It is Saturday, November 2, 2024. Like nearly everyone I know, I am passionate about the voting that will end 84 hours from now.

Passions: strong feelings, here the volatile mingling of fear and hope. Among the most passionate of my friends is a woman who fled Nazi Germany with her family when she was 3. She tells me that she is physically ill with dread and a sense of powerlessness. “This isn’t the country I have wanted to live in,” she writes me.

I will remember Donald Trump, with practiced cunning, promising to “protect” women whether they like it or not, whether they want it or not.

I will remember Trump, with practiced hostility and lasciviousness, promising to execute a courageous political opponent, a woman, Liz Cheney, by shooting her in the face with 9 rifles.

The security forces in Iran were reported to have shot Iranian women who were protesting in the genitals.

I will remember Tucker Carlson, with practiced sliminess, imagining America as a family home that has three out-of-control children, including a rude adolescent daughter. Daddy comes home and is “pissed.”  He spanks and spanks and spanks this “bad little girl.”

I will remember the comedian in the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, with practiced cruelty, calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

I will remember the oligarchs, with practiced willfulness, silently “hedging their bets” or noisily cavorting as they buy votes.

Patriarchal menace, patriarchal pornography, patriarchal hatreds, sky-high piles of patriarchal dollars. Add in a relish for autocracy.

I will also remember sitting at a table with my family, writing postcards to my fellow citizens asking them to vote, especially for the Democratic ticket.

I will also remember the Trumpian neighbor who has put up several yard signs, among them “Suffolk County Is Trump Country,” several hundred yards from our Harris/Walz signs. Thieves have snatched a number of Harris/Walz signs, but not these.

I will also remember reading Lovely One, by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, an enthralling memoir about the perseverance against racial injustice and the active practice of love.

I will also remember watching TV on October 29 to see a crowd on the Ellipse in Washington D.C. grow and grow until it numbered about 75,000 people—all of us there, on screen or on foot, to cheer on Vice President Kamala Harris, our formidable, lively, worthy candidate for president.

I will also remember the publication of the “Prison Diaries” by Alexei Navalny, the great Russian dissident, killed in a Russian prison in February 2024, writing, “We must do what they (Russia’s rulers) fear—tell the truth, spread the truth…Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.”[i]

Democratic exemplars, democratic journeys, democratic assemblies, democratic possibilities.

After the election on November 5, I will still be an American citizen. Depending on the outcome, the necessary path of citizenship will have become clear. 

May my friend, once a child refugee, believe that she still has a chosen home.

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[i] The New Yorker, October 21, 2024, p. 43.