Choice

 If you are reading this now and have yet to make your choice for who will be our next President of the United States, first of all, you must be new. Secondly, if you have been with me all along and perhaps been sitting on the fence thinking, "I don't know, there's so much good on both sides," then maybe you haven't been actually reading this blog so much as looking at the pictures. 

Ha, ha. Just a little Entropical Paradise humor there. This is the place where my thousand words tend to take up the space where a picture might be. For a sadly great majority of the past eight years, those words have been that of a warning: Warning against letting our country fall prey to the xenophobia and misogyny promoted by the big Orange Cabal. 

Which is not to say that I want you to simply vote against a convicted felon and his "concepts of a plan" to Make America A Dystopian Wasteland. I want you to vote for Kamala Harris, a woman who has spent her life working for the people. District Attorney. Attorney General. Senator. Vice President. There is an arc to her story that is precisely the kind that we hope to celebrate with our children when we tell them, "If you work hard and stay true to your vision, someday you could be President of the United States."

And let's be honest about just what that means: Taking over the reins of our troubled nation at this point will be a lot like being in charge of The Reconstruction after our Civil War. The divides that exist within our people and its institutions could not be more stark. But Kamala Harris continues to insist that those things that threaten to tear us apart are insignificant compared to those that bring us together. 

This is what I believe. This is what I believe Kamala Harris can do for our less-than-united states. The American Dream belongs to all of us, and yes it needs to be made available to those who seek to become a part of it. The contributions of black, brown, Muslim, female, LGBTQ+, left, right, white, red and blue are all significant and need to be brought together not in a literal snapshot of what our founding fathers imagined two hundred forty-eight years ago, but a living, moving panorama of possibility. 

We won't go back. 

Nor should we. 

As the poets from Akron once urged us, "It's time to go forward, move ahead, and give the past a slip."

Vote as if your life depended it on it. And your children's life. 

And your cat's.