The Hope

I’m going to try to keep this very brief. This is a hope about the election.

There are many reasons that I hope the democrats not only win but win so big it crushes the MAGA movement and republicans have to rethink their nonsense from the ground up. Most of these reasons are rational, for the common good. A democratic victory is needed if we have any hope of addressing climate change, protecting vulnerable groups, and stopping theocratic autocrats. All of those are very good reasons, but I wanted to talk about one selfish reason.

If Harris is elected (with a clear democratic majority in both houses of Congress,) it is my hope that I can go back to a normal level of worrying about politics. I think most Americans feel similarly. People want sane leadership partially because normal people don’t want to think about politics all the time. Harris seems to sense this and closed the debate basically with this pitch: that if she wins we won’t ever have to think about Donald Trump again.

I’m more politically active than the average person in normal times. I’ve always known who my representatives are at every level. I’ve voted in every election. When I was too young to vote I volunteered for democratic campaigns. But something happened during the chaos and endless scandal of the Trump administration. I realized that I didn’t just know who my senators were and a couple of high profile ones from other states, I’d come to know the names of all one hundred senators. Hell, I was even starting to learn the names of a whole lot of house members from other districts.

I do not want that sort of information in my head. It’s good to know who one’s representatives are. It’s good to be familiar and knowledgable about the issues at stake. This is part of being an informed member of the electorate. But when one knows the names and even committee assignments of representatives from districts from entirely different states, things have gone awry.

So that’s my hope. A Harris administration continues and builds on the quiet competency of the Biden administration and with the added benefit of a congress that wants to work towards that stability instead of trying to create chaos. Then maybe I can start to disengage and return to a normal level of participation in this process and concentrate on the things that make me happy again.