is our country. Be proud of who you are – who we are. We are not alone. We are patriots. We are Americans, each and every one of us, and we love our country enough to care about people other than ourselves.
Thanks for the great advice on reaching out.
May I add a suggestion to your list? Go take a sign to a pop-up protest (or take two friends and create your own). Take some upbeat music and turn it up loud. While you're there, talk about the world you want to live in. Talk about the joy you still feel: where, when and why. Talk about what gives you how. And smile and wave to everyone who drives by, just for an hour. I'm guessing you will come home refreshed, happier, more joyful. And you will create, and tap into, the joy and how that will get us through this. Best of all, it will be yours, and you can re-create it any time you want. We have the power. Let's show it.
What you wrote is one of the reasons why I mail unsolicited out of the blue my jars of preserves to you and others. I ask for nothing in return. I started making them during the COVID pandemic and then just felt that mailing them out to people that I knew was the right thing to do during stressful times.