~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Kamala Harris, Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election, has made freedom ring from every podium she’s stood behind for a mere two weeks.
Freedom is the cornerstone of her campaign supporting her insistence that “We will never go back.” What a refreshing fistful of words those are, for they are hopeful, invigorating and with her in the lead, totally doable. Harris’s buoyancy is an astonishing relief in the face of the awfulness and weariness of years of the opposition. Gloom and doom, accusations and slurs against, name-calling and praise of crooks and despots – we were on a downward cycle and knew it and seemed unable to figure out how to stop it.
There were columnists complaining endlessly (I was one of them); there were comedians making us split our sides at their wisecracks, using gallows humor that was one of the few vents we had; there was/is The Lincoln Project, informing us in wry ways of what was going on. There was the bewilderment of our allies, asking us why we supported such a joke.
But it was never a joke.
And along comes Harris, who has harnessed a simple trick of goodwill on an upward momentum that makes many of us suddenly realize there is light within that gloomy tunnel. There is hope for our democracy. It’s almost like this dark-haired beauty with the flowing hair and laughing face, astride a many-colored steed, is rearing up and charging in among us to lead us across the prairie in a battle of will and words, to be happy, determined people just like her. Can’t you picture it?
And she chose a smart sidekick, governor of Minnesota Tim Walz, a quick-witted man with a sense of humor (a characteristic lacking in the opposition), a farmer, 40-year National Guard soldier, teacher, coach, Congressman … a person of substance, like her.
The 2024 election is about freedom as much as the very first election that chose George Washington . . . after a constitution was pondered upon and argued about and eventually written that ensured a government based on the people making the decisions about their country and how they wanted it to be, how they wanted to live. After centuries, after millennia, ordinary people had a voice and a chance.
That is still our job, coming up on November 5, 2024, when we vote for the 47th president of our country. It remains our job to maintain our freedoms so vaunted and copied across the planet for two and a half centuries. Like in a good marriage, we have to work at it, something Harris brings up again and again. We can’t assume a government by the people will carry on by itself; we people have to make it happen.
This disturbing decade we’ve lived through has been, in most cases, our succumbing to lies we heard by the minute and did not refute. The wake-up call of what seemed like a very long time was not really waking most of us up, was it? We, the people who groused and made fun of, complained as we wondered what happened to our friends and family members . . . we let things go.
To learn to our dismay that we were losing our fought-for rights, our freedoms and our trust.
The solution to our retarded obligation to ourselves and our fellow citizens, to nurturing the growth of human compassion comes out of the mouth of a woman of experience, a woman of substance and hard work, a woman who was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
But she was born with joy and music and positiveness and love pouring out of every cell in her body.
Lucky us. Lucky America.
With good humor and common sense, she informs us that we must work at this government of ours. We must watch it, keep it in check, snatch it back when the wrong kinds of people are elected. We must speak out loud and yell to the heavens when we catch elected justices – of all men – taking bribes behind our backs. We must insist that our elected folks act with decency and integrity; and if they don’t, we must use with pride and intention our Constitutional justice system to take them to task.
As if under a spell, we almost let it slip through our fingers. And it ain’t over till it’s over, as the saying goes. We have work to do. Rejoicing.
