30.10.2024 / US election matters

Consider this a PS to my previous post. This time I’m not asking you to send money, I’m asking you to speak. At whatever scale — talking to your friends, casual conversation with your neighbors, reaching out to members of your community. What matters is that it comes from you. This is different from copy-paste, likes, and even sending your friends videos to watch and articles to read.

Using your voice to speak makes you a person.

I love seeing Americans talking to other Americans about why Ukraine matters for the future of the US. My friend Maria Sonevytsky put together a star-studded, hour-long conversation about why anyone who cares about Ukraine’s future should make their voice heard at the ballot box and before next Tuesday. It aired in mid-October and is just as relevant today. I found the second half, where the speakers respond to viewers’ questions, particularly potent.

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/live/5G5WOC94n0Y

What can you do right away? Start using your voice by reaching out to friends in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where the vote promises to be particularly close.

Get Out the Vote for Ukraine has put together links with talking points and local voter resources, including some in Ukrainian: https://linktr.ee/gotvforukraine

I’ll close with a clip from this past April, when I had a chance to address my Senators and Representative to Congress from Connecticut just after the US House passed a bill to provide Ukraine with more military aid after stalling for over half a year.

The message bears repeating:

The time that I've been in Ukraine has been a huge lesson in democracy and how each individual person is what makes a country function. It's really messy, it's so inefficient, it's really frustrating to try to speak to your fellow citizens who think completely different things, who speak different languages — whether literally or conceptually — and yet there is a great power in not allowing power to be concentrated in one top position.

I have a lot of friends in the military, I speak with them every day. In addition to fighting an absolutely outrageously cruel and criminal enemy, with absolutely no moral bounds, these same Ukrainians are simultaneously also sometimes fighting with their fellow Ukrainians in order to make our country a functional democracy — multi-ethnic, respectful of people's freedoms. They're doing that work simultaneously and it's absolutely astounding, it's inspiring.

That's another reason why Americans should not only support Ukraine, but take inspiration. russia is attacking Ukraine militarily—that's where the missiles are concentrated—but it's clearly got its tentacles spreading out through the whole world, on many different levels, including through our social media. And there are Americans that are willingly — some wittingly, some (probably many) unwittingly — supporting this russian project for us to be demoralized, for us to not trust our own government, to not trust our own capacity to govern ourselves. That is a battle that each one of you are involved in, whether you know it or not.

I encourage every American to keep doing what you can to talk to each other. I know what it feels like to be trying to follow a war in a faraway land from afar — it messes with your mind when the only thing you have access to is somebody else's account on your screen.

We need to keep meeting and talking to each other and coming back to what is really valuable and not falling into despair. russia's project is nihilistic. it wants to destroy the whole world by saying that all of these systems we've built, they don't work, that the UN doesn't function anymore — russia is trying to demonstrate that to us. And our job — and what the Ukrainians are actually proving and showing in practice — is that you can fight against this.

This is not a game where nobody can win. This is not a stalemate where we're just going to grindingly kill each other for the next decades to come until there's nobody left. Right now, those of us who are still alive and here, we can pull ourselves together, we can talk to each other, and we need to stick with each other in order to keep our democracy alive. It is absolutely a viable and powerful alternative to authoritarianism.

Watch here: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/kGdZHBFL6XkZyrpX/