Season Five, Episode 2: Election, Humanity, and How do we vote when nothing feels right

Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.

This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at  1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment. 

Danielle  (00:26):

Welcome to the Rise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. This is a part two of our season five opener, which was review and recap of the past year, and also engaging some questions around humanity, the election, and how do we see our neighbor? We are going to be hearing from a couple of organizers who have been in my county, Kitsap County for more than a decade. You're going to hear some of their experiences, some of what they've gone through, as well as a few other folks who are giving their response to the questions we posed last week. I've been doing a lot of listening. This isn't an endorsement for any candidate. This isn't a psychological advice, and this isn't a prescription for how you should vote. Voting is a right. It's something we can participate in. It's a way to participate in our system.  

A lot of folks are swinging wildly between two pendulums. There's the thought of my vote doesn't matter and I'm not going to vote, or I'm going to vote for X person as a protest vote. These are all of your rights. You have the right to do. So. I've been thinking a lot about change and what does change mean? How do we want to see change come about, and what does long-term change really look like? I can't speak from an electoral politics standpoint because I'm not an elected official and I don't plan to be anytime soon. I can speak as a person, a mother, a wife, a partner, a colleague, a friend, and a community member. And what I can say is people powered movements are what I have seen from the ground up, bring change in communities. This isn't unlike what happens in our bodies from a psychological experience in my own body. Change doesn't come from merely thinking about it. It comes from the ground up in my body. It comes from addressing the feelings, paying attention to my body, and becoming a more integrated person. I would challenge all of us to look around and what are the people powered movements for social change that we desire, and what are the ways our body is talking to us and how if we listen, will it inform us where we stand on many of these different issues?  

This brings me to another sensitive topic. The topic of how we are feeling, how we are doing in the sociopolitical climate. We're living in these United States. I can say that for myself in my own experience, my anxiety is heightened overall and feelings that I can keep at bay with regular normal coping mechanisms such as exercise. It takes me a little bit more and I have to offer myself a lot more grace in the process. I encourage you no matter where you are, to engage these topics with grace towards your own self, towards your neighbor, towards your family, and towards whoever's in your proximity. We won't get things done overnight. That's not how change works. Change is a process. It is for us as individuals, and it is for us as a collective society. So hang in there. If you need help, get the help you need.  

Maybe it's a mental health counselor, maybe it's a spiritual advisor. Maybe it's your pastor, maybe it's your friend. Maybe it's someone in your community that you look up to, like a mentor, or maybe you just need to sit down with your friends and have a good old fashioned dinner and drinks and put your phones away. Whatever the help you need is, it's important that you seek out that help and that support. The goal isn't to be perfect. It isn't to be fixed. The goal is to be in our process and getting what we need so each day we can show up for ourselves and those in our community. We're going to jump into the conversation and voices from across the country. We are all different and we're not meant to be the same. I hope you find pieces of you in each of their stories.  

Speaker 2 (04:37):

Hi, this is Raquel Jarek and I'm coming to you from Bloomington, Minnesota, which is a suburb in the Minneapolis area. I teach astronomy for work to college students in downtown Minneapolis and am an aerospace engineer and was raised in a very Christian home. And I'm still a practicing Christian in many ways, and I make space for people with different political views in all kinds of moments in my life. I do it at my work with students because I have a variety of people in my classes. I'm actually challenging them to vote and to even investigate the two major political candidates for president on what they view of science and space and how they would support NASA or space exploration. And I get to know my students pretty well in person, especially not as much with my online students, but I want to make space and have a comfortable room where people can share a little bit of how they feel, but also not be offensive to people with a variety of opinions in the room.  

Speaker 2 (05:44):

And then there's a variety of opinions in my family on my side of the family and my in-laws and which candidates they support and which parties they affiliate with. I want to be a person who is about supporting different opinions and being able to be loving and welcoming to anyone in any opinion. And sometimes that can be difficult when people have conflicting views in the room. I think you might need to keep the conversation more surface level and fun and in smaller conversations maybe you can dive into what they think more. But that can be really challenging to go deep with people who are very opposite opinions. At the same time, I like to have challenging conversations about politics and religion, and I think being open to those conversations whenever those topics come up is good. And then also just remember to be kind. And I think that's definitely easier to do in person than online or in a social media space, but that face-to-face contact does bring out more humanity and more kindness in people. So I hope that helps and that people can make more time and space to treat others kindly and hear opinions. Thanks.  

Danielle (07:04):

What were you going to say about the election?  

Sarah  (07:08):

Oh, I'm just feeling stressed about how close this election is. And it's just sort of extraordinary to me that given the many, many flaws in the Trump offering that people would still vote for him, that he's clearly mentally impaired and authoritarian, happy with dictators, mean-spirited and more of a mafia boss than a presidential candidate. And it's just extraordinary to me that, and I've always known people like that existed. It's just extraordinary to me that so many people would be planning to vote for him. So I am feeling a little stressed this morning,  

Speaker 1 (07:55):

Pam, I saw you nod your head.  

Speaker 4 (07:58):

Oh, I agree with everything that Sarah said. I have the same I deep, deep apprehensions and anxiety, and I think we're living in a landscape of anxiety just on the edge of a nation that at least half of it wants to go over that edge and pull the other half down with them. And it's really frightening. It's real. And I think I'm also frightened by people who are putting their heads in the sand. That's their response either out of just inconvenience or their terror response. So we're in a situation,  

Speaker 1 (09:04):

I agree. I feel that. I feel it come out in so many different ways. So for instance, as a licensed mental health therapist, something gets said like it was this last week where the former president is at a rally comments on anatomy. It gets blasted across the airwaves. And then what I notice that happens across my workspace is that people are triggered in their family relationships. They're triggered in with community. They're on heightened alert with a neighbor. I noticed this is last week we had two different really random requests. One was to adjust our fence because of the view. And if you know my yard, I live way out in the country, no one's looking. The second thing that happened to us was like, your car is parked at an odd angle sort of thing. So can we switch it around? I wasn't home. I got the message. And immediately when the message popped up, I felt so much anxiety and I was trying to talk myself off the ledge. I'm like, you can move this car, Danielle, when you go home, you can move this. This is fixable. You can come back from this. But the way I understand it is there's all my cup of navigating anxiety and uncertainties already up to here. So if my car's crooked somewhere, I'm freaking out.  

Speaker 4 (10:44):

I think that's happening all over the place. I mean, we saw an example yesterday afternoon with that involved pizza and chicken and people being much deeper issues and wounds being triggered by that, and we just have to take care of each other. I think we really, my priority is number one for the foreseeable future is public safety and how do we take care of each other when a lot of us can't call the people in the system that are supposed to give us support when they're not there, or they are part of what is creating problems and cruelty and insensitivity. So I mean, that's the only thing that's on my mind right now is public safety.  

Speaker 1 (12:16):

Sarah, thank you, Pam. Sarah, what comes to mind? We're kind of discussing the nature of political dialogue in our current climate. What do you see at stake if we do not vote?  

Speaker 3 (12:31):

Yeah, so that's what I've been thinking a lot about because I know there's a lot of people feeling that as a principled matter, they don't want to participate in voting, especially when the Biden administration has not been taking the ethical stand. We would like them to take on Gaza, for example. That's kind of a particularly heightened one, and it's really hard to feel like by voting somehow you're participating, you're condoning genocide. So I really get that and struggle with that myself. And here's where I come down is that I don't feel like any presidential candidate since I've started voting, which was a very long time ago, that any presidential candidate, except for when McGovern was voting, was running to get us out of Vietnam War, that there's been a presidential candidate that I was voting for with enthusiasm, we vote strategically. And that's one of the things the working family party is so good at.  

Speaker 3 (13:35):

They say we're voting strategically. We're voting to build power so that we as a movement can get things done. That doesn't mean the person who's running for president or any other office is our leader. We're not getting behind them as like, okay, all our loyalty is to this individual. We're voting strategically because this person in office is more likely to, number one, give us the space to build a social movement that can actually build power. And number two, to be swayed by the social movement to care when people show up and protest and people gone strike. And when people's movements do what they do so well, they care enough to then be willing to change policies. And so that's the way I feel about it. I don't feel like we have to believe that Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz are the people that we believe are the most, are everything we would hope for.  

Speaker 3 (14:33):

We just have to say, will this person allow social movements that care about poor people, that care about immigrants, they care about the environment, will they allow those social movements to progress? And we desperately need that progress. And on the other hand, if we end up with somebody like Trump, I mean, I think part of the appeal of Trump in the beginning, I mean when he ran the first time around, I think the appeal for a lot of people was they were just so angry at the system as it is that voting for Trump was throwing a bomb into the middle of government and seeing what landed because they didn't want to continue the status quo. And that felt more satisfying. Well, we kind of know what that looked like. We know who got hurt there. And we know also that this time around he has less to lose.  

Speaker 3 (15:25):

He doesn't have another term to run for, so he doesn't have to placate anybody. There is no group of people that he has to be concerned about except for the people who give him money and give him power. And so that's what the entire government will be oriented around is giving Donald Trump lots of flattery, lots of power and lots of money. And we know what that looks like in Russia because that's kind of what happened when the Berlin wall fell, is that they kind of sold off the whole government to a bunch of rich people, and it became just thoroughly corrupt. It's not like we don't have corruption now we do, but just wait until the whole government is privatized and Elon Musk owns this chunk and Peter tha owns this chunk, and it's like the rest of you, we don't care because we've got AI to do your job. Anyway,  

Speaker 1 (16:24):

Pam, thoughts or response?  

Speaker 4 (16:28):

Yeah, no, I think all of that is right on. We sort of can oscillate between the most local level, the national level, and global politics. So we're part of a very extraordinary zeitgeist of authoritarianism popping up in multiple countries. And I heard a podcast a week or so ago talking about authoritarianism in other countries, and they pointed out, and especially in Europe, that there very, very forceful, very strong, very loud, very visible, but they are not the majority in those countries. And I think because we see and hear more about authoritarianism on a daily basis and the ratcheting up of the horrible violent rhetoric that we can easily feel like we are the minority. And I don't know that we're a big majority. And I think that there's a lot of qualifications to what constitutes authoritarianism because it is not that it's not here already. When we talk about voting for democracy, this is about losing our democracy. Well, that's a very relative term. I mean, the country was not founded democratically, this country was taken. I think that's why we have such a hard time dealing with Palestine. If we have to acknowledge colonization and genocide and all of the injustices there, we might have to then look at our own situation and history. So I mean, again, it just travels back and forth between the different levels. And here in sbo, hobo is proud of its colonization and it's just terrified of losing a grip. So I think we are in an identity crisis. You can't imagine.  

Speaker 3 (19:28):

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think a lot of that identity, I think a lot of it is where racism really flowers is people are afraid that they lose their privilege and entitlement of being white, and then they're willing to listen to and be convinced by really horrible racist ideas. And I think part of that is also this crisis of a sense of belonging that people have been, the social institutions that used to keep us connected have withered away in so many different ways. And then during Covid, we were so isolated, and then people just got this, it's a psychological trauma of a kind to be that isolated. And so without a sense of belonging, instead of turning to one another and saying, let's figure out how we rebuild our community in ways that are real and authentic and empowering, people are turning against each other because that's sort of the reptilian brain taking over and saying fight or flight, and I'm going to fight these other, and that's going to give me a sense of belonging because then I'll be part of this little group that all is fighting against the other. So I do feel like it's an incredibly dangerous time. And I also feel like at a local level, there are solutions that are about building that sense of belonging that are within our reach.  

Speaker 1 (21:12):

Yeah, one thing I think from a psychological perspective is often we're like toddlers or babies. We do this process of, we do split a split, what's good, what's bad? And we're dependent on a caregiver to make meaning of the world for us so we can understand those splits and we can become hopefully an integrated adult that's able to manage the good and the bad feelings. And I think an more general term, which it's going to shortcut some understanding here, it's far more nuanced than what I'm saying, but we have a collective split. And in that collective split, for instance, when a toddler can't get their bad feelings out, if you've ever seen a toddler rage, they rage about a candy wrapper, they rage about, I can't get it. X. And what does that toddler need? Yes, they need the physical containment, the love and the care and support. They need boundaries.  

Speaker 1 (22:20):

Then they need a parent to talk to them, even if they can't understand it either through touch or interaction or play or verbally to make sense of why they had those big feelings to normalize the big feelings. So the toddler can say, oh, I'm not weird because I had these big feelings and here's where I can put them. Here's how I can process them. And in a sense, Trump I think has capitalized on the splitting of our collective conscious. And he said, you have bad feelings and let's put 'em over here. Let's find someone to blame. So this becomes, let's externalize our bad feelings about maybe what we're coming to realize. It gets centered around a critical race theory or it gets centered around Haitian immigrants. Let's put all of our bad feelings, the things we haven't been taught to metabolize as a society and let's throw 'em over here into these people.  

Speaker 1 (23:19):

And because there's a lot of folks that are listening to this rhetoric, it feels good not to have to deal with our own bad feelings about ourselves. I'm just going to be honest. When I feel shame about myself, I feel horrible. I do not like that. And sometimes I deal with it well, and sometimes I don't. But I depend on other figures in my life to bring that shame to them and say like, oh, what do I do about this? I feel bad. And how do I make amends? Or maybe I can't make amends. And if you can't make amends, you also have to deal with that. So I think these authoritarians capitalize on the psychological collective consciousness of a society that doesn't often know what to do with the bad feelings. Think about Germany, think about Israel, think about, I'm trying to think about what we've done in Mexico and South America with corporations, and now all of a sudden people migrating north.  

Speaker 1 (24:24):

Now they're bad. So what do we do with that construction of consciousness? And I agree, Sarah, really the only way to take a piece of that elephant is to start with your friend or your neighbor and to vote for people that seem to have more space for us to organize or to continue to make meaning with our neighbor that may be very aggressive and hostile to us. I mean, the mistake is on the other side, if I vote for this radical person, they're going to eliminate that bad neighbor somehow because they're not actually trying to convert the person they think is bad. They're trying to get rid of them, expel them permanently. And what I think I'm looking for is something, what SMA talks about, resum is where do we, and I think what you guys are saying is where's that space where we may know we don't like someone, but where there's actually space to figure it out. And with an authoritarian, there's never going to be that space. They're dependent on the hate.  

Speaker 4 (25:32):

That's right. Go ahead, Pam. And then people want to think that if Trump just doesn't get elected, we'll be okay. We will have dodged the literal bullet in many cases. But that's not true because like you're saying, Danielle, it's the divestment of our own intolerable parts. For whatever reason, they are intolerable to us onto the others, and our system is constructed such that we have to have others. Capitalism has to have others, we have to have racism. That's what makes it work so well for the people that it works well for. I think we need a national intervention, and I think that's what we're going toward in a dark sense.  

Speaker 4 (26:49):

But I would hope that we could start to get ourselves moving toward a national intervention and within a more positive framework. And how do we do that? How do we do that? You're talking about the hyper-local level and with neighbors and family. And at this point, I mean, some of our neighbors want to kill us, and that's not being hyperbolic. And we know that those sentiments are out there, but the sort of signs are being flashed everywhere to intimidate others rather than to put down those weapons, whatever form they take and sit down together to find some commonalities to just bring the temperature down. Right now, so many other people have been very alienated from numerous family members over these issues and can't not bring the issue of guns into this conversation because the weaponization of our society is a huge factor. I think it's a huge factor in why many politicians, political leaders don't step up more. I think it's why they don't confront the atrocities that are happening in front of us, whether it's in other countries or it's in our own backyard. I think the arming of America has really deformed our national character, and I think that's a large part of this identity crisis.  

Speaker 3 (29:11):

So yeah, I think what you said earlier about this being that the authoritarian, the group that really approves of that is a minority. And even when Trump won in 2016, he won by a minority of the popular vote. And we know the electoral college system is to blame there, but we are pretty clear that he doesn't have a majority and he still may win, but he doesn't have a majority. So I think it's really important to remember that there are the violent folks who are really in favor and really relish the idea of violence, but they are a relatively small minority way more than I would've hoped, but still. So then I think a lot of our challenge is how do we work with the people that are still in the middle? And I don't mean that they don't have opinions, it's that they are struggling with the nuances.  

Speaker 3 (30:08):

And I think there are a lot of those people, even though they're kind of hidden from the media, but they're struggling with the nuances, they're not sure who to vote for or whether to vote. And one of the things I keep seeing is Kamala Harris and other people asking for money, which I don't understand, they raise so much money already. And what I wish Kamala Harris would ask for is, I wish you would ask us for our vote, and I wish you would ask us to talk to somebody in our family or in our friendship circle who is struggling with knowing whether to vote or not or who to vote for and ask them for their vote. And I'm not talking about uncle, so-and-so who's clearly going to vote for Trump? What I'm talking about is the person who says, well, my vote doesn't matter. Or the person who says, I can't bring myself to vote for a candidate who hasn't stood up to what's going on in Gaza. And those are things that I sympathize with. I think there are people who have intelligence and real concern who are expressing those things. One of the things I just heard about is I don't, if you remember a while, a few elections back, there was a swap the vote thing going on where you could talk to somebody in a swing state  

Speaker 3 (31:35):

And say, Hey, I'll vote for a third party candidate, Jill Stein or Cornell West if you'll vote, given that you're in the swing state and your vote's going to really make a difference if you'll vote for Kamala Harris. So I'm getting ready to do that. I'm going to see if I can find one of my friends at Michigan who is struggling with that question around Gaza because I struggle with it too. And I think that Kamala Harris has shown she actually cares, even though we're not getting the kind of position we would like, I think she actually does care about human beings. I don't see any evidence of that from Trump. So I think we're better off if she wins in Gaza, we're better off with Gaza, and then we can continue our organizing work. So much of our work is really not about the elections.  

Speaker 3 (32:27):

It's about building the power of ordinary people through social movements. And that's what we need to be about. And that's also, I think the part besides the crisis of the other part of the crisis we're in is this crisis of inequality and hopelessness in a sense that no matter what I do, if I'm a young person, I may never be able to buy a house, or I may never be able to have children because I can't afford daycare. I mean, the death that people and people in the media, often the Democratic party often describe this as inflation and say, well, inflation is so much better, and therefore, why aren't you guys happy? It's like, well, I still can't afford a place to live. Why should I be happy? They're kind of not getting that. So the whole way our economy is functioning to pour huge amounts of money into the military industrial complex and into a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, and to allow the wealth to trickle up, not just trickle, but flow up to the top tiniest percentage and the rest of people to be struggling.  

Speaker 3 (33:36):

That whole way of organizing the economy I think is really important to remember how popular Bernie Sanders was when he was willing to call that out. And I think the Democratic Party was not having it. They kept him from actually winning the nomination, but he won enormous amounts of support. And some of those people were people that then turned around and voted for Trump. They wanted an outsider who was going to shake things up. I think we have to be ready to shake things up in terms of the economy in a way that's inclusive, that says we can have an economy that includes everyone, where everybody has an opportunity and not, we could have a better economy by deporting massive numbers of people. I think when you can have a political message, that's also an inclusive message and also a message of belonging, I think that's where we have an opportunity to actually combat this authoritarian bent.  

Speaker 4 (34:36):

I would add that we need more than messaging. We need action because the Democratic Party has been very good at messaging, inclusivity, the big tent, economic equity, healthcare. But then we look at what happens. And Sarah, you and I have been in this for decades, and we make just enough progress to keep the populace from exploding. I mean, one of the best educations, best parts of my political education was taking the training with cell deaf. Do you know them? Community Environmental Defense Fund? Yeah. Oh my God. So every election cycle, we hear the same songs. The Republicans say, well, we need to get the government out of our lives. We need to deregulate. We don't need these people. The government telling us what to do. We need to tell the government what to do. And then we hear the Democrats saying, yes, we need to make things equal and better for everybody, and we will be your guardians.  

Speaker 4 (36:23):

And over these decades, we have seen some progress, but really not enough. I mean, when you're talking about Bernie Sanders, I'm thinking about when I was a delegate in Philadelphia, a national delegate at the Democratic Convention. And the last night of the convention, which was when Hillary was being, oh, she'd already been nominated but finalized, and I was the whip for the Sanders delegates in the Washington state contingent. And they sent being the Democratic Committee, national Committee, they put a detail of seven plain clothes. I've got pictures and everything of this plain clothes, secret service, FBIA, and then the local law enforcement figures armed to encircle me. We had delegates from other Bernie delegates from other states who were also organized to express our democratic voices. But I think our faith in the system really needs a deep examination, and we need other parties. And the electoral college is its own thing, but this identity crisis has so many dimensions to it that the work that we have in front of us is very broad. And I'm not sure that the public in general understands that. I think they think it's about electing someone, putting them there, and then back to business as usual. And we can't go on like this. So in a way, even though it's so painful, it's so frightening, and it's so awful. I we're at a turning point, and that's a good thing. Unfortunately it doesn't feel very good,  

Speaker 4 (39:04):

But we have to do it right.  

Speaker 3 (39:12):

Danielle, I can jump in, but I was, I'm curious about what you think.  

Speaker 1 (39:15):

Well, I think it brings back to what I was asking you all about how do we see change happening in our society, both long-term and short term? And which leads me back to hearing Resum talk last year and then reading and listening to his books and some of his just Instagram reels and him talking about we got here over 400 years, and it really didn't start then either. It started with disgruntled folks over in Europe thinking the best way to do something about that was to go live in another place and then conquer that place. So it started centuries before this. And wait, how long have we been out of Jim Crow? Can anybody tell me how many years technically zero. I mean, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1950, what was it,  

Speaker 3 (40:23):

1967 I think, or 68. Okay.  

Speaker 1 (40:28):

I mean, just put that in context. You got four centuries and you got whatever drove those people to come here, grew up thinking these guys were the puritan citizens of the world that were looking for a new place. I really wasn't the case. So you got all of that, you honor, you immortalize Christopher Columbus who wrote prolifically and told stories prolifically about murder and rape and state sanctioned violence that set the tone. And this is a man we immortalized. So when I think about long-term, and I think about SMA talking about, he talks about each of us taking, when we begin to make a shift in our family, it being five generations out till that shift is maybe completed. So on some level, that makes me think we're all effed and on the other level, someone has to start it. We have to get going. And that's what I hear you all saying, like, okay, we have this huge dilemma. We are here, and I agree Sarah and Pam voting for the president. Again, you can get caught in that realm. If you vote for Trump, he's your savior. If you vote for Kamala, she's going to save us. Well, she's not going to save us.  

Speaker 1 (42:05):

Jill Stein can't save us, Cornell West, and I hope one of them are thinking they can, the alternatives to Trump. I fear maybe that narcissism is so deep that maybe there is some thought of that, but our people's movements, the things we do on our block and our street matter the most, and those have the potential to make long-term effects for my kids and short-term interventions, look at what happened in the school district here. I mean, they've gone back to using common threads and other things as a foundation because of what was set decades. Was that like two decades ago? Three decades? Two, yeah, two decades. But there is a sense that when you have someone severely corrupt and empowered and dictating tone, you literally can't get anywhere,  

Speaker 3 (43:05):

Right? Well, I think the time horizon question is really important. We do have hundreds of years of this history. We should remember that some of the people who came over came over because they were fleeing horrific conditions. I mean, you think about the Irish people who were trying to escape a famine, and you think about Jewish people trying to get away from pilgrims. I mean, it wasn't that everybody who came over to the US came over here because they thought they could kill a bunch of native people and therefore have a good life. I don't think that was the intent. What they did when they came over here varies tremendously. So I just think we want to keep the nuance in the story because part of the reason is because that's part of what we have to build on, is that today's refugees are not that different in many cases from the people who are escaping the Irish potato famine.  

Speaker 3 (44:09):

They're people who are suffering and looking for a way to survive and raise their families and work hard. And so we have that part of our story to build on too. So that's just one part. A second thing is that I think our social movements in the United States have gotten kind of swallowed up by the nonprofit industrial. We've thought we could get the changes we need and alleviate suffering by service providing within the current system. And part of the reason that that has been dominant within the nonprofit sector is because where the funding comes from, funding comes from very wealthy individuals and companies, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases want to or are willing to alleviate suffering, but they want to make sure the system stays intact, the system that continues to distribute wealth and power to a small sector of the population. Well, a social movement that is hobbled by having to stay within the existing mindset and the existing system can't be, can't take on the fundamental challenge of inequality and of extractive capitalism because it's too tied into it.  

Speaker 3 (45:37):

So social movements have got to become independent. And there are good examples out there. I've mentioned the working families party before. I'm not a member of it, but I'm a big admirer because they insist on independent power based on their membership. They will help a Democrat, for example, get elected, but then they'll hold that person accountable to their agenda and say, these are the things we will only endorse you if you do these, if you commit to these things, then they'll go out and work for 'em and help 'em get elected, and then they'll come back and say, did you do those things? And they'll check their record. So they're building a form of independent power. They're not the only one, but they're a good example of how, instead of just saying, okay, democratic Party will come out and we'll vote for your candidate. I mean voting, I think we should all vote. I think we should all vote. I think honestly, that we should vote to keep Trump out of power. And that means voting strategically, and that means voting for Harris.  

Speaker 3 (46:34):

But that doesn't have to be the focus of our work. The focus of our work should be on building independent power that then holds the candidates accountable to us and does a bunch more in terms of building power. But that's just one of the ways that we need to be building power, is by having the wherewithal to be able to hold candidates accountable to our agenda. I mean, one of the things I used to do when I was at Yes magazine is around election season, we would put together a people's agenda. And this was an agenda of what do ordinary people want? And we figured that out, not just by what we wanted, but what the polls were seeing. And we could find things like a majority of large majority of Americans wanted nationalized healthcare. There was a poll that actually asked them that, and it was way over 50%. Neither democratic nor Republican parties were willing to talk about that. And before Obamacare, when they were working under Clinton on healthcare reform, they excluded any of the single payer advocates from the room. They wouldn't even let them be in the conversation. So one thing after another or that people want reasonable gun control laws, they want reproductive freedoms. They want us to convert energy from fossil fuels to renewables. They wanted that for decades. I can tell you, I was doing this work 20 years ago and the polling numbers showed it. So we need to do more to say this is a people's agenda. This is a people's agenda locally who can represent us and carry this forward and statewide and nationally. This is what we, the people want,  

Speaker 1 (48:23):

Pam.  

Speaker 4 (48:26):

Yeah, and we need imagination. I think we're so conditioned to accept systems and there's structures that our default is just, oh, whatever that system says, this is how we do things. And Sarah's talking about movements that are outside largely of those systems, at least in terms of analyzing what works for us and what works against us. And of course, we can't be just isolated satellites. We exist within these systems. So it's the nuanced little travels back and forth. I think that will, well, we've seen it. I mean, take the school district. That was an enormous breakthrough. Huge. Huge. It works. Some of the tactics involved a lot of imagination.  

Speaker 1 (49:56):

Yeah, I was going to say that. I said, I think we have to realize and understand, I think you're naming this, that people are vastly ambivalent. And so both in the way we think, and I think the way our trauma has hit us as a society and personally, and so I think a lot of us want to engage new forms of organizing or being together as a community. And I think a lot of times at the same time, people aren't ready to do so. There's some comfort in doing it the old way. So I just think we're up against, we have to realize that we're in this complex social movement where we're both invited to understand and know where we came from. And like Sarah, you pointed out the nuance of how we got here. It's not just one story or the other story, but we're also comfortable, I think on both sides of the coin, whether you're liberal or conservative, there's a similarity and you're comfortable and holding that type binary.  

Speaker 3 (51:06):

You're comfortable, but you're also afraid, right? I mean, we get into the reptilian mindset because we feel so under attack, and then we go into our more simple way of thinking. And I think the other side that we need to be doing our best to work on is to soothe our own alarm and fear by supporting one another, but then by opening that up so that more and more people can have that sense of possibility and belonging and joy and celebration and all the things that can happen at a community level that start calming people's anxiety and giving them a sense of hope and giving them the sense that we as a community have possibilities and can exercise our imaginative power and can make things different because we actually can when we're together in a way that we really can't on our own.  

Speaker 1 (52:07):

Pam, now that we solve that problem,  

Speaker 3 (52:17):

Yay, let's go and vote.  

Speaker 1 (52:24):

I didn't. I mean, I think the temptation is to try to wrap it up, but we just can't, to be honest. This is a conversation that hopefully not just for a podcast, but hopefully it's ongoing with people in our actual proximity.  

Speaker 4 (52:42):

Well, for one thing, the election isn't going to be decided on November the fifth. I mean, this is probably going to be the longest election ever, at least in this country. So I think it's important to have our communities know that we are paying attention and we are present especially, I mean, did you see the day that, I think it was a couple days ago when Trump gave that rally and made all of those disgusting remarks about Arnold Palmer and so forth? The thing that I think really fueled him for that was that just before that rally, 49 of 67 county sheriffs in Pennsylvania met with him to endorse the Trump presidency. And so when we put that together with things like the pre-positioned fake electors and all of the mechanics that go into our electoral process, I think it's going to be a while. Until this is settled, the outcome is settled, and I think it's important for us to have a presence based in peace and non-violence and tolerance. And I think it's really going to test us.  

Speaker 3 (54:52):

I agree with you. I think it's going to be really tough in the swing states. I mean, luckily for Washington, I think we'll probably be less in the crosshairs, but I do agree it's going to be really tough. And four years ago, I was on the board of Free Speech tv. I'm still on the board, but I was doing a bunch of research for them to find local people in each of the swing states that they could interview to find out what was going on on the ground. Because I just felt like anybody who thinks that Trump is going to give way to peacefully to a victory on the other side is kidding themselves. He's made clear. He made clear then. But he really is made clear now, and I think because of January 6th, there's more awareness now that we really have to have some safeguards in place. I don't know that they're in place, but there's more awareness of that. So yeah, I think it's a really frightening prospect. And I agree with you, Pam, that being ready to hold each other up is going to be really important.  

Speaker 5 (56:05):

I feel like it's really hard not to villainize the people I come in contact with who vote the other way. The tension is really hard to hold. How do I take a strong stance for what I believe in without hating the people around me who disagree, especially if they hold contempt for me? And what I think a few months ago on a local neighborhood Facebook group, someone posted, she was asking a question of where she could get a yard sign for what's the non-majority party here? The post caught my eye and I debated whether I should check it out to see the 50 plus comments. But ultimately, my curiosity won and I scrolled through them to see insole after insole hurled at this woman, her gender, her intelligence, and even her spirituality all came under attack, all because she asked the question. Others told her she should have known better than to bring it up in the first place.  

Speaker 5 (57:00):

I have to confess, I thought the same thing. There have been moments I've considered putting a sign up in my own yard again for the party that is not the majority here, but when I consider the community challenges I've faced over the last few years, I shy away from doing it. I don't know if I could handle any more loss of community. I need people in my life. We all do. And there's not only the risk of losing potential neighborhood friends, there's also the risk of losing family. Last week as I pulled around to the back of my parents' home, the home where I grew up, I noticed a yard sign for the candidate I do not support, almost as if it was there just for me to see in a family that loves to talk about politics, as long as you agree, I am no longer invited, or do I desire to be a part of the conversations.  

Speaker 5 (57:49):

But the sign in the backyard, which couldn't be seen from the road was placed there only for family to see. It's a statement, a line in the sand. I tell my kids as they ask questions about the fact that me and their grandparents disagree that it's one of the greatest, most beautiful things about our country, that we get to have our own opinion on who we want to vote for, and that it's okay to disagree that we can love people who think differently than we do. I should probably also tell them at some point that sometimes that's really hard to do. It's hard for me to breathe and ground when the hair stands up on the back of my neck and I feel my fist clench when men at the kitchen and my office building laugh and told lies about the candidate I support knowing where I stand. It's hard to stay calm when my middle aged client throws out her party's buzzwords to test me, but I try to remember her humanity. I try to remember that her views are built by reporting that is insulated and circular, and that she's being told that she should be really afraid, and she is. And fear can make any of us want to fight. We're all only human.  

Danielle (59:05):

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Arise Podcast, conversations on Faith, race, justice, gender in the Church. I want to thank all of our contributors. They've done this as volunteers. I'm a volunteer. This has got started off all volunteer work and so appreciative of those who have joined our podcast. Please download, please subscribe, and please remember that we are part of the human race and to treat each other with kindness and respect.

 

 

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.