What, Me Worry?

File under politics.

What, me worry?

Yes! Of course, yes.

Today’s doom scrolling down an endless pit of Twitter takes included a heavy handful of optimistic women, sitting in their cars, positively exasperated by the joy they felt after early voting in their states. 

A woman in Tennessee was in visibly shaken (in a good way?), not merely at the prospect that her state might have a reasonable number of voters who would vote in their own interests, but because it seemed to her that the rate of people voting was higher than it had been in anyone’s recent memory, that a gerrymandered, securely Republican county might still have people voting for the first time, for President and for down ballot candidates, despite the probably low chances of those votes making any numerical difference (https://x.com/maddenifico/status/1848570663805788594). She was just happy people were voting!

Another woman (video posted by the same person as above; neither is the woman featured, FWIW) apologized for shedding real tears after locking eyes with another woman, adding “This is different” (https://x.com/maddenifico/status/1848742544923820216).

A third woman talked about how, at a mail center (she called it a “shipping store”) in “an ultra conservative” district in an “even more conservative” state, she admitted aloud that she had voted “to make my grandchildren proud,” and that she “voted for the first woman president” (https://x.com/witty_shitty/status/1848534009657106496). And, to her surprise, the man in line next to her, and then another person in line, and another, and another, all showed their support for her decision and action, with smiles and thumbs up. She concluded confidently, “I don’t think this election is gonna go how all of the pundits are telling us.”

This is great, isn’t it? Rational discourse, logic and sanity, cooler heads, belief in democracy—these are all going to prevail, surely! Surely?

I mean, yeah, I fucking hope so.

But I lived through 2016, when the endorsements of 244 daily newspapers gave their full support to Hillary Clinton (of which only 100 had supported Obama in 2012 and 47 had supported Romney), compared to a measly 20 for Trump. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_newspaper_endorsements_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election) Leading up to the 2020 election, I mistook that thumping for prophecy. 

So I know to be more than a little gun shy about the prospect of sanity preserving democracy.

As an exercise in trying to see all sides, I occasionally scroll down the comments of a political Twitter post, find a reply that seems to come not from a bot but from a genuine conservative, then scroll down that person’s breadcrumb of posts and replies, as if to get a feel for a fellow American who doesn’t share my worldview.

It’s not just a different rabbit hole; it’s a different universe.

I can’t say I bat a thousand parsing which posts are bot garbage and spam and which are genuine people with lives and feelings, but I can see that people in conservative spheres sure as shit get a different slice of the algorithm than I see in my own social media threads.

So do these three women’s posts (they all started as TikToks and got repeated by other people) give me hope? Sure—Maybe.

Do I desperately need some insurance from those who know, or at least from those who believe, that the future is not as bad as I fear it might be? Absolutely. I am absolutely desperate for the comfort of knowing this will all be over soon and it won’t be the end of the American experiment.

The election is two weeks away. Both parties, both candidates’ PR Machines, both sets of voters, everyone is going to be feeling ramped up. Because despite some people’s growing feelings of optimism, this contest is just not going to be over until it’s over. And maybe even not then.

I am going to stay worried, despite how awful it is for my health. I will tell myself I’m going to stay away from studying polls. I will assure myself I can ignore the news for the next few weeks. But I know myself better than to bet on my closing my eyes to every clickbait from all media as we approach this critical vote. I certainly know that I don’t know what the American people are going to do.

Of Trump, James Carville has “a feeling” that he’s done (https://www.foxnews.com/media/dem-strategist-james-carville-certain-harris-win-knocks-sweaty-democrats). I can’t afford that optimism.

It’s just a little bit longer…it’s just a little bit longer…it’s just a little…