The Latest
I moved to America just in time to catch Bicentennial fever.
In our new town—Cincinnati, Ohio—flags were everywhere. In our new house, the fixtures chosen by the previous owners featured an astonishing number of bald eagles. The shag carpet in my new bedroom was—I kid you not—red, white, and blue.
As I think back, the aesthetic of the country at that time must have seemed bonkers to a recent arrival. But America in the mid-1970s came with a great soundtrack that explained it all. From radio and television I quickly learned: this was a country worthy of over-the-top celebrations. This was the land of the free, the home of the brave. A place where we all looked different—were different—and that was a good thing.
I inhaled these lessons. When I fell for America, I fell hard.
Decades later, this is partly why my response to Donald Trump winning a second term was not I’m leaving the U.S. or I’m done with politics but rather: I need to do more.
I know our reality has always fallen short of our ideals, but those ideals still sing to me (sometimes still in the voice of Marlo Thomas). I simply can’t imagine giving up on them. And so my task these past nine months has not been deciding whether to join the fight but how.
Here’s the latest:
I’ve pretty much decided that I’m not a good candidate for office. Very briefly, I think we need candidates at every level who are a) younger and b) way better at short-form video than I will ever be.
Where I intend to keep focusing my political energy—lots of it—is on the work of coalition building: studying, and practicing, what it takes to bridge divides. This work maps to my strengths but also: I think it’s especially important. It seems to me that we are already so far into the brute force consolidation of wealth and power that only a mass opposition movement—non-partisan and wildly diverse—could even begin to unwind the rot.
Because I’m focused on the work of bridge building, this recent survey from The Argument caught my eye—and I’m hoping to discuss it with some of you when we next meet.* Does it surprise you in any way? What do you see as the implications?
I’d love to hear,
Kate
*Our next Zoom is the first Monday of the month, October 6th. I’ll share the link next week. As for the start time, we’re going to split the difference and go with 5:30pm PT/8:30pm ET. (Thank goodness for our resident epidemiologist who was capable of the high math required to arrive at this neat solution.)
