Hi!

First: y’all are excellent. Thanks so much for your ideas and questions about how to get meaningfully involved this election year. (Keep ’em coming!) I am on it, researching/reading/talking to my wisest people about What To Do.

Today, I’d like to do some level-setting (she said, deploying her sexiest-possible introduction).

I'm hearing that we're all feeling dread (of a more MAGA future), fear (of overwhelm), and desire (for efficacy).

That's a lot!

Obviously, I recommend contemplation as a way to deal with the big feelings. But I also have a couple of framing ideas to help us prepare for our work this year...before we get into a citizenship to-do list.

Here’s what I’ve got, based on my research so far.

Kermit typing
accurate!

Two frames for our thinking about this election cycle


1. Care

Everyone here knows how to do caring work. We raise people and animals, we restore houses, we tend gardens, we maintain relationships. In those contexts, we (ideally) understand that our care is both imperfect and indispensable.

American democracy is ours to care for. Our garden to tend, our grandmother to call, our puppy to train. If people like us don’t tend it, no one else is going to.

There are people who want to run this country by and for themselves. (Notice: “run” is different from “tend.”) They want us to believe that it’s ALL TOO COMPLICATED and there’s NOTHING THAT AVERAGE PEOPLE CAN DO—because when we believe that, we leave the job to them.

Let’s not.

All of which to say: I don’t think our work in this election cycle will be substantively different from our work in any of our care/tending roles. It will require regular attention. It will require boring tasks. It will require some of our money. It will be both joyful and tedious. It will sometimes feel hopeless, and it will sometimes feel like the wind is at our backs.

(NB: As a woman, I know—trust!—that it is exhausting to be assigned a new Care Project: emotional labor, etc. What’s NOT exhausting is to be offered a balanced and active relational strategy to replace an obsessive or avoidant one. My thinking here is: We’re already in a relationship with democracy; currently it’s making us miserable; we do actually have excellent, balanced coping mechanisms in our other relationships; let’s apply them to democracy.)

A woman pushing a stroller with 6 preschoolers.
We're already doing a WHOLE LOT, I know.

2. Balance

After 2016, a lot of us became extremely unbalanced: suddenly we were news-and-politics-obsessed. We went from sitting to sprinting. And by 2021, we burned out hard. Now, when we're asked to “get involved politically,” we think about that manic (and tbh often ineffective) sprint, and we feel something like PTSD.

As in any caring relationship, we’ll need to find balance. I’m seeing a need for myself to balance…

  • …commitment & experimentation
  • …reactivity & responsiveness
  • …input & output
  • …high-flying ideals & boring tasks
  • …local & national issues
  • …a love for democracy & the urge to fix it
  • …self-awareness (“is this for me?”) & group-awareness (“we’ve all gotta help”)
  • …this presidential election (which is uniquely important) & our everyday citizenship (which is always important)
  • …feeling like we’re making a difference & feeling like we’re just one in a crowd
  • …work & rest.

Probably some of these pairs resonate with you, and some don’t. The key point: neither obsession nor avoidance appears on the list.

I know none of this is a STEP-ONE TO-DO ITEM. But given what I’m hearing and learning so far, I think it’s extremely important.

The tl;dr:
This year (and beyond) we’ll need to actively care for our democracy, with all that “active care” entails; and we’ll need to seek balance—not obsession or avoidance—in that work.

To-do items to come.

What do you think of this? Is it all, like, glaringly obvious? Does it land? How/not? xoxo