'peace' without action is just an idea. 'friend' without justice is just a word.
This election day, I'm obviously feeling anxious. But I'm also feeling overwhelmed with hope and gratitude.
Election day is here, and this year it doubles as my birthday.
This sort of thing comes with the territory of an early November birthday, so honestly it’s not so bad. Or at least not any worse than anything else that’s going on in 2020. The death and devastation of this year have been so beyond comprehension. Over 230,000 and counting Americans are dead of a virus as our nation’s leaders have allowed us to lead the world in incompetence and apathy.
But it didn’t need to be this way, and it doesn’t need to be this way. We live in a democratic society that grants us the right and privilege to vote. I just have to hope that people do so in record numbers, in such a way that cannot be denied or erased. And that this week begins our nation stepping toward the light, a place where science and empathy are respected and revered, a place of healing.
We can’t be naive, however, about a transition of power. I’ve seen some social media posts going around in recent days touting a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural address where he stated, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
While that all sounds well and good, and I’m sure peoples’ intentions are true, let’s recognize that those words were spoken just month before the beginning of four years of civil war in our nation. That war, sparked by the Confederate States’ opposition to abolishing slavery, claimed the lives of more than 600,000 Americans.
With the behavior of our president and his supporters, I feel some days like we might be on the brink of another civil war. For many of my friends, they have already prepared plans ahead of this election to stay home and avoid contact with the outside world for fear of being ambushed by the sorts of domestic terrorists that attempted to run a Biden-Harris campaign bus off a highway in Texas, or extremist police officers who pepper sprayed children participating in a peaceful march to the polls in North Carolina just this past week.
These fears of violence are very real for marginalized people, particularly people of color and queer people. To tell folks like us that, regardless of today’s outcome in the polls, we need to bury the hatchet and play nice with Trump supporters is to erase our difference and sideline these very real concerns. It is bullshit. As James Baldwin brilliantly put it in another quote that’s gone viral in recent days: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” These concerns are not about “politics” — this is all about being able to live without fear, and to know the people in your life support that ability to do so.
I’ve already lived through two incredibly painful elections, and over the past couple of days I’ve found myself revisiting that pain. In 2006, while I was a student at UW-Madison, Wisconsin voters considered a mid-term ballot referendum concerning whether it would move ahead with a state-level ban on same-sex marriage. The ban didn’t just pass — it did so overwhelmingly, with 59 percent support.
At the time, I was very involved with LGBTQ activism on campus, and my friends and I had fought very hard to try and defeat it. We canvassed over the phone, and door to door. We passed out signs, we protested in the streets and at the Capitol and we put our relationships with family members and roommates on the line. That year, I wrote an op-ed published in my hometown newspaper, the Lake Geneva Regional News, urging a “no” vote. That op-ed earned me a stern call from my parents who — I’ll never forget — asked that I consider the reputation of the family and “please keep that stuff in Madison.” It’s one maybe three times I’ve ever hung up on a family member.
I remember for weeks afterward feeling deeply uncomfortable in public places. I would look around at the people sitting around me in a coffee shop or passing on the street and do the mental math — even in famously liberal Dane County (home to Madison), some 30 percent of voters had still voted “yes” on the ban. So which of these three people is the one who denied my humanity in the voting booth this time around? If you’ve never felt this sort of feeling, consider yourself lucky.
Ten years later, in 2016, I remember feeling then that it was the most important election of my lifetime. I was still a reporter at the time and I appealed to my family that they consider the attacks that then-candidate Trump had made on members of the press as “enemies of the state” as deeply hurtful and potentially dangerous for me. I brought them my fears about what a Trump presidency would mean for me as a queer person and an advocate for racial justice. Those conversations did not go well. My relationship with my immediate family is still strained as a result.
I’ll never forget the pain of sitting with friends watching results pour in that election night. We had gathered with a couple of close friends to “celebrate” the night in the most American way we could envision: a casserole potluck. It wasn’t long before the sensation of indigestion began, and tater tots were only partially to blame. Saying goodbye that night felt like we weren’t just saying goodbye to our friends. We were saying goodbye, at least for a time, to a nation where we felt relatively safe and protected by our nation’s leadership.
Waking up that next morning, I genuinely feared for the safety and liberty of myself and my loved ones and now, four years later, I can honestly say that everything I feared might happen already has — and then some.
And yet, in this moment of uncertainty about our nation’s future, today I am feeling overwhelmed with hope and gratitude.
Every year around the holidays, our town erects a “Peace on Earth” sign to a pedestrian bridge in the heart of our downtown. (If you want the full story on the sign, Shumway Studio filmed an excellent mini-doc on it two years ago.) This year, the sign went up early — just a few days before the election. This morning, my partner Stefin and I voted in our polling place and were in and out in 10 minutes. (The sort of voting experience all people should have.) We went to a local coffee shop and then walked along the river, taking in a family of ducks down by the water.
We took some time to take in the “Peace on Earth” sign and thought about how this day could be a step toward a more peaceful existence for our nation. But it’s not going to happen without action.
If you voted in this election, thank you for your action. If you are working as an election worker or poll watcher today, thank you. If you phone banked, text banked, canvassed or taken to the street in protest, thank you. If you are a postal worker ensuring mail-in ballots get properly processed, thank you. If you are a healthcare worker tending to the sick amid this ongoing pandemic, thank you. If you are helping people get access to the food, medication and supplies they need, thank you. Without all of you, “peace” is just a word on a bridge. But with you, we’re all taking one step closer to a better world.
This post is already much too long, so I leave you with some music that has been helping me process these recent days. An election day playlist of sorts, though my former colleague Jen Sabella’s over on Spotify is much more thorough. Take care of yourselves, VOTE VOTE VOTE and see you here on the other side.