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(Though it is a really good T-shirt slogan.)

This was my birthday present to myself, fresh from my Virginia-canvassing-and-family trip, and amped up–only a week later–by democracy’s powerful showing in the November 4 elections.

Notice I didn’t say Democrats (though they did well, and I’m glad). Nine months in to this presidency, people on all sides of politics–including no politics at all!–are starting to coalesce around the basic idea that things should work. And democracy, as Churchill famously said in 1947, is “the worst form of Government…except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” [ellipses added for emphasis]

In other words, for things to work (fairness, food, airplanes–that sorta thing), we need democracy. And when you look at election results more focused on immediate outcome than on party, here are some promising signs:

Maine anti-mail voting measure loses
Progressive DAs in Philly and NYC win
Colorado funds free school meals and SNAP support with taxes on the rich
Detroit elects first woman mayor
Cincinnati rejects JD Vance’s brother after endorsement
GOP Redistricting in Kansas failed
Charlotte approves transit tax
Maine passes gun control
Turnout in blue district US House election in Texas higher than 2024 Pres (thanks to Common Power for this compilation)

See what I mean? I have a lot of company in thinking, the IDEA of democracy is having a moment right now. And for democracy to work, we need all hands on deck.

“Wait a minute,” I can hear you saying. “I loathe phone-banking, and I’m donating all I can to things like food banks and my church. And now you want me to do take on ‘democracy’ too? I am SO not that person.”

Au contraire. I maintain that if you are looking out for vulnerable people; if you are protecting green spaces or animals; if you are reading to kids, or making art to share, or donating to organizations that multiply those values, you ARE a democracy standard-bearer.

I mean–don’t forget (or underestimate!) voting! Do all you can to keep your loved ones from feeling that voting’s not worth it. Point them to this book if they need a little inspiration…

I’m giving this book to everyone who’ll take it!

On my walk today I stopped to make a roadside bouquet. November in Washington State = pretty limited wildflowers. But the low-rent, multicolor assemblage I collected reminded me, there’s so many ways to be a flower!

You can be bright, demure, prickly, robust, delicate, complex or simple–and you can still call it democracy. Just do SOMETHING, keep doing it, and keep talking about it.

As Joyce Vance says, we’re in this together. And as Gretchen Wing says, “For things to work, we need democracy.”

What are some of your ways of participating? Anything new, anything especially challenging or rewarding, or both? Please share as many as you feel like.

The other night I woke from a vivid dream about Keith Siegel.

Keith graduated two years ahead of me from Carolina Friends School, in Durham, NC–my sister’s class, 1977. Even at such a tiny school, we didn’t hang out. Except for the occasional fragment of nostalgia, I hadn’t heard his name since then.

Until he was taken hostage by Hamas.

I learned about Keith’s terrible status in April, when Hamas released a video of him. https://youtu.be/obQ7vpgWHiU?feature=shared

Shocked into action by this connection, I immediately wrote the White House and my Senators, begging them to keep the pressure on Israel to negotiate a cease-fire in Gaza that would bring the hostages home AND stop the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian innocents.

Then I forgot about the hostages again, for long stretches. I certainly wasn’t dreaming about them.

Photo from The Atlantic, submitted by Aviva Siegel

Then, a few days ago, my sister (the one in Keith’s CFS class) sent me an article from The Atlantic. THAT’s what inspired the dream.

In “I Survived Hamas Captivity, but I’m Not Yet Free,” Keith’s wife Aviva Siegel writes:

The last time I saw my husband, Keith, was on November 26. He was lying on a filthy mattress on the floor of a darkened room and could barely look at me. We had spent 51 days together as Hamas’s hostages after being violently abducted from our home on October 7. I had been told earlier that day that my name was on the list; I was to be released and sent back home to Israel. Keith was to be left behind.

Keith, Aviva reminds us, “is an American citizen…born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—also the hometown of James Taylor, his favorite singer.” (I remember him liking Jackson Browne too.) He’s a gentle man, she writes, someone who learned Arabic in order to communicate with Palestinians living across the nearby border. A vegetarian so committed he wouldn’t even eat a morsel of chicken in the little food provided by his captors. A peacemaker.

Yes, I thought. Sounds like a 1970s CFS grad, all right.

As I forced myself to read Aviva’s horrific descriptions of captivity–on a lovely, sunny day, heading to a farmstand to buy some flowers–I felt more and more surreal. “I think about Keith all the time,” Aviva writes,

…but I feel a particular pang whenever I drink water, when I take a shower, when I eat something delicious. As a hostage in Gaza, these are not things I could do. The most frustrating part is that I don’t know anything about Keith’s condition: Is he alone? (I’d love for someone to tell me that he’s not.) Is he sad, or crying? Is he in a tunnel with no oxygen? Is he sick or being tortured? Has he eaten any food at all today? Is he alive?

In my dream the other night, I think Keith was trying to answer his wife’s desperate questions. He was still captive, sad and weary, wearing a white T-shirt, but he was philosophical. Reassuring.

I woke up feeling I wasn’t doing enough. I read Aviva’s article again.

“Keeping the hostage issue at the top of people’s minds,” she writes, “is the only thing I can do.”

I’m asking the United States government not to give up on them. I’m asking Israel’s leaders to bring our hostages home. Don’t abandon them. Don’t let our loved ones be killed.

I wrote the White House again, and my two Senators. I don’t know what else to do, to stop this terrible war. Except not forget, not give up. Maybe we can all try not to give up on peace.

If I dream of Keith again, I want to be able to tell him we’re trying.