Keeping Our Democracy Alive, One Postcard at a Time

The 100 postcards with pictures of pretty Japanese cherry blossoms I had ordered online sat in a pile on my lap. Trying to muster up my best handwriting skills, which is hard work for me on the best of days, I wrote out the simple message to encourage the unknown recipient to vote for the Senatorial candidate running for the Senate seat in their state. I alternated between the blue and black pen, trying to make something monotonous slightly more creative or, at the least, slightly more entertaining. I had one eye on the TV, which was tuned to a British dramedy about a chef and the complications of adultery and the resulting family dysfunction. As I wrote out each card as carefully as I could, I felt a tiny bit more empowered each time I was able to put a stamp on the finished card. I follow politics closely and with a BA in International Politics, one would assume I was more active politically beyond simply voting and sending money to candidates. My rudimentary engagement was not due to not caring, apathy, or cynicism. Instead my laissez faire attitude was the result of my firmly held belief that no one candidate could do irrevocable damage to a country set up with a system of checks and balances. The pictures of tanks rolling down streets, facing off with fellow countrymen and women, who were on the streets protesting the unfair policies or tyranny they felt they were living under, were the images of other countries with fragile, sometimes shoddy political systems. As a child born in the late sixties, I was too young to have lived through the tumult and social unrest of young people protesting against a war being fought in a foreign country thousands of miles away. Kent State was something I had studied, certainly not something I can remember personally. As the Presidency swung red or blue, I was confident in the bureaucratic systems keeping our country running without too much disruption, regardless of the President’s political party affiliation. Yes, I have disagreed, sometimes vehemently against certain policies, but these disagreements never felt irreparable.

All of my previously, somewhat naive beliefs, that our country and our democracy was never in danger have been blown apart during these past three years in ways that I could never have imagined. As the child of parents, one who fled communism, and both survived a civil war, I believed even more in the idea of America as a country where norms were impenetrable for any one person to destroy. It is as I watched the very norms I had blithely assumed indestructible being toppled easily and without much argument that my own naivety got ripped into shreds. What I finally understood, much like a yoga practice, was that democracy, our democracy, was a living and breathing idea kept alive by each person in this country. Like any living breathing idea, it was just as susceptible to extinction if each of us gave up on keeping it alive, or worse, if each of us gave up and believed what we did was irrelevant in keeping it alive.

This revelation is what has turned the urgency of this moment and this election into a clarion call for me to take up arms, or for the moment, take up my pen. As I wrote out my one hundredth postcard, my fingers slightly numb, my one eye now watching a Scandinavian detective series, the British dramedy long finished, I again felt a little less helpless or powerless. As I made plans to vote early in my state with a friend, setting up a date of sorts. I had decided to vote early in person since I had been hired as a poll worker, working at the polls on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday of the weekend of the election. Once I finished with the batch of addresses I had been assigned, I texted the Bot to get more addresses. As I did my small part for this election, I realized that this work was now my personal yoga. Yes, I still got on my mat for my daily practice, but the volunteering and engagement with the election was my full yoga practice for now. I have moments of absolute doom and terror about the potential outcome and possible unrest, all of which I have to fight, to prevent the drop into the cauldron of hopelessness and helplessness. Will I be outraged if the outcome is contested, or worse, feels as though had been manipulated? Yes. Will that be a different clarion call for me to take up arms? Yes. But I will arm myself with a pen, my feet, my voice, my body, and my heart hopefully to help keep our democracy alive for all of us.