Voting is how you can change the world right now.

It’s the day before election day, 2024, and voters are facing a moment that my elementary school education promised would never happen again.  

There were supposed to be warning signs, alarms, flashing lights to make us all feel safe forever more from disappearances, deportations, enemy lists, and firing squads.  We would never again be blind to a creep and then malignant race to autocracy, and everything that happens after that.  We understood that there were laws and institutions to protect us from that happening.  We would see it coming.  

This is why we pledged allegiance to the flag, because that flag meant freedom for all from an evil we didn’t really understand as pledging children, but we knew it was the worst thing that could happen.  We knew it was because one very very bad guy with a tiny mustache was so evil he did things like kill a little girl who dreamed and laughed just like we did.  How could there be anything more evil than that, we thought, to kill one of us, a schoolchild?  

That flag we pledged to would make sure this would never happen again, we vaguely believed.  That was the beginning of our Civics lessons, on the first day of Kindergarten.  That pledge, that every public school child made everyday, strangely comforted.  No one ever complained about it, and there was something that really did unite us beneath it.  Every first and second grader felt the big abstract promise that America would not let bad things happen.  Children would never have to hide in America.   

In this election there is a person running for President with an enemies list, calling for Americans to be killed because they disagree with him.  And now the voters, and the voters only, are the last wall of defense against that horrific story we believed wouldn’t happen to us. .  

Vote with the belief you held as a first grader, with sleep still in your eyes, some tangles still in your hair, your metal chair cold on the backs of your legs, and your hand on your heart on any Tuesday morning. 

(Thank you to Robin Meloy Goldsmith who pointed me in the direction of this Anne Frank Quote in her essay, Civility. )