A YEAR of POLITICAL ACTION from November 4, 2024 to November 4, 2025

“What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

If you aren’t familiar with the above quote, it's from my favorite band back in my college years, the Grateful Dead. And at least for me, this was one of the longest and strangest years of my life. Several times this year I found myself saying out loud to my phone as I read the news, “this can’t be real,” or “this can’t be happening.” But it was happening. It was all too real. This is exactly what Authoritarian Regimes want, for you to doubt your reality. To feel defeated. It’s unsettling, and that’s the goal, because when you aren’t grounded in reality you cannot organize and act.

I was never involved in politics before this year. My husband was a career Army officer; we got the message for decades to be a-political. For me, being able to speak my mind at long last and be politically active has been a real awakening. I know many who read this newsletter have been politically active their entire life and because of you and your tireless actions, we made amazing advances in this country for civil rights and equality. Watching those rights be attacked and dismantled has been nothing short of heartbreaking. We have a lot of fighting to do ahead to right this ship. Our country is addicted to outrage and opinions and the attention economy is injecting us nonstop with cortisol-laced noise.

The opposite of addiction is connection, according to the author Johann Hari. Healthy human relationships and community support are crucial to our country’s recovery. We need each other, in person, aka “IRL” or “in real life,” in actual face-to-face conversation, preferably with eye contact! I know!! Good news, we can do hard things. That’s the new political action we need. And that’s not easy but we can start small, and it will get easier. We get off our phones, we get out into the community, we stop listening to the noise and we listen to each other. I believe in us; I know we remember how to do it; we are just out of practice. Let’s get back into it together.