When Nothing is Easy

I want to help save the United States from falling into a fascist oligarchy or autocracy.

Helping, however, is not easy.

The easiest thing is to write a check or send an online donation, but I want to do something tangible. I need to see that I've done something, see something besides a dwindle in my bank balance.

And yet when I began looking online for ways to send out postcards or otherwise support a federal candidate in my own locality, which is contested in the House election this year, I found little to indicate that even the Democrats support their own candidate.

Websites that offer the option to write postcards pointed me towards North Carolina contested seats. While I understand the need for the Democratic party to keep a majority in the House and to gain a few seats in the Senate, I'm a Virginia girl who has written about local politics for 30 years. If the contest is here in my backyard, then that is what I'm most interested in.

After looking at the "how to write postcards" sites, my heart sank. So many rules. So much rigamarole. So much crap to wade through when all I wanted was addresses and a template on what to say. I sat that aside to return to later.

Then I went in search of the Democratic candidate for the Virginia's 6th District. I found her Facebook page. I found a place to order a sign - and my locality, which she would represent, wasn't even listed as an option for a sign. I had to list my address in the "other" line, which did not leave me feeling very hopeful, I must say.

I doubt I get a sign.

After checking her website. I found there was no option to volunteer to write anything. Options to canvas (go door-to-door) was about it, and I'm not physically able to do that.

I contacted a member of the county's local party simply to ask what was going on. She sent me to someone else, and I was told the money had to go where it mattered most. Meaning, they've already decided to give up the 6th District to the Republican incumbent, who as far as I'm concerned is one the former guy's cult of traitors. He doesn't represent me. He wants my sex to be popping out babies and losing jobs because of "motherhood."

My only option, I learned, was to write postcards for candidates either in northern Virginia localities where there were strong possibilities of wins or write for candidates in other states.

I don't know if Republicans do this, too. If they know a district is generally 70% Democrat, do they not support the Republican running there? I have no idea.

But the Democrats are coming across to me as totally stupid in running this campaign - or any campaign, to be perfectly honest. There is so much that could be blasted across TV screens to show that we are a failing nation - and so much of lays at the feet of a few men, including but not limited to the senator from Kentucky, who has held up many, many changes that would have been helpful to millions of people, and the former guy. 

We could be trying hard to remind the businessmen who have married the evangelicals to create a lockstep of bootlickers that maybe lower taxes isn't the only drumbeat that should sound in their heads. Maybe they need to be reminded that they could lose rights, too. Or that an autocrat, should he so desire, could just snap his fingers and declare that he - as the so-called nation-state - owns the businesses and their profits. It happens in other countries, so yes, it could happen here.

I mean, if they can make women lose their bodily autonomy by stacking SCROTUS, then of course any right can be removed. Even the right to own a business or property because you don't meet certain criteria. Or the right to have as many children as you want. One need only look at other nations to see that "rights" aren't rights at all, if enough people agree that taking "rights" from others is a good thing.

Maybe they need to be reminded that rioting in the streets isn't good for business, either, should the voting situation become dire, should other candidates use the former guy's tactics. And I'm sure someone will.

The Democrats are doing, well, as best I can tell, next to nothing, which makes them at best complicit in the decline of the United States, which is already nearly a third-world nation with nukes, if not actually working to make it happen.

I have thought for a long time that there is no party in this country that actually represents me, a middle-of-the-road person who is apparently caught in the 1970s in my thinking, still believing in the American Dream (as it was laid out for me in my teenage years) even though it's become a fascist nightmare.

I have never registered for a party. I have almost always voted for Democrats because their values align more closely with my own, but they are no longer reaching many people that they need to reach.

They give up too soon, and they don't fight back.

I guess they want to lose.

Maybe the people who don't vote have the right idea, after all.