World Weary
Dear Leading Ladies,
There are less than five months, 145 days, or about 3,480 hours, until Election Day 2024: November 5. What are we each going to do until then to try to make a difference? How many of us are feeling energized by the latest developments, domestic and international? How many of us are bone tired and discouraged?
At Leading Ladies, our raison d’être is to inform people about issues and motivate them to vote, but even we sometimes lose our verve. How do you stay hopeful when a past president and the presumptive Republican nominee is a felon who has raised crazy money since his conviction? Or when the excessively hot weather in California threatens lives and augurs ill for our future? When the situations in Ukraine and the Middle East are killing thousands and tearing families apart every hour of every day? And when US Republicans just last week kept a bill from advancing toward final passage in the Senate that would have reinforced Americans’ access to contraception?
In The Atlantic in February 2024, Conor Friedersdorf, said it best in an article entitled, “Apathy Loses.” He acknowledges the temptation to opt out of politics because of its “disagreeableness,” but warns that “if affable, pragmatic, constructive sorts opt out of civic life,” then “the future will be shaped to a growing degree by unreasonable zealots who will make our politics more stressful and dysfunctional. Avoiding that future requires a bigger share of circumspect people to participate.”
Staying engaged, not overwhelmed
He is neither suggesting “becoming an aggrieved shitposter on social media, or blocking traffic to impose your priorities on others, or subjecting colleagues to the bombastic talk-radio monologue that raised your blood pressure on the way to work,” but something more appealing to those who “lament that social media is too often used to attack rather than to understand or persuade,” or “can empathize with people on different sides of society’s thorniest debates…”
And he suggests that political engagement need not even be a daily ritual, lest it burn out its participants. (Refer to former Leading Ladies letter recounting a week without media.)
What he does advise is:
Vote in local elections. (Sorry, we know this is part of our broken record!)
Don’t take on something you hate doing. If you hate writing postcards or making phone calls, don’t do it, because we never stick with things we hate doing.
“[G]ive campaign contributions to a candidate whom you particularly like and to the opponent of a candidate who strikes you as particularly pernicious.”
“Or contact a campaign that’s in a close race and ask what they need most from volunteers.” (We always like Force Multiplier.)
He also advises identifying “a cohort of people whom you find reasonable and help get them registered to vote” and organize “a peer-to-peer effort to get out the vote among acquaintances with temperaments like yours.” We are not exactly sure what these two suggestions mean, but we are all for having our readers help us and other organizations such as League of Women Voters register people to vote at area schools and other group gatherings in the months to come, so please stay tuned for updates. Also, postcard and letter writing campaigns are effective through groups such as Postcards to Swing States; Postcards to Voters; Swing Left; and Vote Forward.
Doing our best
“Spending a few hundred dollars or a few days of effort,” writes Friedersdorf, “is enough for you to have far greater influence than people who waste hours every day on fruitless online arguments about politics”
He ends by quoting the late Charles Krauthammer, Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The Washington Post: “For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius,” he argued, “everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics. Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.”
While we personally believe wholeheartedly in the power of art to uplift and, yes, to change hearts and minds, we get his point.
Moreover, we know we won’t ever change minds by yelling or shaming or intimidating. We can, however, educate ourselves and share information with others who are willing to listen. And we can support those candidates who represent the values, beliefs, and laws we need to support the rights of all the people in our country.
That doesn’t mean we won’t take a few mornings off from the New York Times or nights off from MSNBC, however. We need to replenish and renourish our bodies and souls. We recommend the same for you as well.
Here’s to staying engaged, but not obsessed, with the news and our political process!
All the best,
Therese (she/her/hers)
Judy (she/her/hers)
Didi (she/her/hers)
Leading Ladies Executive Team