In California, I have a privilege all U.S. citizens should have. I can vote before election day by mail with a ballot (and all relevant supporting literature) that comes right to my home. Within two days after mailing, I receive phone and email confirmation from the Secretary of State that my ballot was received and counted. Where I live, there are no laws (at the current time) dictating women’s reproductive decisions; my state has the hard-won End of Life Option Act that allows terminally ill patients to get physician aid in dying, the ultimate control of body.

But my privileges do not excuse me from caring about others who aren’t as fortunate. As anyone who pays attention to my Facebook page or who has received invitations to my Peace Potlucks and film showings knows, I have been posting almost daily about the Palestinian genocide unfolding live on our screens since last fall, and indeed for decades prior.

My visceral concern and outrage no doubt contributed to the colitis I suffered from October 2023-August  2024 (this ailment, thankfully, was successfully diagnosed and treated), yet the heartbreak remains. My emotional pain continues to this moment as the rogue state of Israel has been allowed to violate international laws with astonishing impunity, and recently to attack Lebanon as well, killing many thousands of civilians and destroying cities and priceless cultural sites, again with impunity. How easy it is to attack stateless (or failed state) people who have no American-supplied jets and bombs to fight back. Yes, there are many horrible conflicts in the world, with numbers of dead worse than in the Middle East, but I am not paying for those conflicts with my tax money, nor is my elected government legally complicit (i.e. the Foreign Assistance Act and the Leahy Law) in those.

By casting my vote for the Harris/Walz ticket for POTUS, I am not approving of Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s genocide. I simply believe that if Trump does not lose by a sizable margin, our country will be in a catastrophic condition affecting far more people in this country and around the world. I fully support those passionate people who are making calls to swing state “uncommitted” voters asking them to expand their political morality beyond this single issue—as absolutely dire as it is—and mark their ballot for Kamala 2024.  We need to “live to fight another day.”

See Michael Moore’s My Plea to Kamala on behalf of Michigan and Bernie Sanders’ recent comments.

With Trump (and really J.D. Vance, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and their ilk) in power, our peace-making tasks will be many multiples harder. To say nothing of the next four years being critical to slowing the climate devastation and the need for bold action divesting from fossil fuels that Project 2025 will absolutely prevent.

This is a quote from the final essay in the revised edition of a book published during Trump’s first term, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. (I’ve just finished reading the updated version which includes essays by forty mental health experts.)

“Much of global politics is based on the twin myths of the primacy of hypermasculinity and the myth of redemptive violence. The first tells us that only strong men who exhibit traits of dominance, narcissism, aggression and competitiveness are fit for leadership. The myth of redemptive violence tells us that violence will solve our problems, that war and genocide will somehow bring peace and security…Alongside these dominance systems with their values of violence, racism, sexism and homophobia, lies a parallel system based on egalitarian values and social practices… The challenge for this generation is to disempower the hierarchical dominance systems, with their male narcissistic leaders and empower instead the empathic networks which value the sacred ordinary of relationships, beauty, empathy, equality, love and fun.”
[Ian Hughes, PhD, author of How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy.]

All this to say that I agree with Keb’ Mo’— now is the moment to Put a Woman in Charge!