My Heart and Politics
Why I can't ignore either in the coming months.
I count on my heart for a lot of things. It lets me grieve without killing me. It lets me feel joy without guilt. It gives me room to feel what others might be feeling so I can commiserate and empathize. It lets me live.
But my heart is notorious for steering me toward a need to participate in the politics of the day, essentially and especially when there’s a danger that things could fall apart, that the wrong people will be in charge, that everything so many of us have worked for could go up in smoke on one particular day in November when the vote counts come in and we’ll know whether or not our side has won or lost.
Then my heart is in my throat.
This year, American politics will be my almost everything. I’ll find time to write about other things, because life is also about other things, but every single day from now until Tuesday, November 5, my focus will be on working toward a Democratic landslide.
I’ll be thinking and plotting and arguing and cajoling and begging and working hard to get my words right in order to make my case, and throughout it all nothing will get me to change my mind about where I think this country should be heading. I’ve been at this for more than a half a century. I know my own mind. I know what I believe. I know my own heart.
I don’t expect everyone to agree. That’s not the point. My goal is to do everything I can to make sure the Democrats win. I honestly didn’t expect this form of desperate election fervor to kick in so soon, but it’s here and it’s as real as the early attacks against the people I’ll be working hard to elect.
I’ve spent many decades writing about politics. I was writing a newspaper column during the Reagan years and I made him the target. I spent the Iraq War years writing anonymously on message boards. And when Barack Obama was elected president I began a political blog, Ramona’s Voices, on his Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009 and reluctantly put it on hiatus on Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021. (I lost the comments and couldn’t find a way to get them back.)
Though you may know me only as a long time writer of features and essays, politics is the heart and soul of who I am.
I’m telling you this so you can make a decision, too. I’m not going to pretend that the political events ahead won’t matter to me. I won’t necessarily bring it all here, since I have another blog, Constant Commoner, where my pieces on politics will mainly live, but it does mean I may be more distracted than usual. It might mean my feelings about an issue will spill over to here from time to time.
But at the same time I want to keep Writer Everlasting safe and focused on our writing needs. I’ll try my darndest to remember my mission here, which is to keep it meaningful and relevant and to come up with topics we’re all interested in.
I want to hang around with you and talk about the things we all have a stake in. Our writing lives. I love it when we find much so much to talk about it just goes on and on and on. Then I’m in my glory.
It’s just that this other part of me might be hogging my space and I can’t know right now by how much. I’m a writer who writes. A big part of that this year will be about politics. I’ll be juggling these two blogs and I hope I can even things out.
I’ll do my best. That’s all I can promise.
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Hear hear! I'm with you - just write, write, write, in between the bouts of grief...which may multiply exponentially if we all don't do our part.
Your writing has been a constant reminder to me that on the day after the election, I must not feel that I failed to do my part.