Not a Spectator Sport

View From Here
By David Mark Greaves
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has to compete like the women’s 4 x 400-meter relay. Come from behind and drive to the finish. As her running mate Tim Walz says, “We can sleep when we’re dead.”
And for those cheering Harris on, unlike the Olympics, politics is not a spectator sport. It offers an opportunity to participate in the contest, with the “Skin in the game” being how the future is envisioned. While our physical vote is less important nationally than it is locally, where it is critical, we can participate in the national fight by sending contributions to the campaign.

The importance of local voting was demonstrated by Democrat Stefani Zinerman’s margin in this year’s primary of only 479 votes of 8,161 votes cast over Eon Huntley of the Democratic Socialists of America.
This is in a District with over 63,3000 active registered Democrats. There is a lot of opportunity for both the Democrats and the DSA to grow their vote totals, and whichever does that best will win the next election.

On the many distractions of the web stream’s constant bombardment of text and image, I see how the bots and algorithms are feeding my interest in bad news about Trump and I realize how they must be doing the same in reverse to the MAGA adherents. This constant reinforcement of negative information, real or not, is curated into the consciousness of the most likely receiver: me for Trump and MAGA for Harris, and confirms and hardens beliefs, and while justified on my part, it makes it difficult to communicate outside the silo giving us an electorate polarized by technology.

But technology is just a tool. And here it has taken the pent-up energy of belief in democracy and hope for the future embodied in and magnified by the organic explosion created by the Harris/Walz Democratic ticket, and using it to send shock waves of engagement across the electorate the results of which are still coming in.

The Harris/Walz campaign is rightly keeping the pedal to the metal, focusing on issues that touch the kitchen table, like health, taxes, cost of living, and the future. Trump has no response to that. For his future, he’s consumed with not going to prison, with the presidency as his only “Get out of Jail Free” card, that he now sees turning to dust in his hands.
If we’re able to eke this one out and save our democracy, future generations will look back and say, “They cut it close, but they did it.”