July 1st 2024,

It’s early morning and I lay in bed with my eyes closed. I sit there in silence allowing my brain to turn on the lights and get the factory wheels going. First on the agenda: practicing gratitude. A habit I started when I turned 30 years old.

1. I’m grateful for friends who have been so generous with me.

2. I’m grateful for a good nights rest.

3. I’m grateful for breath.

I turn over and reach for my phone which is sitting on the night stand. I check my texts. I check my email. I check my daily horoscope from the Chani app. And then I check instagram.

I open my account and the first thing I see is a post from NPR about SCOTUS voting 6-3 in favor of essentially giving the former president immunity over being tried for his involvement in the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol (a simple breakdown here). My stomach drops and I feel a knot the size of an oil tanker wrap itself around my waistline. The last time I felt this way was November 8, 2016.

I had moved back in with my mother to save money after being laid off. I went to bed feeling nauseous seeing the votes come in. I couldn’t stay up watching CNN, so instead I went to sleep. I woke up at around 4 am in a cold sweat, and grabbed my phone. Quickly searching the tally. Seeing what had happened I started to cry, waking my mother up. She tried to console me, and reminded me that “we’re citizens, we’re ok”. She didn’t quite understand what his presidency was going to set us up for.

So waking up to the news on July 1st felt like a full-circle moment. I wish I could hold Yari of 2016 now. She knew that when we vote, we are voting for future us. Most policies and choices made by those in office either tend to go into effect later or we feel their effects after all is said and done.

Shit, look at the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which financed community mental health support systems and emphasized the importance of comprehensive, integrated mental health care that addressed the needs of individuals across their lifespan and provided support for services such as crisis intervention, rehabilitation, and housing. It was signed into law by Jimmy Carter, and was repealed TO THE BONE by Ronald Reagan in 1981. These actions have a direct correlation as to how America views mental health (hi the loneliness epidemic is calling) and specifically how we treat our unhoused population (look at how SCOTUS voted on Oregon vs. Johnson two weeks ago). We are 43 years removed.

I stayed off instagram and tiktok the rest of the morning and afternoon. I knew that what I needed was to step away from the dizzying spell casted by the outlets that would soon pour in with their own headlines on the news, and instead allow myself to process the path laying before us. I needed to hold space for me before I could hold space for this world and it’s many screams.

I started to clean, and found solace in a book I’ve spent all of June listening to, Marianne Williamson’s “A Return to Love”, which was published in 1992. I’ve been listening to the audiobook in conjunction with reading bell hook’s “All About Love: New Visions”, which was published in ‘99. I mention the years because much like one of my favorite albums, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” (which was released in ‘98), both these books are evergreen. They are so relevant to what we are facing now, that they feel like they were published yesterday.

Marianne and bell’s work centers love as the guiding principle for living. Love, a word most throw around like a hot potato when discussing romance in an idealogical manner, or their latest impulse purchase. But that’s not how these two women talk about love. Their version of love is much more revered and sacred. It demands us to take seriously how we show up for ourselves and each other on the daily.

It is evident that we’ve been indoctrinated into individualism as a way of life, and have just begun to question how insidious it is. Because of pockets of the internet, like TikTok, we are seeing raw footage of the effects of American capitalism and imperialism not just on us, but on others. We, the Gen X/Millenials/ and Gen-Z’ers of America are having to reckon with the aftermath (and continued arsonism) of a country that terrorizes all people in the name of a prophet who is the icon for loving thy neighbor. And ain’t no way Jesus would fuck with Ron Desantis or Clarence Thomas.

Swimming in these works has forced me to re-evaluate how disciplined I am about leading with love in all aspects of my life.

In “All About Love”, hooks writes a lot about how our society lacks “a love ethic”. A love ethic is a commitment to nurturing and practicing love in all aspects of life, beyond romantic love, to encompass love for oneself, others, and the community. Having a love ethic means making decisions and taking actions based on love, compassion, and mutual respect rather than fear, domination, or selfishness. She shows us how the patriarchy and individualism are at the root of why the fabric of society feels so broken. Having a love ethic means acknowledging and valuing everyone’s inherent worth, and recognizing the impact of our behavior on others. It calls for integrity, and stresses how it is our duty to advocate for justice and fairness, no matter what.

And no, I’m not saying that if we could all miraculously agree to a love ethic today, that tomorrow things would be easy. In fact I’ll let bell tell it. In chapter 8 titled 'Community: Loving Community” she says the following two things:

1. Often, New Age writing on the subject of love makes it seem as though everything will always be wonderful if we are just loving. Realistically, being part of a loving community does not mean we will not face conflicts, betrayals, negative outcomes from positive actions, or bad things happening to good people. [However,] love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life-enhancing.

2. The willingness to sacrifice is a necessary dimension of loving practice and living in community. None of us can have things our way all the time. Giving up something is one way we sustain a commitment to the collective well-being. Our willingness to make sacrifices reflects our awareness of interdependency.

Where am I going with this? As someone who was considering voting independent (or at least looking into it), I cannot let my rage for the lack of strategy by the Democratic party to fog my vision of the future. I want to channel my rage into what future us will need in order to not just survive, but thrive. Everything that has happened since 2016 is imploring us to be global citizens. We get to co-create what we want the plot to be for the next 43 years!

This election is bigger than america. How can we even consider giving fascism (have you familiarized yourself project 2025 and the heritage foundation?) full access to the worlds biggest military? If you didn’t know, as of 2021 the US has around 750 bases in at least 80 countries. More than any other nation. And while I’m not trying to feed you fear, we need to be fucking forreal and acknowledge that yes, it can get worse. Please know I’m not blind to the many atrocities that have happened under the democratic party (including present day). I just need us to see around the corner and beyond our own noses.

If we mobilized with a love ethic, our care for community would never falter, and we would have the votes to prove it. We are a chronically inconsistent bunch (me included) when it comes to nurturing democracy. But every time an election rolls around we will complain till our last breath because that’s easier than showing up.

According to Pew Research,

while sizable shares of the public vote either consistently or not at all, many people vote intermittently. Given how closely divided the U.S. is politically, these intermittent voters often determine the outcome of elections and how the balance of support for the two major political parties swings between elections.

Overall, 70% of U.S. adult citizens who were eligible to participate in all three elections between 2018 and 2022 voted in at least one of them, with about half that share (37%) voting in all three.

How can we know something doesn’t work if we only did it once? We want results without responsibility. We want change without having to try. I wish we were in a world where we could vote people in, and go on autopilot because we can trust their own love ethic. But that is not where we are at.

Last week I went to an event that was focused on “un-muting” ourselves in spaces where we are the minority. And while the conversation was focused on corporate life, one of the panelists said something I woke up thinking about. He said that at the start of his own career in advertising he had the mentality of “fuck them, they don’t appreciate and understand us so I’m not going to waste my time trying to convince them otherwise”. And as he got older he changed his approach to not having it be all or nothing. He did not need to get the company he worked at to make 100% of the changes he wanted. If he could move the needle even by 35% in the right direction, it would allow the next person with the same agenda as his to move it even further.

And that’s how progress works.

We are not in a marathon.

We are in a relay race.

From this point forward I’m concerned with how we pass the baton to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, because come November, “40.8 million members of Gen Z (ages 18-27 in 2024) will be eligible to vote, including 8.3 million newly eligible youth (ages 18-19 in 2024) who will have aged into the electorate since the 2022 midterm election”. And considering that 154M people voted in 2020 (keep in mind there’s roughly 334M people in the US, and at least 86% are natural born citizens), I’d say 40M votes are CRUCIAL.

If your choice has been made, and you are forfeiting your vote, I want you to think about how you will show up with whatever the outcomes are. You cannot wail in the wind my darling friend. Your attendance is still required (and needed).

As Marianne said in chapter 11 of “A Return to Love”:

It’s easy to be cynical, in fact whenever people say to me “Marianne I’m so depressed about world hunger”, I say to them, “do you give $5 to one of the organizations that feed the hungry?”. The reason I ask is that I’ve noticed the people who participate in the solutions to problems don’t find themselves as depressed about those problems as the people standing on the sidelines and doing nothing. Hope is born of participation and hopeful solutions.

What hopeful solution will you partake in?

Okay beautiful people, signing off for now.

xo your fav lover girl

PS - If you’re in need of a morale boost, look to the French. They just had an election and kept Marine Le Pen’s far right movement out of office (read here). The power of the people is greater than the people in power.