Tag: Democracy

Empty Soles

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November 3 was a brisk Thursday morning in Scottsdale, Arizona. But when I walked past these empty soles on the edge of Camelback Road after my workout at the gym, I felt an eerie sensation. It was almost like learning a close friend had died or vanished.

My focus shifted immediately away from our cooler-than-average temperatures in the Valley of the Sun. I felt compelled to pay tribute to the remnants of a life well lived. To stop and take this photo and–three days later–write a story about what I saw and felt in those moments. Because that is what I do.

What would provoke someone to leave behind a pair of decent canvas shoes on the side of the road in such an orderly fashion? Did they suddenly outlive their usefulness? Perhaps they were simply an extra pair a homeless person could no longer carry. Or the sensible shoes were forgotten by someone who waited for a bus and was ready to advance to the next station in life.

For my storytelling purposes they are a metaphor for the sense of displacement many of us feel in our country. We’ve been pushed to jump out of our shoes from the criminal escape antics of our past president and the barrage of political ads spewing venom through our devices. Whatever the case, we wait for the next shoe to drop as we anticipate the outcome of the mid-term elections.

If you follow my blog, you know I am a positive person. Generally. I’m thankful for the beauty of nature that surrounds me and the quieter life my husband and I have carved into the desert landscape.

But as a nation we teeter on the precipice of despair. The future of democracy–as I’ve known it for my 65 years and 181 years before that–is definitely on the ballot this coming Tuesday.

Tom and I have already voted. Nearly two weeks ago. I checked the boxes alongside the names of only those who will protect our democracy. Not the high-profile election deniers in Arizona running for senator, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. We need to believe them when they tell us they wouldn’t necessarily respect and honor the will of the majority of the people.

If you live in the U.S., be sure to vote on or before Tuesday. When you do, I hope you will support those who uphold our beloved U.S. Constitution.

Otherwise, I fear that the close friend who disappeared without their shoes is actually the democracy we once loved before we allowed it to vanish.

Wide and Deep

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My heart raced and jaw clenched. Like thousands of Americans, on Tuesday I tuned in to watch true patriots from Arizona and Georgia do the right thing.

The 2020 election numbers–votes counted and recounted numerous times–don’t lie. Neither did Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his deputy Gabe Sterling, and Georgia election worker, Shaye Moss.

At a defining moment in American history, on June 21, 2022, they delivered their testimony before the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

They sat before the nation. They breathed deeply, mopped their brows, and somehow maintained their composure. They told us how they kept their fingers in the dike to keep a corrupt president and his allies from breaking through the dam and cheating the American people. They upheld the law and the letter of the U.S. Constitution.

Over three hours of testimony, we heard heart-stopping stories. Each witness detailed how some of those who still support the ex-president have threatened and targeted their professional and personal lives. All in an effort to illegally change the outcome of the 2020 election.

In this one blog post, it is impossible to address the sense of fear, anxiety, and division that exists in our current culture. But suffice it to say, this insurrection and its related tentacles run wide and deep. It appears there is much more evidence to come. Each day we brace ourselves for more of the ugly truth about the targeting of public servants and slates of fake electors.

What will happen next in this drama? Who knows? But the biggest question of all looms on the horizon: Will the U.S. Department of Justice pursue criminal charges against the forty-fifth President of the United States and others who apparently have violated the rule of law?

Young and old alike, we watch and wait. Our nation’s future is at stake. Our sense of freedom hangs in the balance.

***

Tuesday’s hearing occurred fifty years and four days after five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Soon after, the Watergate political scandal dominated our lives. Our nation was thrust into the pain and complexity of a constitutional crisis and investigation that would expose President Richard Nixon and members of his administration.

I was a teenager at the time. I didn’t understand the gravity of the Watergate scandal. But I remember the anxiety of uncertainty that pervaded our country and how outraged I felt that our president would lie and cheat and do all he could to try to cover up his deceit. That pain has resurfaced today.

I also remember pausing for breakfast with my friends John and Jon in the middle of our western camping adventure on August 9, 1974. It was the day Nixon finally resigned after two years of political denial and trauma.

John, Jon and I chowed down on steak and eggs in a dark tavern/diner somewhere in Wyoming, while on the other side of the room, through the tube of a grainy black-and-white TV, we watched Nixon break the news in an address to the nation.

Before and after that moment, my buddies and I drove through miles and miles of magnificent western landscapes–mostly through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming. But we also ventured through the beauty and desolation of Arizona and New Mexico.

Imagine three sets of parents of three teenagers, permitting one seventeen-year-old and two sixteen-year-old boys to pack up a beat-up AMC Javelin without adult supervision. Somehow, we convinced them to let us go.

Over a ten-day period, the three of us towed a small camper more than a thousand miles each way from St. Louis to the Rockies and back again. We had fun, drank Coors beer, exercised our freedom, cooked over a Coleman stove, slept in a tent, and managed to stay out of trouble. Those were simpler and safer days. That trip wouldn’t happen today.

As a young man about to begin my senior year of high school, the possibilities of life surrounding me traveled as wide and deep as the terrain you see in this photo of Shiprock, New Mexico, which I captured and saved from our 1974 journey.

Little did I know that one day nearly five decades down the road–as I approached my sixty-fifth birthday in this western literary chapter of my life–our nation would face a much darker and historic challenge.

We must find a way to restore some semblance of sanity to our culture and political process … we must punish the perpetrators to resurrect our democracy from the jaws of an insurrection that continue to haunt us.

Maricopa

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With every TV update of returns or refresh of election news coverage on my smartphone, I hold my breath.

Will this be the moment? Will Joe Biden arrive in the land of two-hundred-seventy electoral votes and officially become president-elect of the United States? Though my anxiety runs laps in my buzzing brain, he waits patiently. Ready to calm the turbulent waters. Steady a sinking ship. Steer our nation out of this dark age. This endless nightmare.

Diligent workers and volunteers in previously mostly disconnected swing states–Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona–count unprocessed ballots. Anonymous state and local officials sit and stand. Doing their jobs while cameras scrutinize from above.

They are not our healthcare heroes in hospitals. Fighting COVID-19 on the front lines. Working to save lives that teeter as new cases escalate each day. However, they are just as heroic. Unfettered Republican and Democrat openers, scanners and sorters tabulating mailed-in ballots from distinct counties: Chatham, Dekalb, Fulton and Gwinnett in Georgia; Alleghany, Bucks, Chester, and Montgomery in Pennsylvania; Clark in Nevada; and Maricopa in Arizona. The list of counties and ballot counting goes on.

I live in Maricopa County. The gigantic land mass was named after the Maricopa Native American tribe, who originally lived along the banks of the Colorado River.

Maricopa is the fastest growing county in the United States. It encompasses the greater Phoenix metropolitan area and is home to four-and-a-half million diverse people.

Republicans and Democrats. Young and old. Poor and rich. Straight and gay. Employed and jobless. Citizens of all religions or none at all. Hispanic, Asian, white, black, and Native American people living in the vast Sonoran Desert.

As the final votes are tallied and reported in Maricopa County and elsewhere, this process will end some day soon. We must disregard unfounded claims of fraud and distractions from the White House and accept and celebrate the election outcome (whenever it arrives).

I believe all of us in Maricopa are stronger if we embrace our differences in this wide-open space of grand beauty, dry heat, and burgeoning possibilities. The same can be said for every Maricopa, every diverse American community, no matter the climate or terrain.

With Thanksgiving less than three weeks away, it’s time to give thanks to our democratic process, open our hearts and minds to our neighbors, and look forward to writing a new chapter under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. If we follow their lead, we can unite.

Our future as a nation depends upon it.