Category Archives: Political

Midterm Musings

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“The red wave is the ketchup dripping down the walls of Mar-a-Lago.” – From a Facebook Friend, 11/9/22

This is my favorite take on the 2022 midterms.

I also like the results, except for this bummer: More than a week after the election, the Republicans finally secured their 218th seat to win the House majority. Good luck with that, Kevin! Watch out for the ketchup stains on your trouser cuffs. Or maybe it’s blood from your backstabbing caucus.

Except for losing the House by a hair thanks to gerrymandering and New York’s apparent new status as a swing state, it was a good night for Democrats and their pro-choice, pro-democracy, anti-lunatic allies. Yes, of course, we had an assist from the Supreme Court and Donald Trump. Yes, of course, we still face enormous peril. But it’s time to break our doom and gloom habits even while remaining clear-eyed. This is a moment to celebrate. I’m reminded of the famous headline following the 1968 Harvard-Yale football game, in which Harvard, trailing by 16 points, evened up the score in the last 42 seconds:

“Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29”

Given the momentum and the fact that who controls the Senate is no longer an issue, the chances of breaking the 50-50 tie there by re-electing Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s December 6 run-off are good. Go Warnock! If you’re looking for a way to support grassroots groups on the ground ready to turn out every last vote for him, check out Airlift’s portal to the Georgia Alliance for Progress.

Of course, the House isn’t quite tied, and my wish that it could all have been favorably decided by Lauren Boebert going down is not to be. Still, I don’t think endless investigations of Hunter Biden will prove a winning case for Republican governance.

A lot of my political activism these days has been with the aforementioned Airlift, an all-volunteer group founded in my home county of Marin in Northern California after the 2016 election. Airlift raises money for progressive grassroots groups who excel in turning non-voters into voters through year-round organizing in key battleground regions. We do the research to make sure donors who are bombarded by a million asks can be sure that they’re getting the best bang for their buck.

I’m pretty busy putting out Airlift’s monthly newsletter and liaising with our two partner groups in North Carolina, so I haven’t done as much phone banking this cycle. Still, during the last couple of weeks, I put in some time calling voters in North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada.

Mostly phone banking consists of lots of “Not Homes,” hang-ups, and wondering when I myself last answered the phone from an unknown caller. Still, there are some good conversations along the way that make it all worthwhile. I spoke to a woman in North Carolina who wasn’t planning to vote because she’s too busy for politics and didn’t even know the election was a week away. After ascertaining that she didn’t like the overturn of Roe or what the Republicans were doing, I convinced her to vote, and we made a plan for her to go to an early voting center before work the next day. .  

Another woman in North Carolina said, “We’ve got to stop the hate.” Someone else told me, “I don’t believe the polls. The women are with her [Cheri Beasley].” Sadly, they weren’t quite sufficiently with Cheri in North Carolina. But they did prevent the return of a GOP supermajority in the state legislature, thus preserving Governor Cooper’s veto power over further abortion restrictions and other right-wing legislation.  Pro-choice swing-state women–and men–were most everywhere else.

In Arizona, a woman said she used to be a Republican, but is no longer because “now they’re just peddling lies.” She confided that she’s lost friendships over it, and it breaks her heart.

Responding to my asking if we could count on his support for Mark Kelly, an Arizona man replied, “I would rather vote for a week-old tuna sandwich than for any Republican.”

Sometimes phone banking is cause for full-on belly laughs.

Speaking of which, here’s a hilarious note to close out my 2022 Midterm Report:

Missing My Mother

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It’s true that my stay-at-home mother was known for her disinterest in cooking and housekeeping. It’s also true that in 1973, I, her youngest child, was a senior in high school who required little hands-on care. Still, I don’t know how my mother managed, well before streaming or even VCRs, to stay glued to the television for all 51 days–sometimes up to 6 hours per session for a total of 237 hours–of the Senate Watergate Hearings.

My mother’s on my mind because today would have been her 99th birthday, but also because last week I watched the last hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack of the U.S. Capitol. There have been 9 live hearings, most lasting 2-3 hours each. You can stream them for free at any time on many different platforms. I am no match for my mother: Even though I am recently retired with a lot of time on my hands and few obligations, I managed to catch only about four hours in real time. (I eventually watched most of them after the fact.)

Apart from streaming, times are different. Up to 80 million people—three out of four households–watched at least some of the Senate Watergate hearings. As the New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik wrote on the eve of Trump’s first impeachment trial, the Watergate hearings were appointment TV, a collective experience that no longer exists.

In contrast, twenty million watched the first of the January 6 hearings, 18 million the last. Lots of people, especially Republicans, tuned them out altogether, and the hearings are not expected to make much difference in next month’s midterm elections. Almost all congressional Republicans have consistently denigrated them.

In 1973, the vote in the Senate was 77-0 to establish the Senate Committee. For our latest constitutional scandal, following Trump’s second impeachment acquittal, an independent commission in the mold of the 9/11 investigation was recommended. The House approved such a measure 252-175, with 35 Republicans joining all Democrats. Senate Republicans blocked the commission’s formation by filibuster. This left only the House to pursue an investigation through the formation of the January 6 Select Committee. Only two Republicans—Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger–joined all Democrats in voting to proceed, and have thus been driven out of today’s GOP. As I said, times are different.

What’s not different is how much I miss my mother in times of political turmoil and great national consequence. Even though I am glad for her sake that being dead for a long time means she’s missed a lot of truly horrendous stuff that probably would have killed her, how I wish we could have watched the January 6 hearings together, or at least texted back and forth across the country!

I imagine starting January 6, 2021, by sharing our joy that both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had won their run-off races in Georgia, flipping the U.S. Senate blue. My mother would have loved that. But at least she was spared witnessing Trump’s “wild” rally as it descended into violence.

I, too, was spared live coverage of the unfolding insurrection. My work day of eight back-to-back sessions with psychotherapy clients began just as Mitt Romney shouted, “This is what you’ve gotten!” to his Republican colleagues as the Capitol was breached. I was professionally obligated to be glued to my Zoom screen for the day, not CNN’s live coverage. My information came in snatches from one client after another giving me shocked updates and scrolling through headlines in between sessions.

I followed the news (including Trump’s second impeachment trial for fomenting the insurrection) for days, weeks, months. But the January 6 Committee’s presentation—with lots of live video footage, some of it never before seen–brought it to horrifying life in a way I had missed.

I would have loved to compare notes with my mother. I suspect she would have shared my deep admiration for the January 6 Select Committee members–even and especially Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger (plus, of course, heartthrob Jamie Raskin). To a person they have been dignified, somber, collaborative, and without an iota of grandstanding. They’ve made a compelling, ironclad case for the American people, the Department of Justice, and for history. The Committee’s done so by presenting damning testimony almost entirely from Trump’s own allies–from the hapless January 6 rioter Stephen Ayres to Bill Barr, whose obvious relish in trashing Trump would be funny if it weren’t so maddening. To borrow from Barr’s own twisted interpretation of the Mueller report to protect Trump, the former Attorney General’s turn before the committee “does not exonerate him” from the harm he previously caused.

And hat’s off to the women, especially election workers Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman. Cassidy Hutchinson and Liz Cheney proved that decency still resides within some Republicans. In fact, feeling sustained admiration for Liz Cheney has been one of the most surprise silver linings of the last year. Who knew?

Here’s what I really would have loved to discuss with my mother: In the closing statements of the final hearing, the low-level foot soldiers of the insurrection were depicted charitably (to put it mildly). Cheney spoke of how Trump had manipulated his followers’ patriotism and love of country. Mike Pence was treated as heroic for refusing to be Trump’s devoted lapdog this one time. Many of Trump’s enablers were similarly and generously let off the hook when January 6 proved a bridge too far for them. This is probably smart strategy. Still, I can’t help but envision my mother and I gagging together over it.

Chairman Bennie Thompson said of Trump, “He is the one person at the center of the storm.” True in one sense, but is he really? Per usual, he is both cause and symptom of the dark forces that have been gathering for some time. As the traitors keep reminding us, “The storm is coming.

I miss my mother, but I’m glad she will miss the storm.

Don’t Be Fooled

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My heart sank when I first heard about Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. That’s because I thought he might just succeed in tricking people into thinking it was a reasonable idea. After all, before the Dobbs decision eliminated constitutional protection altogether, abortion rights had been slowly eroded for decades by just such “compromises.” Chief Justice Roberts was hoping to preserve a fig leaf of SCOTUS legitimacy by allowing just such a ban to stand in Mississippi without overturning Roe. Plus, a 15-week limit polls well.

I also had to read the fine print to understand that Graham’s proposal did not ensure abortion rights nationwide for the first 15 weeks. Quite the contrary: States would remain perfectly free to restrict abortion at any earlier point, while states with more liberal access would be forced to ban the procedure after 15 weeks. As the saying goes, “Heads we win, tails you lose.”

Still, it’s not unusual for people to react with outrage to egregious proposals before acquiescing to something more in the middle. Graham is trying to quell the intense backlash to overturning Roe by offering something that sounds more reasonable than the draconian restrictions GOP state legislatures are passing right and left.

I myself—staunchly pro-choice my entire life—almost fell for something similar when “partial-birth abortion” entered the anti-choice lexicon in the mid-90s. The descriptions of the procedure were pretty grisly: puncturing the skulls and removing the brains of partially delivered fetuses. It sounded as bad as abandoning newborn infants on Chinese mountaintops simply because they were girls. A steady diet of such horror stories made me wonder who could possibly oppose banning such a practice.

Or so I reacted for a nano-second, until I thought and learned some more. The scary coinage came from the National Right to Life Committee in 1995. The correct term for the medical procedure is “intact dilation and extraction,” a safer method than the prior standard for ending pregnancies after the first trimester. About 95% of abortions occur before 15 weeks, but it’s not exactly like care-free women are casually clamoring to end their pregnancies later on. Some may not have known they were pregnant. Others have been forced to jump through so many hoops already that a safer, simpler abortion option is no longer possible. Most likely, something has gone wrong with a wanted pregnancy, as Pete Buttigieg explained in 2020 at a Fox News Town Hall. Here’s his exchange as reported by Upworthy with moderator Chris Wallace about whether there should be any limits on abortion rights:

“I think the dialogue has gotten so caught up on where you draw the line that we’ve gotten away from the fundamental question of who gets to draw the line,” Buttigieg replied, “and I trust women to draw the line when it’s their own health.”

Wallace wanted to clarify that Buttigieg would be okay with late-term abortion and pointed out that there are more than 6000 women who get third trimester abortions each year.

“That’s right,” responded Buttiegieg, “representing one percent of cases. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it’s that late in your pregnancy, than almost by definition, you’ve been expecting to carry it to term. We’re talking about women who have perhaps chosen a name. Women who have purchased a crib, families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother or viability of the pregnancy that forces them to make an impossible, unthinkable choice. And the bottom line is as horrible as that choice is, that woman, that family may seek spiritual guidance, they may seek medical guidance, but that decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.”

Reporter Annie Renau then observes:

And that’s really the gist of the pro-choice stance. Why would we want the government to be involved in our most difficult medical and moral dilemmas and decisions?

Exactly. Especially the likes of Lindsey Graham and all the other Forced Birth proponents in government. No matter what the reason or stage of pregnancy.

Luckily, Graham’s proposal has backfired. His intentions are clear, and his own party is mad at him for saying the quiet parts out loud as they busily scrub their websites of draconian anti-choice pronouncements.

Don’t be fooled. Come November 8, Roe, Roe, Roe your vote.

The Other Anniversary

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“And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”

– Amanda Gorman, 2021 Inaugural Poem, The Hill We Climb

Think back to a year ago. No, not the insurrection, but the day before. On January 5th, both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their Georgia run-offs, turning the U.S. Senate the palest – but still lovely! – shade of blue. Honestly, to most of us, the likelihood of not just one but both of these men prevailing seemed preposterous. But we opened our checkbooks, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work anyway. Their victories felt miraculous.

But of course it wasn’t a miracle at all. It was the determination, hard work, and generosity of everyone – doubtful and hopeful alike – who stepped up. Led by primarily Black grassroots organizers whose persistent movement building had just put the state in Biden’s column, legions of activists and volunteers knocked on doors, registered new voters, phone banked, wrote letters and postcards, texted, and donated hundreds of millions of dollars.

As a result, Democratic turnout, especially in counties with a large share of Black voters, smashed records. As Nse Ufot, head of the New Georgia Project said at the time, “The margins are so small that every action, including your vote, matters and will make a difference. Black voters got that message. Black voters recognized that we need to complete the task.”

Now we turn to the task of securing a better and more progressive future in 2022, “striving,” as Amanda Gorman reminds us, “to form our union with purpose.“

The hill we must climb in 2022 is indeed steep. Yet we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. In the spirit of January 5, 2021, and of the poet, we greet the New Year with purpose and resolve.

*

I wrote this for the January issue of “The Drop,” a newsletter I produce for Airlift, an all-volunteer group near and dear to my heart. Airlift raises money for progressive grassroots organizations in key areas throughout the country. The groups we fund excel at turning non-voters into voters, especially in communities of color, women, and young people–exactly the groups who made all the difference in the 2020 election, and will do so again in 2022.

Recall Madness

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Crooked Media’s “What a Day!” newsletter delivered the news succinctly and with characteristic wit: “Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) emphatically slapped down the GOP recall effort on Tuesday, which means it is time to treat yourself to one (1) rare and luxurious sigh of relief. Enjoy!”

I did enjoy that sigh, as well as my Facebook feed filled with people marking themselves safe from California becoming Texas or Florida.

But mostly I feel angry. Angry at the Republican arsonists who keep setting fires we must put out. Angry at the colossal waste of time, energy, and money. Just administering this election cost taxpayers $276 million, and one estimate I’ve seen puts the cost of both Yes and No campaigns close to half a billion dollars. That’s a lot of moola that could have gone to fighting actual fires, or solving real problems instead of forcing us to deal with whatever havoc political arsonists are wreaking.

I’m angry at the anti-democratic recall process, as well as all the other anti-democratic power grabs across the country in the name of “election integrity.”

I’m angry at Gavin Newsom for his maskless French Laundry fiasco, even though every single person I know, including myself, has done something hypocritical and self-serving regarding Covid.

I’m angry with human nature, and our tendency to scapegoat. Sure, Newsom’s done some dumb stuff and can be too enamored of the sound of his own voice, but seriously? He’s to blame for Covid and its ravaging effects on the economy and schools? For the drought and fires? For climate change? He’s actually done a ton of good stuff, as this great piece by Ezra Klein notes.

I’m angry with Democrats’ tendency to be asleep at the switch (as they were about the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2016 election) until it’s too late.

Fortunately, we woke up on time this time, with great takeaways about boldness and fighting hard and mobilizing every voter.

California’s easy, though, compared to the rest of the country. First of all, it’s a deep blue state. Second, running against Larry Elder is a gift even bigger than the one Alabama Democrats got in the 2017 U.S. Senate special election, in which Democrat Doug Jones beat alleged child-molester and lunatic Republican Roy Moore.

So enjoy your one (1) rare and luxurious sigh of relief, channel your anger into action, and prepare yourself for the many and worse fires to come.

Twenty Years

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Twenty years ago here on the West Coast, the alarm woke me to the news on NPR that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Was it grogginess, naiveté, or refusal to fathom horrific possibility in those first minutes that made me assume at first it was a terrible, freak accident? The second plane struck as I listened. It became clear that we were under attack.

My husband Jonathan was at a conference in Atlanta. We didn’t know when—or how–he’d be able to get home. While our daughters slept, I called my mother-in-law, who hadn’t yet heard the news. When I told her, she said, “This will be the end of democracy as we know it.”

Prescient, my mother-in-law.

It was time to wake the girls for school, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want them to leave behind the blissful oblivion of sleep, of the life they had lived thus far, or explain to them what had happened. I didn’t want them to go to school. I didn’t want any of us to leave the house, ever.

Since it was the beginning of the school year, Ally, 10, had invariably caught a cold—sick, like clockwork, every September. I used that as an excuse to stash her in a quiet corner in my office while I worked a reduced schedule. Emma, 13, painted her toenails red, white, and blue, and went off to school. She soon added to her list of reasons why we should get her a cellphone the ability to call out from a pile of rubble. Ally was more noticeably upset than her sister. She announced she was mad at Grandpa for inventing bombs (my father had been a scientist on the Manhattan Project). When I asked if she was worried about war, she replied philosophically, “Yeah, but I just try to stay out of trouble.”

What I most remember is wanting to hold them close, always, and how incomplete we felt without Jonathan home with us. Somehow he made it back from Atlanta after just two days’ delay. (When he needed to travel to Boston two months later, it was Emma who became distraught.)

We never subjected the girls—or ourselves–to endless replay of the towers smoking, burning, collapsing. We watched very little TV, laying eyes on the horror only once or twice. That was more than enough. Instead I devoured stories in the newspaper, particularly stories of unbelievable acts of kindness and courage.

I remember George W. Bush, caught like a deer in the headlights, reading a story about a goat to school children when he learned of the attacks. I remember members of Congress, joining hands and singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps after the doomed passengers of United Flight 93 crashed their hijacked plane into a Pennsylvania field instead of its intended target. I remember the President saying something decent and good about our Muslim brethren. Then, more alarmingly, he urged us to go shopping, and announced to the world that “You’re either with us or against us.”

A colleague at a conference by renowned trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk later reported that he’d said, in response to Bush’s us-vs-them comment, “I knew then that our goose was cooked.”

Stories of goodness started to give way to a thirst for vengeance, escalating rhetoric and militarism. Only Representative Barbara Lee voted against handing Bush a blank check with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. (She and my mother-in-law are cut from the same cloth.)

We began to bomb Afghanistan. Soon after, our home town became internationally famous because John Walker Lindh—aka the American Taliban—grew up here. Emma was double cast with his sister in their 8th grade theater production. Luckily, John’s sister was able to shine in the spotlight for the first two performances, before the news about her brother broke. At least she was not robbed of that.

Often I post something a bit more hopeful to commemorate what happened twenty years ago, but these days I find hope more elusive. The trauma of 9/11 will be with us for a long time. There are still acts of unbelievable kindness and courage, but bleakness blankets the world. Fear and uncertainty have upended the social fabric, spawning a surveillance state, conspiracy theories, and two disastrous wars. Countless lives are lost and treasure squandered. There’s a clear thread between the terrorists who aimed a hijacked plane at the heart of government and the domestic terrorists who staged an insurrection at the Capitol just this January. 

After the planes struck, it took a while for the towers to collapse. Those planes struck 20 years ago, and we have been in a delayed collapse ever since.

Nomadland: Wanderings through Late-Stage Capitalism and the American Psyche

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“The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire.”

– Wilfred Bion

I don’t really understand the influential nineteenth century psychoanalyst Bion, but his words suffused me as I watched Nomadland, the widely acclaimed film based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book and starring the brilliant Frances McDormand.

An article about Nomadland’s director Chloe Zhao describes the essence of her film-making: “Zhao tried to make herself porous, immersing herself in life there and attempting to get past the familiar narratives offered up to expectant visitors.” This porosity feels akin to Bion’s philosophy. It is hard to achieve. 

Just how hard struck me while watching Nomadland. The film is about a widow, Fern, who loses not only her husband but her job, house, and town in the Great Recession. She takes to the road along with a proliferation of older itinerant Americans who live in their vehicles as they travel from one short-term, low-wage job to another. I expected it to be a searing indictment of America’s winner-take-all system that creates down-and-out losers I could pity from a distance of privileged political righteousness.

There are traces of that, but I encountered something quite different. More accurately, I confronted within myself assumptions and biases that got in the way of truly listening, truly seeing each individual. It reminded me a lot of psychotherapy.

Nomadland begins with an economical background sketch: U.S. Gypsum shuts down its plant in Empire, Nevada. A few months later, the town’s zip code is discontinued. It’s like an intake form; we know the broad outlines and can begin to develop a story, but we are ignorant. Unless we have memory apart from the film, we may not even know about the 2008 housing crash and economic collapse that wiped out so much more than a zip code: people’s jobs, savings, homes, and lives. 

The murkiness of our comprehension is accentuated by the film’s naturalistic lighting: so many scenes are shot in the dark, it is hard to discern what’s happening. We form impressions of the people we meet, but it takes time to get to know them, especially if our preconceptions obscure. 

I expected, for example, to feel the heavy horror of victims frozen in trauma and was instead startled by the film’s gentle sweetness. Grief is etched in people’s faces but so are easy laugh lines and the pleasures of ingenious solutions for cramped spaces. The sense of community and resilience often overshadows the pervasive loneliness and precarity of the nomads’ lives. 

The film seems like both a triumph of empathy for each person’s complex humanity and a glossy valorization of overcoming hardship. One critic notes in “What Nomadland Gets Wrong About Gig Workers” that “it feels less like artistic license than a betrayal of workers’ reality.” Perhaps Zhao, by downplaying the structural societal context, obscures something important. Yet what do our socioeconomic-political lenses miss about what the film gets right about grief, the interplay between closeness and distance, resilience and brokenness, freedom and confinement?

I couldn’t help but ponder Janis Joplin’s, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” or my ambivalence about our resilience fetish. Every time we lionize heroic coping, our complicity in tolerating a system that demands it mounts.

Nomadland’s emphasis on deep character exploration rather than the larger cultural context reminds me of psychotherapy’s shift from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal to the importance of externalities. I think of the optical illusion:

Do we see two profiles or an urn? Is our vision flexible enough to take in the totality? 

*

Originally appeared in Impulse, an online publication of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Our National Holiday

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Groundhog

Finally, the day you’ve been living over and over again for almost a year is officially here! I’m referring, of course, to Groundhog Day, hitherto an obscure and underrated holiday whose elevation I’ve proposed as an apt celebration of the American character.

But I didn’t quite intend this level of elevation, this much capturing of our experience! Seriously, I could do without Groundhog Day as a national meme baked into our collective unconscious because of COVID Times. Like Bill Murray in the famous film, the alarm goes off and we are eternally trapped in the same day. Also with the same people, same four walls, same conversations, same Zoom screens, same Netflix stupor, same quiet unraveling. And that’s if we’re lucky!

The tedium is broken up by panic attacks about paying the bills, homeschooling the kids, elderly parents dying alone, sniffles spelling death–you name it. Not to mention anxiety about armed anti-maskers storming state capitols and militant anti-reality mobs staging an insurrection at our nation’s Capitol under the direction of Donald Trump. So much for subscribing to the “What’s the downside to humoring him?” theory.

This got me thinking about whether groundhogs are harmless hibernators who sometimes bite people who haul them out of their slumber, or if there’s a darker side to these reluctant rodent celebrities. As one gardening website asks, “Can that cute groundhog really cause damage?”

Yes, as it turns out. Much like insurrectionists and their leaders, “If not properly controlled, groundhogs can cause serious structural damage when burrowing. Their tunnels break apart building foundations . . . ” An easy Google ramble further reveals the answers to some of the most vexing questions, including my favorite: “Are groundhogs good for anything?” This is artfully evaded with a sort of “All God’s Creatures” vibe, plus a passing note that they’re vegetarians.

More pragmatically, we learn how to get rid of a groundhog:

–Sprinkle blood meal, ground black pepper, dried blood, or talcum powder around the perimeter of your garden.

–Puree and strain hot peppers and garlic, mix them with water and enough liquid soap to make it stick, and spray it liberally around the garden.

Would that these methods worked with insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists!

Anyway, today’s news is that the groundhog foretells 6 more weeks of winter. Had it been cloudy, it would have been slightly shorter. Since the daffodils are currently blooming where I live, and since the calendar notes that Spring will be here no matter what in about six weeks, I smell a hoax. Or some kind of rodent.

At any rate, we did wake to a slightly new day on January 20. President Biden has a plan to bring us out of our long, dark winter. No groundhog can tell how long it will take to emerge from Covid Times based on the presence or absence of its shadow. Assuming vaccination rates continue to improve, here’s a better predictor of how many more deaths will occur depending on how we (and Congress) all act in the meantime.

As Bill Murray learned in Groundhog Day, he had choices within his trap, choices that led to remaining stuck or breaking free. So do we.

Hallelujah

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On the same day our country marked the milestone of more than 400,000 people dead from COVID, we were finally able to collectively acknowledge and grieve our loss. President-Elect Biden reminded us, “To heal we must remember. . . . It is important we do that as a nation. That’s why we are here today.”

In the brief space between sundown and dusk, the simple and somber pre-inauguration memorial was electrifying. Lori Marie Key, a Detroit nurse, sang “Amazing Grace”—the same as she did on her shifts tending COVID patients to lift spirits amid all the heartbreak. Gospel singer Yolanda Adams then sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Along the entire length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, 400 light pillars—each representing 1,000 lives lost—began to glow as darkness descended. The camera slowly zoomed out to reveal the illuminated waterway, Abraham Lincoln frozen in marble and time, the Potomac beyond.

“In Hebrew, the word hallelujah means to rejoice in praising God,” I soon learned from Kyson Parks’s The Origin and History of the Song “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen. Parks continues:

It is a bitter lament about love and loss . . . “Hallelujah,” the song teaches us, is a refrain worthy of times of celebration, of mourning, of regret, of catharsis, and reconciliation. Cohen’s song tells a story of broken love, true love remembered and mourned, guilt, penance, and of finding peace in the vicissitudes of brokenness.

How fitting for what we have been through. In our nation’s capital, the last line of the song—“It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah” soared over the Reflecting Pool as the lights came up.

For some of us, Leonard Cohen’s song marked the beginning as well as the end of Trump’s  presidency. On the first Saturday Night Live after the 2016 election, Kate McKinnon–who had played Hillary Clinton throughout SNL’s 2016 campaign skits–performed it for SNL’s Cold Open.

When McKinnon finished, she turned to the audience as Hillary and said, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”

Tomorrow Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as our new President and Vice President.

Hallelujah.

This, Too, Happened

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Far, far down the very long list of Donald Trump’s transgressions, which range from petty insults to treason, is something trivial that nonetheless bugs me no end: His ability to suck all the oxygen out of everything, grab the narrative, and destroy anything good.

After Biden’s clear victory in the days after the election, my brief period of joy and relief quickly was subsumed as Trump’s and his enablers’ lies about election fraud sparked widespread denial and defiance among his supporters.

“I thought at least we’d get a bit of a mental health break,” my husband said, “but things just get worse and worse.”

Reality played out on a split screen: election officials counting ballots while white mobs screamed at them; many, though not all, GOP state legislators accepting the results while most Republicans in the U.S. Congress acquiesced to the President’s lies; the courts—including the Trump-packed Supreme Court–holding firm against ridiculous claims; Georgia Republicans Brad Raffensberger, Gabriel Sterling, and even the detestable Brian Kemp–all of whom voted for Trump—becoming unlikely Resistance heroes. Biden’s 7 million plus margin in the popular vote coexisted with the depressing possibility that once again the Electoral College would have rendered those votes irrelevant if a slice of votes in a few swing states had gone the other way. But in the end, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, then Georgia all flipped from red to blue.

Georgia!! Thanks to demographic changes and more than a decade of on-the-ground organizing, mostly by Black women, this deep red state turned a lovely pale shade of blue. Georgia in Biden’s column was thrilling though not decisive. But a tantalizing opportunity emerged: the fate of the U.S Senate rested entirely on the outcome of Georgia’s January 5th run-off elections. Could it happen again?

I didn’t think so. I thought it was unlikely that the Democrats could win one race, let alone the two that would be necessary to pry the Senate Majority Leader’s gavel out of Mitch McConnell’s hands.

Stacey Abrams, founder of the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, likes to say, ““I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic—I’m determined.” I tried to channel her attitude. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, sending postcards through Reclaim Our Vote and phone banking once or twice a week. My husband and I sent a little money to Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, more money to grassroots organizations on the ground .We were among millions who did the same. Whether or not it would do the trick, at least it would be good for my mental health.

Phone banking is not glamorous. Mostly it’s a tedious exercise in marking “Not Home,” occasional hostility, depressing levels of disinterest. Every now and then, though, a conversation makes it all worthwhile. Calling Georgia for the run-offs had very little of the former, lots of the latter. Caller after caller picked up the phone, especially in the early weeks before every organization under the sun was calling multiple times a day.

Almost everyone was fired up and ready to go. People expressed appreciation for our efforts all the time. They eagerly agreed to get their friends and family to vote. “Don’t worry, we’ve got this,” one man told me right before Election Day. “We’ll be there with our whole block.”

They were, and then some—voters who mailed in their absentee ballots, put them in a drop box, or stood in long lines for early voting; newly minted 18-year-olds casting their first ballot ever; a robust Election Day showing. Turnout was high among Republicans, too, but it was higher among Democrats—with impressive gains not only among Black and suburban voters, but also among young people, Latinx, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders.

By the time I went to bed Tuesday night on the West Coast, Warnock had been declared the winner, and it was clear that Ossoff, too, was well on his way to victory. The first Black and Jewish senators from Georgia, running on an unapologetically liberal platform.

All our hard work paid off. Particularly impressive were the tireless and creative efforts of on-the-ground organizers and volunteers who have rolled up their sleeves forever for Georgia and the country. Stacey Abrams, Nse Ufot, LaTosha Brown, and Cliff Albright, of nationally known Fair Fight, New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter, are the stars of this movement, this moment. But so are those lesser known who got it done. Abrams noted, “We beat voter suppression.” As Rembert Browne, host of the wonderful “Gaining Ground” podcast summed up, “People stepping up from every corner of Georgia is what turned Georgia blue.”

On Wednesday morning, even though it was cold, I put on my flimsy peach-colored T-shirt to mark the occasion. I had not felt so jubilant, so emotional, since Obama’s 2008 victory. What a glorious day!

Or at least it was before it all turned to shit, joy and hope once again snatched away. Shockingly but not surprisingly, the Mob Boss incited his mob to violently storm the Capitol to stop Congress from formalizing the Electoral College votes. Of course this insurrection is the most important story

But it is not the only one. Remember what happened in Georgia, not just once but twice. This, too, is real. We have the power to help it grow and endure.