Vote because it matters. Then keep the ripple moving, one honest conversation at a time.
How do you decide? Do you vote from hope, despair, anger, or urgency? Does a system that shapes your daily life feel out of touch, unfair, or made for someone else? Does your choice feel right, or does it feel like a lack of options?
Do you ask who looks like me? or who do I want to lose? Or do you ask who is this vote actually building for? Each of us is more than one label. We are parents, neighbors, workers, believers, doubters. When we vote on one fear or one trait, we shrink ourselves and hand someone else the victory.
My friend Elijah, whose life’s work is justice, puts it this way: representation matters, and so do values. Does the person who looks most like you hold the values you hold? Do those values lift people up, or push them down? And if we find ourselves reducing someone to a single part of their identity, what are we afraid of?
Words, Fear, and Change
If you vote to change a system, you know how hard that is. Fear is part of the reason, and fear is not new. Othering is one of the oldest human habits: sorting people into “us” and “them” so that “them” becomes easier to blame. Every era has used it as a strategy.
What is new is the engine. Today’s media landscape can carry that old strategy to millions of people instantly, tailored to what each of us already fears, and repeated until it feels like common sense. The tactic hasn’t changed. Its reach has.
Rick Steves, best known for his travel guides, put together a glossary of the language of fear in today’s politics, written in the context of MAGA’s extreme makeover of the USA. Every camp uses framing, so I’m borrowing his terms to practice noticing it everywhere. Two to keep in your pocket:
OTHERING:
Treating a group as so different from “us” that they become easier to fear, to blame…and to discriminate against (or worse).
WHATABOUTISM:
Dodging an uncomfortable truth by pointing to someone else’s alleged wrongdoing.
Naming a tactic loosens its grip. And because the engine runs on attention, the most powerful response is still the oldest one: talking face to face with the person we’ve been taught to see as “other.” Steves’s call to action is worth borrowing too: armed with this glossary, connect with your friends and neighbors, and vote.
Every vote cast for everyone’s wellbeing, not just our own corner, adds to something bigger than any single ballot. Change has always started with people willing to vote and to keep showing up afterward.
Does the Ripple Become a Wave?
Whatever the results of any election, the work of community well-being continues. I believe conversation is the next step. We need to acknowledge what we have in common, take stock, and keep uplifting the human spirit.
I believe in staying connected locally, and in conversations that give us permission to question what we hold onto and the fear that wraps it. There will always be a need for repair and healing. A vote is not the finish line. It’s a beginning.
Back to System Change
Income equality will change a lot, but it won’t change racism, homophobia, or transphobia. It won’t end othering or remove a person’s bigotry. Othering is a human trait that gets deployed as strategy, so no policy alone can switch it off. It has to be met person to person.
Equal access will help people have more money and get what they need, and that matters. But a good election result is a moment in the game, not the championship. All of it is temporary and depends on the players.
Affordability won’t undo fear either, especially fear stoked by what Steves calls a chaos strategy: a steady stream of disruption meant to overwhelm, distract, and demoralize. So we have to ask where hatred toward people seen as “less than” comes from. Do you want quality of life for all, or only some? What are you afraid of, and why?
This is where public historian Tad Stoermer comes in. His book A Resistance History of the United States argues that people have always had to force change against institutions built to resist it, and that those institutions then adapt to contain whatever resisters win. It’s a sobering lens, and a useful one. Progress was never handed down. It was organized, demanded, and defended. A ripple only becomes a wave when people keep it moving.
On This Side of Common
If ‘othering’ thrives at a distance, this show can close the distance. A show at studioW, On This Side of Common, invites people who believe they’re opposites to sit down together and discover how much they value the same things. No winners, no shouting, just one question: where do we agree?
Initiated by David and Andrew, it is open to all viewpoints. Respect is required.
We record a few Tuesdays a month in the evening at studioW at WPAA-TV and Community Media Center in Wallingford. If you want a seat at the table and have a topic on your heart and mind, send us a note at reserve@wpaa.tv. Don’t just sign up. Sign on: help close the distance, one conversation at a time.
