Edie Meidav

Because she is someone who will stand up for your community (even though you learned differently)

I don’t know you, but I wish I did. Easy to guess how tired you might feel from all that you care about being constantly threatened. You or your family have voted one way in the past, and this time I wish we could talk together in a kind and safe place. Can you let this postcard from me fly into your heart. Forgive me for asking this bit of your attention, but can you help: Can you take in one more thing?

Some questions: Did you grow up in a place in which no person would ever in a million years vote for someone like Kamala? Maybe someone told you she stands against everything. Against your god, tribe, politics, history. Against your paycheck and gas tank. Against your commitment to various movements, environmental, antiwar, prowar. Is everyone around some unthinking liberal drinking Kool-Aid believing in the old two parties? Or do you feel she must be punished for a particular stance? (And do you find yourself secretly agreeing with her, despite yourself, on some issues crucial to your own well-being?)

Say you feel you need to vote against her to get out your anger somewhere. It feels great to blame one person. You have a mother, but imagine being angry at mothers, wives, women who look too much like her or not enough like her. Do you feel she will not look out for you and your kind? (Could it be that she will? And that you are more than a member of one kind?) Maybe you think she is the devil or god who single-handedly made the cost of gas and groceries go up. (That’s a lot of power in one person. Don’t we have democracy to keep us from having one god?) You might blame her for fracking, for choosing to drill or not drill. You might blame her for the costs of things: for taxes, gas, groceries, mortgage rates, stock prices.

But here’s your real question: Who will really look out for me? This question comes to you at the convenience store when you’re scrabbling for coins for bread or at the country club refusing the rolls, but let’s face it: You deserve safety and the kind of protection she offers—a true lasting safety that will protect you and the people you care about. You have a right to be safe now and forever, and to choose how you want to live.

So I have some questions for you: Do things feel true to you only when you rebel against an authority, when you hold the truth like a private torch against all the scary, unjust shadows?

Maybe you had the kind of childhood, as I did, in which people scared you because they were also afraid? They wanted you to believe in the dangers of people different from you. The wallpaper of your kitchen was made up of other people’s fears.

Can you let this into your heart? You did not deserve growing up with this sense of danger. You deserved better back then. You deserve better now.

All of us, including me, are so good at recreating the difficulties we knew as children. Abandonment, isolation, neglect, unsafety. Fear of the other. Grow up scared, and it becomes very easy to recreate the same conditions.

Maybe someone near you spoke of everything that would be stolen from you?

It happens that I grew up in the same school system as Kamala. For this reason, I can feel the safety she understands and wants to offer. A belief in a tent that will protect all of us in the States. And the good part is she does not believe in playing king. She believes in a system that will be fair and protect you, what you hope for, what you own, your rights. A chance for a person exactly like you to be nourished. She cares because she knows the good and the bad of our country, and wants a system—not a PERSONALITY—which will help you, and me, and everyone we know.

You deserved to be protected as a child and deserve it now. Please, will you join me in picking her? I say this because you are not alone in caring. We need you and your help. We also need Kamala to stand up for your rights to a secure home and life. She knows your life is made up of little moments—groceries, schools, streets, work, paychecks, health care—as much as your biggest dreams for yourself. Please, could you vote for her? You can make a difference. This is not politics as usual: This is a person versus a potential apocalypse. Your vote for Kamala would mean the world, and would help us all feel safer now and into the long future. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this far. Could you please vote for her?

Edie Meidav is a professor in the UMass Amherst MFA and is the author of Another Love Discourse, Crawl Space, and other books.