let’s fool the meat to hassle the room

Even though I know there are important things going on elsewhere in the world and that nobody really needs to read my thoughts about the upcoming presidential election – I am a predictable leftist, I’ve known who I was voting for from the beginning, etc. – I’m about to go cast my (early) vote and I know I’ll be holding my breath until all the ballots are in on Tuesday. It’s chilly, dead leaves are chasing one another and we’re all rushing somewhere.

This is the first time in my (relatively short) lifetime that this process feels like a movement to me (so said R. yesterday, and she was right). She voted yesterday, and she said that families were hanging around in front of the polling place taking pictures of themselves with their ‘I Voted!’ stickers. I can’t remember such a feeling of community engagement with politics ever before – it was something I nostalgically always yearned for. Before my time, never coming back, gone with popular anarchist stump-speeches and union organizing from within and politics as everyday life, not as marginal act.

I’m glad to say I was wrong.

I wonder often if there might be a slight trending toward ideals of conservation, community, idealism, progressivism – but maybe that’s my wishful thinking turning its face toward the sun. I feel like such things are a natural response to the kind of socioeconomic and environmental crises that we’re facing.

Of course, I’m also older and cranky and fed up with the idea of lifestyle as an organizing concept.