Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Tilting at Tomorrow

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I get so wrapped up in making flyers, planning activities, visiting and traveling and trying to keep up with myself - and after a long, happy day of hard work and hobbit-wrangling, it's a shock to log on and read about a profoundly broken world.

I worry sometimes that I'm too fortunate and insulated - that all of what I'm doing basically amounts to building castles in the sky while Rome burns. I hope that's not true. More than anything, I want what I'm doing to matter. I expect we all do.

But here's what I know for a certain fact: there is going to be a tomorrow in which the all-consuming crises of today don't feature. Our current problems will pass away, just as surely as the Cold War and the 1918 flu did before them, and new ones will grow in their place.

And when tomorrow gets here, I want to make sure that we still remember how to co-exist. I want to make sure that clickbaiting and fearmongering and runaway intellectual inbreeding don't deprive us of our friends and neighbors. We're in the middle of a hard and essential fight right now, but there's something completely unlike it already waiting in the wings... and whatever that is, we absolutely can't afford to meet it at half-strength.



I hope you registered to vote today, if you weren't already signed up. I hope you have been using every good means at your disposal to weigh in on the big decisions, and take ownership of the small ones.

But I also hope we remember the last vital stranger who helped us - on the side of the road, in the hospital, a thousand miles from home - and how little their political views mattered when we really, desperately needed them. And I am going to join my fellow big-hearted eventroverts in continuing to raise up little tentpole-spaces for good people to meet face-first and practice helping each other out... because that's the best way I know to ensure we still have a common ground left to come back to after today's fight is finished.

And because I just god damn love wearing a fancy name tag and buying tax-deductible donuts.

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