hey i just wanted to say i really enjoy your posts. i'm a 30-something who works in reproductive health care in pennsylvania, and while i often feel pretty bad about our government, i still think voting is essential.
i get really frustrated with a lot of the people around me who seem to almost delight in being fatalistic. dems just might be able to secure a majority in our state house which, along with a pro-choice governor, means we could finally secure some protection for abortion access instead of just constantly praying the gop doesn't reach a veto-proof majority. and when i share this with my friends i either get silence or, literal quote, "that would be absolutely incredible and by absolutely incredible i mean in keeping with the barest sliver of hope for the future but i guess it's a low bar" and it's like????? hey fuck you???
anyways, i like how you balance optimism and pragmatism and seem like someone who doesn't just want to smoke week, play mariokart, and talk about how every candidate sucks.
Thanks, this means a lot to me. I have been cavilling in the lonely Tumblr wilderness about elections, voting, the necessity to do it, the toxic and useless "Progressive Online Leftist" culture, why you need to support Democrats, and so forth ever since at least 2016. As you might expect, this has not always gone down well, but I am stubborn.
Also: yes, this election wasn't a blue wave, but yet again, I'm astonished at how fast the goalposts changed, and suddenly the best midterm results for an incumbent president in recent history were Actually Bad. The almost universally-expected Republican red tsunami didn't happen at all, and while they may scrape out the House in a tight race (let's hope not the Senate too), that is hardly the barn-busting result that everyone was crowing about. Their craziest and most dangerous candidates, in the places where they had the chance to do a lot of damage, almost universally lost. Democrats even made pickups in places where they weren't expected. They held their own and made it exponentially more likely that we can stagger into 2024 without going full fascism, and that is important.
I know the nihilist millennial/Gen Z culture tends to make everything as bad as it can be at all times (and don't get me wrong, it is indeed very bad), but just being Edgelord Darko at all times to show how cool and cynical you are... eh, it just doesn't appeal to me, it never has, it never fixes anything, and is as much a self-serving fantasy as the Republicans' Big Lie. In both cases, it conveniently excuses the person from having to do anything to actually help the world and the state of things, if everything is already fucked anyway, and I'm definitely not cool with that.
