The country is on a knife’s edge.
In my voting lifetime, I have never seen a mood like this across the entire country. 2004 got close. This was the year of Bush v. Gore in the 2004 general election. We were a country bruised and battered and grieving over 9/11. We were also a country at war.
This country and its citizens and its denizens (yes, they are different) has been bruised since January 20, 2025.
We have been battered at the gas pump and at the grocery stores for what feels like forever.
We have been grieving all the losses of the covid pandemic since 2020. Friends, family, people we don’t know, died of a novel coronavirus. And the world was changed.
We are again a country at war. Well, I say war. Then just like now it was a “military exercise”.
Some of us are grieving the loss of US research superiority and are at odds with our own path forward now that research has been turned to rubble.
We are all tired.
Of the relentless lies.
Of the relentless grifting.
Of the relentless deaths.
Right now we are Orpheus and Eurydice, on the cusp of making it out of the underworld. Back to earth, back to normality. The way we were in the 2020 general election.
And then we were burned in the 2024 general election and all the chaos that has followed in the past 21 months.
Hermes in the Broadway show HadesTown would tut at us and remind us that we’ve all been here before. HadesTown was released to theaters in August as a pro-shot movie. If you haven’t watched it, please do. It is available on streaming.
But it feels different.
Those of us who have been writing congresspeople and senators, state and federal, ever since the inauguration can feel the difference.
Before we were alone. But the overwhelming response of the early voting numbers and the day of voting numbers has given us hope.
However, the midterms election isn’t over until the last vote is counted.
You see, we’ve been here before.
Maybe it’ll turn out this time.
