It has been a long week. Months of anticipation culminating in one day of hour by hour watching the needle move towards red, away from blue. I am open and unapologetic about my political beliefs and leanings, because I feel they are part of the threads of my moral fibers. Take care of others. Be kind. Everyone deserves support, love, and acceptance. Love is love. Each person should control their own body. We have ruined our planet and need to do all we can to save it. Everyone should have the choice and opportunities to do and be whatever they dream to be, so long as it does not hurt others or the earth. Honesty, trust, equity, integrity. Ease, purpose, abundance, and joy.
I choose the candidate and policies that are closest to these values. I am also pragmatic and fall under prey of our two-party system. While perhaps my values are more aligned with the Green Party or another party I have never heard of, I put my vote where I feel it will count, and vote for the democrats because in general they support a person’s right to choose, healthcare, education, the environment, gun control, human rights, and the working/middle classes. They are completely fallible - supporting genocides in various countries, aligning with corporate interests, perhaps not socialist enough for my leanings after living in Europe. But in this election, I saw Harris as the ONLY way forward. The only viable president. How could a convicted felon, sexual abuser, liar, racist bully ever be allowed in a position of power? Do we really want someone like that to be a role model in our society? Would you want your son to behave that way? Would you want your child to date him? Not I.
So I have been in a bewildered state. How could so.many.people. think it is okay for someone with his resume to lead our country? Where will we go from here? What can we do? Will it be as bad as I fear, or will something stop him? Mostly, I feel a deep, deep sense of exhaustion. I just want to sleep, hold my babies (teenage girls), and I know I am on the precipice of a depression. And so I walk, swim, look at the ocean and the trees and the moon and the stars and search for hope.
The glimmer that I keep landing upon, that pushes its way into my mind even at the most random times, is that maybe we need this. Maybe we need to break down the system entirely, and maybe he is the person to do it. Maybe the icon of the patriarchy will be the one to destroy it, and we can rise like a phoenix from the ashes. We watch Barbie and like posts on social media to “smash the patriarchy” but what do we actually do? Perhaps if Kamala Harris had won, we would have felt that it was enough, and relaxed back into complacency, figuring she would manage it and we’d be okay - maybe not great, but okay. But we need more. We need a revolutionary change, the ultimate paradigm shift.
Now is the time to dig in, to root down, to gather together and build. I use words of growth and construction instead of destruction, because we need to do it differently. We need to build a society and culture that is collective, generative, and nurturing. We need to turn away and unshackle ourselves from the patriarchal values of the individual above all, power as domination over others, and destruction with no regard for natural life and well-being. We have lived under that system for long enough.
It won’t be easy - we will have to let go of our desire for so much material stuff, for needing the latest trend, for buying and throwing away on a whim. We’ll need to live more consciously, to learn what indigenous and matriarchal societies of past and present can teach us. We’ll need to redefine success, to truly determine and live by our values. We will need to not care so much about our status, and what people think, but to act simply with care and consideration for what we impact. We can do it together. We can rise up - phoenixes all of us.
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