I can haz a little hope, as a treat?

Four years ago I took my then-11-year-old daughter with me to vote for a woman president. The light in her eyes that day, I’ll never forget it. Pure unadulterated 100% radiant hope.

I have always voted. I have never voted for a Republican. My first presidential election was 1988; I voted for Dukakis (don’t ask).

I was raised Catholic. At about age 10, sitting in mass, reciting the incantations I knew by heart, it hit me: Mary isn’t a person. She exists in an impossible state – virgin mother - elevated to an unattainable ideal.  Snap. I began to smuggle books into church, tucked them into my missal to read, to escape, while pretending to follow along. Fuck that noise, I’m over here tending to my goddamn brain, it’s my ticket out.

I have never enjoyed the luxury of a perfect candidate. My first state election was the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial. I voted against the white supremacist David Duke, and for Edwin Edwards, the corrupt incumbent governor who said during his 1983 campaign, "The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy." I voted for him.

I’ve had to rely on men in power like Ted Kennedy to speak for reproductive rights, a man who by all accounts drunk-drove off a bridge and swam to shore, saving himself and leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown. Talk about a political metaphor. They will always save themselves first. You think separating the art from the problematic artist is rough, try separating the policy from the problematic politician.

I’ve always taken my kids with me when I vote. I want them to know it’s a sacred right and not to be taken for granted. I want them to know that people died fighting for the privilege, that people continue to be kept from voting, and we vote for them. Voting is a compassionate act, not a selfish one.

Watching my kids’ anxiety spiral over the past four years has been one of my greatest challenges as a parent. Not being able to give them a sense of hope because I don’t feel particularly hopeful myself. Yet I still vote, this time for a guy who called my friend, the journalist Lyz Lenz, “a real sweetheart” when she asked him a direct question about his record on LGBTQ+ rights.

The audacity of hope. Implicit in that phrase is a how dare you? How dare you think hope will change anything, hope matters? It’s audacious to remain hopeful now, because you’ll feel like a fool if you’re wrong. You’ll feel tricked. After 2016, men told me I was being silly for feeling doomed. Under the guise of making things better, they still tried to trick me. “We’ll be okay,” they said, when they meant I’ll be okay.

News Flash: we’re not okay.

Hope feels stupid, naïve. We’re weak for hoping. Sit in the shit and stew, they want us to. Here, a fresh bucket of shit for you. Every day. I made it myself, they say, with my shitmouth and shitheart. And my shitty, fucking asshole.

I no longer care what men and their willing accomplices think about my hope. Their instincts were wrong. My intuition was correct. All the darkness that has come to pass, I hold it in my hands and feel it like a stone. It is solid, it is real. Animal, vegetable, mineral. It is mineral: it is geologically ancient, this darkness.

But so is light. And the Sun is older than the Earth, so HA! Besides, I’ve heard sunlight’s the best disinfectant. So I will stay on the side of light, and crush the stone under my feet.