The other day I was driving to a morning event I have had for several weeks. It is a ten week long class, and I was headed to the seventh one. I noticed the two men in my neighborhood who walk together every morning. They were almost to the top of the hill where an exit of the subdivision takes you out to a main road.
I opened the window and said,
“Good Morning! If you two are this far up the hill I must be runnin’ late! Because you are dedicated walkers - I have passed you every week now, but never when you’re this far along the route!”
They laughed and said “Have a blessed day.”
Then I got on my merry way and thought about looking up, and looking around. Nobody does it anymore. I teach women to signal and smile at other men, and I was with one of my students in person recently. We saw a guy and I urged her to smile at him - but sure enough suddenly he was crouched over his phone screen.
As I drove along the other day after encountering my neighbors on their daily walk, I was thinking about how entire communities used to run on looking up and around the place. Kids sensing it was time to get going home because the local shop owner is taking his break outside and that’s the daily indicator it is time to get home for dinner. People wondering why they aren’t seeing the beauty shop lady opening her storefront and remembering that it’s Monday - they track the day of the week on that glance over at the beauty shop lady. People seeing their community and finding their place because of others in it, finding harmony with them. I know this is still going on, in small towns and in neighborly areas of big cities, but it isn’t consistent anymore - crime is changing us, and everyone is on their phone.
My dad used to say things that inspired looking around. He’d say “the sun will be on your left” before I got in the car for a road trip. Or when we were taking the bus to visit his office on the south side of Chicago he’d say, “when you are the last white face on the bus, that’s when you know you’re in the neighborhood where my office is, and it’s time to get off the bus and find my building.” That was because he worked in a predominantly black neighborhood. Our kids would mark that comment as “racist” today - it is not. I was being taught to identify, know and respect community, neighborhoods, the people in them, where they came from, what they’re doing, where the good places to eat are, how we are more alike than different, and how much nodding and smiling at fellow neighbors mattered. That’s “inclusion.”
It’s election day.
I find it interesting that the TV calls it “decision” 2024, as if someone or something is making it for us. As if, no matter what is happening out in lines of people on the roads in the towns, the TV will tell us what happened. They better not, and that is something I could really go down deep on - but I won’t. I believe it is impossible to steal an election if you have lost the narrative. And someone has definitely lost the narrative. Even Harrison Ford stayed sober long enough to make one of those rrrreally emotion-evoking black and white videos. The left’s Hail Marys are everywhere. Anyone who tries to steal this one without being the obvious preference won’t have the ease of 2020.
I prefer the candidate that is so direct (direct communication is the bedrock of true safety) that censorship and warped manipulation of common sense policies is required.
Please go vote. Do not throw your vote away on an emotionally defeated pause because there is polarization. The polarization is detoxifying and necessary, or it wouldn’t be happening.
Remember, you are not voting for a PERSON - you are voting for policy that will either restore our country or send it further down this UNSAFE spiral.
Pressure is a privilege. GO VOTE.
May the truth prevail, may communities light up with the memory of just existing among fellows, living and letting live, in peace, together.
May we light up just like I lit up when I arrived in N.C. and remembered what it was like to just smile at someone again. I was told in Culver City, CA that being a white person and smiling at someone you pass is “centering yourself.” It’s not - it’s smiling at someone you pass. It is healing, and it is a part of life. And it is diablolically destructive to inject that kind of Marxist garbage into everyday living in America. I moved out of a town that is the LAB for what one of these candidates would create given the chance. Want more info on the playbook? Here’s a great book on it.
May America thrive again, may America be healthy again, may America be restored to sanity and prosper. We are beyond blessed to call ourselves citizens of this incredible experiment, a free republic - if we can keep it.
God bless the USA.
Amen, thank you for sharing!! Already early voted for Freedom and security, common sense, truth, and faith!! So many reasons to vote Trump/Vance!