The Beginnings of a Broad Coalition

In Case You Missed It: People Power to the Polls: Our Power Against Extremism

Good morning, knurds. 🤓

Wow, what a week! Election results are still coming in and will probably continue to come in over the next few days (or weeks!) before we have a clear picture of the final results. We’ve already had some major wins (yes John Fetterman!) and many high-profile MAGA election-denying candidates were defeated. The red tsunami that news pundits desperately tried to breathe life into did not make landfall.

The picture of the 2022 Midterm elections is still coming into focus and some things are still uncertain.

What is clear, however, and was clear before November 8th is the struggle to achieve a multi-racial democracy will take time and energy from a broad coalition of people.

A Broad Coalition Forming

White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy has been centuries in the making and will not go away without a massive movement of people standing in solidarity across racial, generational, gender, and class lines.

What gives me hope is seeing this broad coalition forming in my real life.

This Tuesday, I worked as a poll worker seeing voters come in from 7am to 8pm (I’ll be napping all day tomorrow). There were two people, in particular, that were visual reminders of this broad coalition.

One of my fellow poll workers was a 17 year old high school senior. She lived in a county that doesn’t allow minors to poll work so she volunteered in the city instead. She traveled across the Golden Gate Bridge at 5:30am to participate in democracy. She brought life into the polling place with her exuberant joy in helping voters submit their ballot.

Gen Z is a force to be reckoned with. They are passionate and firm in their progressive values and don’t care how the old world did things. Gen Z understands the power they hold and is voting in higher volumes than most past generations at their age.

On the flip side, we had a 100 year old woman come in to vote at our polling place. She shuffled in with her slightly oversized denim jeans and red sweater ready to do her civic duty. Despite her poor eye sight, she sat at the booth and voted for every race and ballot measure. After voting, she took the time to come back to the polling place to give each of us a Hersheys kiss for our service.

So when people ask me what gives me hope, it is these two courageous women who know their power and the power that voting holds.

Imagining A World

Todays newsletter is short, but sweet. After a long election season, I will be resting and taking some much-needed downtime (and I hope you do too!). But I will leave you with a clip to spark imagination.

We’ve worked so hard to not go backward in many ways, but there is so much ahead of us. This video by the Intercept does a great job of imagining the world we want and know we can achieve.

What world do you imagine?

Next Up: We’ll be slowing it down for the rest of the year to talk about books & creativity as change-making tools!

We will pick up on our regular monthly series in January. And I promise no more election talk! (I’m sick of it, so I can only imagine how you feel) Voting is crucial, but there is so much more for us to explore that shapes our society and helps us bring about change.

We have some big announcements coming up to help us continue the work of shaping change. If you haven’t already forwarded this newsletter to a friend, now would be a great time.