The temperature is going up everywhere

We need to take this election back to the core question: Who will best represent our deep and shared desire to construct safe, inclusive, just communities in which we and our planet can thrive?

I live in a part of the country that has been stuck in a dangerous heat warning for about two weeks. That’s nowhere near as bad as other areas in the U.S. and around the world, but it’s bad enough. Even with all the privileges of air conditioning, flexible work schedules, and a reliable vehicle, my daily life’s been circumscribed by avoiding the worst of the heat.

And this is not an anomaly. Each summer will be different, but the overall trend is more than clear: this might just be the coolest summer of the rest of our lives.

This is the backdrop for the truly awful spectacle of campaigning before us. One party wants to support climate action (though nowhere near enough); the other wants to support the fossil fuel industry. One party brags about its plans for encampments and deportations of our immigrant community members; the other tries to find a workable policy. One party wants to restore women’s right to bodily autonomy nationwide; the other wants to destroy it even at the state level.

And one candidate has every gaffe, slip, stumble, mutter, and sputter turned into evidence of unfitness to govern, with vast scrutiny on the tally of who continues to support him and who is peeling away; while the other candidate, a convicted felon, has not yet disclosed any medical information regarding his recent injury in the shooting at his rally in Pennsylvania. And the press stops asking.

Easy as it can be to blame the amorphous “media” for this grievous imbalance, we are their intended audience and we’ve played into the dynamics leading up to this moment for years. We’ve sold our attention for the bargain price of clickbait, adding our personal data as a free side benefit, and made ourselves willing participants in the manipulations that follow.

Maybe days and days of triple-digit temperatures has hollowed out my reserve of patience. We need to take this election back to the grassroots, the people whose lives are at stake (all of us), and bring it back to the core question: Who will best represent our deep and shared desire to construct safe, inclusive, just communities in which we can all thrive, and help our planet thrive too?

Because we are all in this together, and the temperature is going up everywhere.

Be safe and well and take good care, you are needed in this journey.