Martian Wisconsin

The calm before the storm

This is what I’ve been listening to lately:

It’s November 4th, 2024. Tomorrow is going to be a historic day regardless of what happens. The business side of politics is always a dangerous thing, we’re entrusting people with the health of our nation but it is also a job. One that opens a person to financial opportunities that aren’t always ethical.

When I worked at the bookstore, one of my managers was also a professor of ethics. He was fired for stealing. By all accounts from the staff, he was a person who tried to do right by them. Even the theft was something justifiable, at least in his eyes.

I had a cashier once get fired for stealing drinks from the vending machine. He volunteered that information. A good kid, who had his own kids, and always tried to do right by me and for me. He made that job bearable for me when I started and I was tasked with terminating him. I would have bought him the drinks, but it happened before I worked there.

We like to pretend that politicians are made of finer moral fiber. They are deified, forming cults of personality, and their humanity is stripped away. Anyone cast as a role model gets some form of that treatment. And still, they are just humans. Humans with access to tools that can reshape the world. I’ve seen someone get fired over $2 drinks, what would a person do when it is millions on the line? Elections and candidates elicit trepidation for me for this and so many other reasons. People are just people, after all.

Tomorrow, we see who gets the keys to the kingdom. It will be a tense day regardless of the outcome, but stability is more likely with a Harris-Walz victory. Stability brings its own concerns, I think the past 8 years have show just how fragile the American empire is. People who call for instability as a means for change often do so from a place of privilege.

I am hopeful that we will see Harris as our first woman president. Diversity in leadership is long overdue. Hope also persists that she will continue Biden’s progressive domestic policies. She has made a pledge to continue to be a war hawk, which is disconcerting, but the alternative is a traitorous war hawk. What a bind.

It looms large over everything in our lives, makes the days a little more tense. Tension is just a way of life in America, but that extra bit stretches at our collective rubber on our bandwidth. A lot of people feel on the edge of breaking. Chaos isn’t just confined to the global world, however, and it has taken up residency in my own household.

We’ve had a flurry of activity in our personal world - my mom bought a house down the street (so if anyone wants to come visit, you have a place to stay), my wife’s aunt and uncle were here for a week visiting and our household was stricken with Covid.

I wrote a short story for a reddit competition. I started playing music again. Maybe I can even get back to a consistent writing schedule.

It would be nice if I could just focus on the stressors in my life, but the reality is that regardless of how this election goes, there are people whose lives will still be at that breaking point.

Adrianne’s childhood homeland was ravaged by a hurricane. The mountains of North Carolina are in a years long recovery after the damage from Helene. Spain, a place she called home for two years, also suffered from the harsh realities of climate change.

It’s easy to bemoan the state of the world. But one of the things I’ve really started to internalize is that the hard times are also an opportunity. We look at history through the lens of the present, but those people back then were just people too. Those of us with the bandwidth, with the privilege, can help shape the new world. Push us forward instead of letting entropy work at the foundations of humanity.

It doesn’t always have to be big. My mom has made a new friend since moving here. A woman who asked her for $5 once when she was walking around the neighborhood. They have since talked a few times a week, sometimes they walk together or they take a break when my mom needs one. And sometimes, my mom gives her $5. It is what she asked for after all.

If you share in a communal sense of relief tomorrow, you should embrace that. We need to celebrate small wins. That doesn’t mean the fight has been won though. Politicians are just people, like me and the people in my life. While we can and should work small, we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

The future is built by those small, daily choices—those $5 gestures—and by not turning away when the larger battles arise. Tomorrow may be a historic day, but every day holds the potential to shape what comes next.