For the last handful of days, I’ve started a habit at breakfast: I make myself a pot of Mrs. Bennet’s Nerve Tonic from Friday Afternoon Tea. It’s a gentle, herbal blend of chamomile, sage, raspberry leaf, and more. I tend to read news in the morning, and, well. The news has been…newsing.
It’s helpful to take on the burden of enormous stress that the news brings with something warm, something calming. It’s a delicate tea, one that rewards patience, and sometimes that is precisely what nerves need.
One of the things that I think is interesting about Pride & Prejudice, by the way, is that Mrs. Bennet is not wrong. If Mr. Bennet dies, she and her daughters will indeed find themselves in dire straits. And there isn’t much they can do about it, and retain their status in any kind of gentry community, except marry. She is not necessarily effective at getting to the goal of marriage, but she is not wrong. And Mr. Bennet is, in fact, extremely wrong to not worry at all.
So I love the concept of this tea: something that would help Mrs. Bennet take a few deep breaths and be more effective. That’s what I try to imagine myself doing.
I am extremely good at working myself up into a state about things, a thing I know from a long, long history of working myself up into a state. When I was younger, the sky was always falling.
As I got older, I realized that the sky was in fact still falling, but that it wouldn’t fall any slower if I panicked about it.
So we’re less than three weeks from Election Day here in the United States, and the polls are coming fast and furious. The inevitable result of a measurement, with a margin of error that is larger than the difference between the most likely result, is that you will have some numbers that look like the sky is falling and some numbers that look like things are going well.
I have been trying to avoid getting caught up in poll-mania, but this is what I have to tell myself about poll-induced panic: wouldn’t it be so much more effective to do something to help get out the vote than to panic about it?
There are so many things to do. If you’re able, you can canvass neighborhoods to help get out the vote. Fated States (the phone-banking arm of the Fated Mates podcast) does an amazing romance-friendly phone bank to help swing states and elect senators. (I’m going to be joining them on October 26th because they’re canvassing for Missouri, and, fun fact, I worked with Josh Hawley the year I was at the Supreme Court, and I absolutely hate the way that he’s presented himself as some kind of populist instead of an elite guy with an elite education and elite experiences who wouldn’t know how to pinch a penny if his life depended on it.)
You can ask your friends and family what their plan is to make sure they’re casting a vote; if there’s difficulty with that plan, see if there’s something you can do to help make it easier. You can donate to voter mobilization organizations—national ones like Fair Fight or Vote Riders or Black Voters Matter or the Movement Voter Project—or local ones like Battleground Texas. You can write postcards to remind people to vote—I particularly like Markers for Democracy, who organizes postcards in favor of hyper-local candidates, and helps make sure people know when THIS school board member needs a warning.
Or, you may be having difficulty voting yourself—if that’s the case, reach out Election Protection to see if they can walk you through your state rules.
Action is grounding. Action is the opposite of despair.
And if you’re despairing over the polls, here are things to remember:
In the last few years, the polls have underestimated (by very large amounts!) candidates who support reproductive choice. And abortion is on the ballot in several key states, and this may help drive turn out.
There is a monetary advantage for one side—that would be the side where the guy in charge didn’t siphon away all the money from get out the vote operations in order to muster a legal defense for his massive crime/coup empire.
There is an observed enthusiasm gap between this election and the one four years ago.
I say all this not to imply that we don’t need to do anything else, but to point out that the things we are doing are working.
We’re almost there. We can do this.
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This month’s cat picture features a picture (lots of pictures) of a cat who is technically not (yet) my pet. We’re working on it.
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