I’m going to try something out in part because I feel like recently I’ve stopped trying on several fronts.
I’ve been very dedicated to my main job: being a dad to a toddler. I try to be a better husband every day and I’d like to think I have more effort to give.
But in many other respects, including all things political, communicative, communal, and digital, I sort of stopped trying. And it bothers me.
The Sunday before the election, I went door-knocking for the candidate that wasn’t the fascist. Years ago, I would’ve hated myself for this. I would have cringed because I was exerting effort for someone I saw as more powerful than me.
What I found myself telling the few potential voters who took the time to listen was that I felt this election was very important for my young family. I was door knocking for my wife. I was door knocking for my son. I was doing this for their future. And it felt good to participate in these cringeworthy exercises of aligning myself with one of the most powerful political operations in the world, because it meant at least I was trying to avoid the worst possible outcome.
Then yesterday happened.
This is a blog that will try to capture the effort that I sometimes feel I should have exerted during Donald Trump’s first administration. We know there will be rapid-fire scandals and assaults on our basic assumptions of what is permissible within the power structure. We know they will flood the zone and we know the consequences will be both immediate and long-lasting.
And maybe it’s futile to try to stop the boulder of history once Sisyphus has been flattened like a pancake. But maybe some documentation of how we got here, what is happening, and how we come out of this will prove worthwhile and useful to somebody, somewhere, at some time.
And I’d like to at least try.