Chris Colin

Because I don’t always agree with her, and that’s okay

Let the record show my fondness for Kamala Harris’s strategy around abortion. And my trail of GIFs and tears at her convention speech. Let it show with all those molasses cookies baked with my son to sell for campaign donation money in front of our local grocery store, which we did not abandon even as that light sprinkle became a downpour. Let the record show I then matched those proceeds, like some kind of baller.

I was talking about none of that as I drove this same son to soccer last week. I was talking about how Kamala Harris disappointed me.

“You weren’t born yet”—Casper is eleven—“but when she was California’s attorney general, her office tried to prevent nonviolent parolees from getting out of prison, partly to keep using them as cheap labor.”

Incarceration is a frequent dinner-table topic in our house—my wife spends a lot of time in prisons for her work—and I sensed this had landed with a thud. But I wasn’t done. After fielding a few questions about what had happened, I continued. “Yes, that had sucked. Lately, though, I’ve noticed something funny. This and other little qualms over the years haven’t diminished my fondness for Harris. They’ve deepened it.”

Every election season coincides with a parenting season, for those of us in the business. If you’re not capitalizing on political/domestic parallels with a rich sermon or two, I don’t know what to tell you.

In our case, having two kids has deposited us squarely onto the high, deranged plane of righteousness. Righteousness is binary. He who sets the table without prompt is good. She who interrupts a retelling of The Simpsons plot is bad.

With considerable adult wisdom, Amy and I explain that this lens onto human behavior is, you know, bad. People are complex. Good ones do bad things. With some work, you can learn to accommodate this.

Enthusiasm for this position has, historically, been limited. But that was before Kamala. Casper and I were approaching the field now, so I pressed on.

“Maybe as attorney general, she had reasons that I couldn’t see. Or maybe she didn’t, and it was just a bad call. I don’t care! On top of all the things I love about her,” I said, “I’m excited to be supporting someone I don’t always agree with. You can love someone imperfect. You already do, in fact.”

You don’t get the results in real time, I’m afraid. You say your thing, the kid goes off to practice headers, and only later do you find out how it turned out—the lesson, the election, all of it. There’s probably a sermon in there somewhere, with parts both good and bad.

Chris Colin’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, 99% Invisible, Wired, Pop-Up Magazine, and Best American Science and Nature Writing, and he makes José Andrés’s podcast.