Guest Writer! Doxxed by Bernie Supporters

I first met the young woman who honored my with her story when she was a campaign organizer for Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016. From the outside, she was powerful, self-assured, and hopeful in ways that put my Gen X when-I-was-her-age self to shame. I wouldn't have guessed, even with my election year + anxiety mind, how much she was going through for us. I'm really grateful to her and so angry that all of this happened to her--it's my hope that this story will spread far and wide, and that it will help folks understand why it's still and always important to speak out against the misogyny of our own side, no matter what threats we face from the right.

Doxxed

Written by an Anonymous Hillary Campaign Organizer

TW: Doxxing, Racism, Threats of Violence and Rape, Gaslighting

It’s no secret among people that know me that I worked for Clinton in 2016. My wall is still decorated in posters, my car is covered in bumper stickers, I even have a tattoo that reminds me of the good times on that campaign. However, the worst parts of the 2016 campaign still haunt me wherever and whenever I meet new people working in politics. It’s no secret among people I’m friends with that I was doxxed by Sanders supporters in 2016, but it’s something I’m not “supposed” to talk about. 

I joined the Clinton campaign while I was still a student. Originally it wasn’t because I liked Hillary any more than Bernie, as a woman I just wanted to know more about women running for higher office. My facebook was full of friends that supported Bernie, but were happy for me on the campaign. Until Caucus night in Iowa. 

The lucky part for Iowa was the Caucuses were so close and went so long that most people were asleep by the time the results came out and most people had to work the next morning, so I was left alone. By the time Super Tuesday rolled around, I had already been doxxed for the first time. 

I had gone to bed around midnight Central Time, but a few people I knew on the West Coast were still awake. I woke up to dozens of notifications on my Facebook. A friend-of-a-friend had made a post asking for people to tag the people they knew who were “sHillary sellouts” in the comments. I got tagged by someone I had worked on a class project with right before I left for the campaign. People started by replying with the generic “corporate cunt” or accused me of “voting with my vagina” until one of them decided to click onto my profile and things got a lot more personal. Whatever public info on me they could find, they commented about. In my messenger were people who screenshotted my parents and siblings profiles. They called my dad a “banana” or “coconut” and called him uneducated. I got messages that said my mom, my sisters and I deserved to be beaten and raped. 

I’m not sure if they actually sent anything to my family. If so, I never heard about it. But I spent the whole day with my supervisor reporting accounts and trying to lock my Facebook. Some of the threads I couldn’t mute or take down because the doxxers knew that Facebook hadn’t yet figured out a way to let people report comments and my name wasn’t in the original post. 

The most common comments and messages in between the threats and slurs were “you’re just too stupid to know Bernie is who is best for you.” 

We searched my name on Reddit and tried to get a few posts taken down. I didn’t have a Reddit so it wasn’t worth taking down more than the posts of my personal phone number, email, and address. Taking a look at the account, it appeared to be the same “friend” who tagged me in the first place. Luckily, it didn’t seem to have spread beyond Facebook and Reddit.

After locking down my account, I made a post about my experience. It was a little vague since I wasn’t ready to talk about the specifics, but mentioning “Bernie Bros” rained even more hell I wasn’t ready for. This time from actual friends. Comments talked about how the “Bernie Bros” didn’t exist, how I must be overreacting, how both sides had violent supporters and I was contributing to the violence by mentioning it when I couldn’t provide proof. 

The thing is, I was young and dumb. So was my manager. We didn’t know to screenshot the hate and report it up the chain, nobody told us that’s what we were supposed to do until we were trained again a week later. I couldn’t access the hate anymore, I’d already blocked the accounts. People were riled up in support of their candidates so the hate shifted from an anonymous barrage of insults to comments from friends denying my experience. I blocked more people. 

As I shifted around in the campaign and my role shifted, so did the hate. Since I was making calls from my personal phone, obviously my personal number got out. Prank calls, hate texts, my number was even scrawled in a men’s bathroom somewhere in Colorado. “A Monica Lewinsky hoe- one of Clinton’s bitches. Call for a good time.” Someone texted it, curious why my non-Colorado area code was in a Colorado bathroom. He was nice enough to scratch my number out, but not without a dick pic first.

From there the barrage of messages decreased significantly. Hate sent to my work email had to be saved in a folder, no deleting anything on the Clinton campaign, and flagged up the chain. I didn’t hear much back, there wasn’t much they could do. After the primaries were over, I did digital organizing for a state’s Democratic Party. Those messages weren’t nearly as personal, they didn’t know who I was, but my work email had 2 folders for the 2 different kinds of hate I was receiving- death threats, mostly directed towards the candidates and superdelegates from that state, and dick pics. 

I felt fairly safe and rather confident again, except my new state party was all former Bernie staffers. The email about Hillary “riding a rocket-sized dildo of corporate cash” that made me feel uncomfortable was laughed off by my coworkers and called well deserved. Cheap shots were made at the Clinton campaign’s expense on the Slack channel. The candidates and party chair had all supported Hillary, but the rest of the staff took shots at them too. As a “worker” people didn’t insult me personally or directly, but they insulted where I’d come from to get there. 

I sobbed on election night. My coworkers told me to suck it up. It was my fault for supporting the wrong candidate in the primaries. There were a lot of “I told you so’s” as I cried. 

The “I told you so’s” and “you just didn’t get that Bernie was what was best for you’s” followed me into a campaign in 2017. My full year of experience with Clinton wasn’t as good as the experience from the guy who volunteered on the weekends for Bernie during the primary. The insults followed me to a campaign in 2018 when one of my coworkers called me a “centrist pussy,” called me an “elitist rich bitch” on my birthday, and laughed in my face about how she drove across 3 states to Michigan just to vote for Jill Stein so the Hillary shills could “get what they deserved.” The gaslighting followed me into 2019 as the same thing started happening again to Warren staffers. I tried to come forward again with my new friends and instead was told “well we hear all these things about ‘Bernie Bros’ harassing people but I’ve never seen it. Hillary staffers don’t share screenshots because it was all made up.”

The thing is, it’s been years at this point. The email accounts I had for work are long gone. The phone that had all the screenshots broke after the primaries in 2016. The Facebook messages and tagged posts are long lost, and the list of blocked names on my Facebook has dwindled as people have deleted their accounts amidst Facebook’s many scandals. The internet has not lasted as long as my memories, especially as I’m continually reminded. 

“You just don’t understand that Bernie is who is best for you” has followed me into 2020 as I’ve watched Warren’s staff get caught in the same kinds of hate. 

It’s no secret that I experienced hell from Sanders supporters in 2016, but I’m not sure people knew to what extent. I’m watching the same things happen to the Warren campaign, often fueled by the same people as last time. I’ve been told that years have passed and my experiences don’t matter anymore and I should take down the posters and stickers that reminded me of the best year of my life. I’ve tried to move on and respect the best parts, but the worst parts of 2016 still haunt me as I look at the snakes spammed at Warren staffers on Twitter. It’s no secret that Bernie Bros harass people online, right?

Texting Voters: A Blue Wave Love Story

When Amy and I showed up a the Steelworkers’ Union Hall last Saturday for textbanking training, I started off crabby. We were a little late and missed part of the training. The coffee and donuts supply was already depleted and I couldn’t find a cup. I was super-aggravated not to get started right away, nostalgic for the feeling of being handed a good old-fashioned call sheet and getting to work. I waited grumpy-old-ladily for the lead volunteer to send me the link so that I could join the group on the Hustle app.

BUT THEN!!! I was in. Before I knew it, I’d texted FIFTY voters. Then another fifty! Whoa. They start you off with a pre-typed message, but I later figured out how to customize the canned messages, with all of the blue heart/rainbow/flag/Earth/blue wave emojis I wanted. AND!! It turns out that emoji-use DRAMATICALLY increases the odds that someone will text back—found a new superpower, who knew?!

There were still reasons to be grumpy, of course. As the women (As in 2016, the volunteers were mostly women, I’d say a 4:1 ratio of women to men, with room for the nonbinary, of course.) at our table mentioned the hostile messages they were getting, a middle-aged white guy was intrigued:

“Really?! I’m not getting that! I want to change mine to a woman’s name and see what happens!” He seemed curious and amused, rather than concerned LIKE A PERSON.

Maybe I should have just ignored him and let him try it. Maybe his texbank would have turned into an empathy machine. But he made my blood boil to the degree that this could’ve turned panic attack.

“I’m glad you can just OPT IN to my oppression. I’m glad it sounds fun.” I snapped, feeling like a party-ruiner.

“Well, I’m just a straight white guy, there’s not much I can do.”

            I said something like: “There’s a LOT you can do! You can listen and believe us, stand up for us instead of just being amused.”

            He backed down and I took lots of deep breaths to get to a good place and OH! The texts! The texts. I love them so much.

            This was the first time I was contacting ALL kinds of voters, not just active Democrats. When asked who they were voting for for governor and congress, many people responded with “TRUMP. MAGA.” Etc—we were supposed to just thank them for their time and mark them as Republican rather than arguing, and I MOSTLY followed that instruction. (It took me a little while to recognize the sweet gift that is the “Opt Out” option.) But I loved that I’d been a little ping in their day. Showing Up for Racial Justice (https://www.facebook.com/ShowingUpForRacialJusticesurj/) holds the idea that even when we can’t convince someone to fight white supremacy, we can still be an interruption in their worldview. I love when I have a chance to do that.

            (Of course, I don’t love being called c**t or stupid or crazy or hysterical, but those responses are few and far between.)

            But the BEST, of course, are the Democrats who write back, asking how to volunteer and sending all the blue heart emojis, asking about yard signs and organizing and telling me they’re already pledged to volunteer for Emily’s List. (A dude said this! Swoon!) We wish each other luck and the world feels warmer and more optimistic.

            I even, from time to time, step out of character and try polite disagreement. Then, okay, I step back into character and ask people when they’ll stand up for children who are already born.

            Now that I did the training, I can text voters anywhere, anytime between 9AM and 9PM. In my pajamas! Yesterday I wrote to 500 voters and only a handful were mean. With every try, I feel stronger and happier and more hopeful. Give it a try! <3 a="" href="https://act.padems.com/page/s/volunteer">https://act.padems.com/page/s/volunteer

            AND! When you’re on the receiving end of calls, some things to keep in mind:

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part Five

Back to last Sunday in a minute, but this morning in church, we had a guest speaker, an organizer and woman of color who said we should push outside our liberal boundaries and realize that those who hate might do so because they don’t have enough love. She wanted white folks to use our identity as a way in, to go back to where we’ve left and try again.

Disarm, she said, and listen.

Unitarians are like that.

Though I generally prefer to spend my energy on targeted communities rather than their/our attackers, the speaker did give me a chance to reflect on the compassion I DO feel for white nationalists and others who don’t have the benefit of diverse lives. Amy always scoffs/admires when I talk about how sad I am for racists, but I am. Anyone can empathize with the feeling of being trapped inside what one already knows, with being afraid of those unlike us. I do feel sad for those 25-or-so men on the other side of the fence last week in Lafayette Park. It would be lonely and sad to rely on superiority for a sense of worth, to be so scared they turn to hate. But I’ll probably always be the one to yell, fight, and turn away while others with more people skills reach out to those in hate groups. I think both approaches are necessary and okay.

Back to the wonderful yelling. Craning our necks. Chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Police on horses lined up facing us. The crowd startled and seemed to retreat about something and I smelled something bad. The nightmare sequence activated in my already-altered brain. The smell might have been a confederate flag burning, or just a funky cigar, but my brain read it as tear gas, which to my knowledge I have never smelled. I grabbed Amy amidst the (she said later it was very mild, if any) chaos and said “I have to get you out of here.” By the time we found a friendly tree a few feet away from the crowd, I’d started to return to normal. I breathed. I ate peanut butter and jelly and hoped no one nearby had a nut allergy—back to regular everyday protest thoughts.

“I’m DONE WITH THIS,” I said, but as the food entered my system and I could see that  everyone around me was doing okay, I knew I could stay a little longer.

Possibly it was thunder that had startled the crowd. The sky opened up and poured rain into the humidity, onto everyone’s signs. Watercolor colors dripped down onto my Disarm Hate shirt.

Amy wanted to see the other side of the fence and my curiosity took over from my fear, so we waded all the way into the crowd, trying not to poke or be poked with umbrellas or dripping signs. We sang:

“Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.”

We sang “We Shall Over Come.” We sang “This Little Light of Mine” Then more na na na nas. I decided that all this singing meant that it qualified as church.

The police horses were so beautiful. I stood there feeling outraged on their behalf. Why should they be wearing riot helmets? They never did a thing to anybody, why should they be dragged into our mess? I guess it’s too late in human history to be mad about the domestication of animals, but sheesh!

I didn’t stand there fuming about the horses for much longer. A police leader came out with a bullhorn and told us that Unite the Right had gone home, and now we needed to go home too. It was the first time I’d ever felt like we’d won a protest.  Dance parties broke out! Whoops of joy came up from the crowd. It was right around the time I’d told my check-in person that we would hit the road. I put my waterlogged sign into an overflowing recycling bin and felt free without it. We did it. We won.

On the way home, Amy drove and I scrolled though news story after news story. While most of them acknowledged that the counter-protest had far outmatched the hate rally, they didn’t show the images of the march the way I saw it. News videos showed the most armored Antifa members and they showed Jason Kessler draped in the American flag.

On our neighborhood thread, one guy told me that my personal experience of the day was “fake news” and a lady told me that I was wrong because my perspective didn’t match those of the mainstream news.

Part of the reason I’ve written this down in so much detail is that people are already trying to convince me that it didn’t happen. The way so many on our team tried to erase Hillary’s primary win. Tried to erase the fact that she won the popular vote and so would seem to be, on some level, likable. Like people try to erase pretty much all of the work that women do. Ever. Like I teach my tutoring students—we’ve got to give ourselves credit for every step of the way. It’s the only reliable way to get it.

Speaking of 2016, amidst this liberal love-fest, this celebration of (momentary but no less important) unity, it’s important to remember that we on the left have our OWN white supremacy problem. (I mean, in addition to Mass Incarceration. Please watch 13^th) There’s still a small but loud minority of people (mostly white men) on the left what say that “Identity Politics” don’t matter (please listen to Kamala Harris lambaste them for this on Call Your Girlfriend: https://www.callyourgirlfriend.com/sen-kamala-harris/) and who undermine the work and contributions of not just Hillary Clinton but of her supporters, which means women, especially women of color, LGBTQ folks, disabled people—there are those in our party who want to silence us/them. (Amy just explained to me that the silencers are known as the alt-left. I had no idea that was a real thing!)

THERE ARE PEOPLE ON THE LEFT WHO BOOED JOHN LEWIS! NOT IN THE SIXTIES! TWO SUMMERS AGO!

So I’m glad we teamed up against the nazis on the right and won this round. But we still have to keep pushing back against the sexism and racism of our own party if we want last Sunday (AND THE BLUE WAVE) to have the lasting effect that we want.

Thank you for listening and being on my team. Love you a bunch.

This Election Year, Leave Your Troll Farm Training Behind

In 2016, Russian Troll Farms helped Americans hone our unfortunate skills of hating women and people of color (and our/their pesky “identity politics”) to undermine our election and support straight white male supremacy on both the right and the left, including efforts to suppress the African American vote overall. (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/22/587921536/how-a-russian-troll-factory-waged-an-aggressive-campaign-to-disrupt-the-u-s-elec) I’ll stop writing about 2016 someday, but not until its influence is over.

Here in 2018, we’re seeing a lot of progress despite the ongoing fascism at the top. We have so many more female candidates, LGBT candidates, and candidates of color to root and cheer and canvass for. But as much as those candidates will have our support, as much as I believe in the Blue Wave and the Rainbow Wave and all of the other against-evil signs that I see in our near future, it saddens and angers me that all of the inspired candidates entering into or persisting in our political sphere will face the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and white male entitlement of Trump’s/Sanders’s/Putin’s well-trained army of commenters.

As Bernie’s adherents turn their Hillary-hatred toward Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, heaping them with comment-contempt and demonizing all Democrats as shills, will that hurt the Blue Wave and end up (maybe unintentionally) supporting Trump’s agenda? Will the Left’s version of white male supremacy end up supporting the Right’s? I hope not. I know the White Male Supremacist Left is louder than it is pervasive (That’s why they don’t get, you know, THE VOTES.) but I still think reclaiming the government in November is going to take extra badass efforts on the part of all intersectional feminists and our allies.

While the misogynist Troll Farm mentality is concentrated in the MAGA/Our Revolution camps, our training in abusive commenting bleeds into everything. Last year when the Al Franken story broke, my misery at being triggered by that gross picture was made worse by the fact that many of the members of the Marching Onward Facebook Group (Which has previously felt like a marvelously comforting group of Hillary supporters to me.) refused to acknowledge Franken’s misconduct, preferring to gaslight, debase, and undermine his victims. I hear that they have since moved on to trashing Kirsten Gillibrand for daring to speak out about Bill Clinton’s abuse of power.

Misogyny, abuse, voter suppression, racism, and cultural gaslighting are not just the product of some right-wing “other”—they are everyone’s problem, everyone’s fault, and EVERYONE’S responsibility to change.

I live in a very liberal neighborhood, but since 2016 I’ve been learning more and more about its general Get Outness. I’ve learned over and over that the label of “liberal” does not translate to “not-misogynist” or “not white supremacist.” But still, it usually seems like things are getting better. As we gear up for the primary election, we are lucky enough to have a choice between two Democrats of color for State Representative; an incumbent guy with lots of charisma and all the best endorsements, and a lady challenger who is very vocal in opposing the NRA but about whom it can be hard to find other information. I’m likely to vote for the incumbent because he seems more vocally supportive of LGBT rights, but I feel protective of the female candidate, for good reason.

The other day, on our neighborhood Facebook group, a neighbor asked a perfectly straightforward question about the female candidate’s endorsements. Her question seemed to trip some sort of Manchurian Candidate wire in many neighbors’’ heads. They saw this innocuous question as a chance to show contempt for the female candidate, dismiss her accomplishments, and denigrate Democrats in general. I just Googled the male candidate to make sure and yep, he’s a Democrat too, but for ladies, it’s for some reason a sin to have the benefit of belonging to a party.  It was a thread of very low-key misogyny, but it let me know that Troll Farm mentality is still in effect, and I pushed back and then turned off notifications.

I’ve been suspicious of calls for civility ever since I realized they most often come from conservative white people, so I won’t ask for civility here. But since I can’t go back in the political TARDIS to 2016 and get my Bernieful neighbors to respect women’s accomplishments and help us save America from Trump, I can ask them for that respect now. Stop erasing women’s accomplishments, and stop pretending that misogyny is anybody’s revolution, that it does anything but support the status quo. For America to prosper, to get all of the freedom and inclusiveness our country is supposed to stand for, you have to stop using the comment section as a way to put women in our place. Nobody signed up for Troll Farm Hate Training, it was forced upon us. It is way past time to let that training go.

What the G.O.P. Gains from Campus Rape

Every once in a while, I look at the Trump administration’s policies and ask the somewhat futile question of “Why?” Mostly the only answer I can come up with is “pure contempt for life itself,” but a trip down the Betsy DeVos rabbit hole gave me a little more specific (though no less alarming) answer.

DeVos has decided to frame campus rape as a crime that victimizes both the survivor and the rapist. Her stated goal is to minimize the damage to “the accused,” apparently having missed the movie with that title.

I feel like for the most part society at least has acknowledged that rape cases generally put the victim on trial, asking her to demonstrate enough “innocence” in herself to prove that she is somehow virtuous enough for rape to be possible, rather than her very female existence being, in itself, a kind of consent.

But to DeVos and the Men’s Rights Advocates, rapists are the real victims when it comes to campus rape. (It hurts to even type that sentence.) Along with the rest of our rape culture-steeped society, Trump’s deplorables set out not to preserve women’s right to learn safely, but to preserve the “bright futures” of campus predators. It would seem like the only possible aim here is to shore up the structures of rape culture itself—but why? Why advocate for members of society who feel entitled to the bodies of others without consent? What possible function could that serve?

My assertion is that the aim of making campus rape easier is to drain resources from women and make it harder for us to live independently and advocate for ourselves politically. Though my rape stories didn’t happen on a college campus, I can offer some insight as to what being a rape survivor costs. Like many women, I decided to get my PTSD treated after Trump was elected. I go to exposure therapy every Monday afternoon, drawing out and reliving rape and abuse stories in order to help my brain heal. It takes a long time to bounce back from the sessions, so time off work costs me about $100 per week. I am generally too exhausted to participate in political or artistic activities on Mondays or Tuesdays. A little less than 2/7 of each week is given over to treatment for rape and abuse. That adds up to about $5200 per year, and would be much more if I weren’t lucky enough to be treated at a free clinic. (Women Organized Against Rape! Call them!)

With all that said, I am probably among the luckiest rape survivors in human history. I have the money, time, and support necessary to devote myself to healing, and I have the spiteful and sassy temperament that it takes to stay positive and productive for the other five days of the week, to stay self-actualized and part of the Resistance.

But it’s still time theft. Because of my status as a survivor, I have less time and money to devote both to my own freedom and to the causes that I care about. Multiply that by every well-cared-for survivor, and it’s a lot of days, a lot of money, a lot of women’s physical, emotional, and political resources being siphoned off to recover from rape, and that’s just those of us who are lucky enough to be treated.

The damage done by rape can’t be quantified, and women emerging from college should have the right to devote their full selves to the life they want to lead. My littlest cousin just entered college this week, and my nieces aren’t far behind. I want them to have sovereignty over their own bodies so that they can build whatever life they choose.

So back to my original question of “Why?” Though I fully believe that the Rapist-in-Chief would love nothing more than to create an apocalyptic Handmaiden-scape, I think that everyday Republicans are after something that to them, seems more benign. I think that they want to save us by keeping us in what they think should be our place, and that means protecting male dominance no matter what the cost. I think the landscape the average Republican is trying to create is a whites-only 1950s suburb, where women are happily enslaved in the home and ever more willing to produce white, conformist children, all the while feeding the economy by purchasing ever more expensive kitchen supplies.

The good news, I think, is that that landscape never existed, and that the young women of today don’t want it. No matter what happens to Title IX, the young women of today will not support the G.O.P’s white supremacist misogynist heteronormative ideal. They deserve to own their bodies and their futures, and I hope they won’t have to fight as hard as I did to heal.

Things That Made 2016 a Life-Changing Summer: Part Two

The Fourth of July! I didn’t get to do much in June, and with the broken-arm grief it sometimes felt like all was lost, but when we drove up to my sister’s for Independence Day, summer started to light up the way it’s supposed to. Watching the Oswego parade with my sister and niece and nephews gave me such a feeling of childhood joy combined with grown-up patriotism and progress—the parade even included a giant rainbow flag and ladies dressed as suffragettes!

In between fireworks, (both the mom-lit and city-provided varieties) swimming, and red-white- and-blue “Patriotic!” cookies, my nephews asked a million political questions and I showed them how to use the candidates’ issues pages so they could learn all the points themselves. Holden really hates fracking and Kieran told me that whenever he has a substitute teacher, the class asks who he or she is voting for. My niece is the youngest person in her school’s Acceptance Coalition, so they give me more hope for the future than anything else.

Helping Open the Neighborhood’s PA Democrats’ Office! This is where I felt the most at home this summer. Whether I was calling to ask people to volunteer, making art to hang on the walls, or hearing the entire headquarters sing “Happy Birthday” to Amy, I felt a sense of love, inclusion, and purpose—I felt most welcome to be myself. There are only (thank goodness!) 71 days to go ‘til election day, but I’m hoping to serve Planned Parenthood in some way after this, so hopefully the love will keep inspiring me.

The Filibuster and Sit-In! After Orlando, it was hard to deal with the fact that friends and family didn’t always see the personal nature of the tragedy, the implications of such a large-scale massacre of LGBT people. When Chris Murphy, John Lewis, and Nancy Pelosi lead our lawmakers to really take a stand for gun control, it felt like such a relief, like oh, thank goodness, someone sees us. After decades of being ignored and/or vilified by my own government,  I’m grateful that public opinion and grassroots activism has given Washington the push and the permission to take a stand for LGBT people in so many ways, even if there’s still a long way to go. Also, sending thank-you tweets to the sit-inners and tweeting vigil pictures at Paul Ryan was pretty fun.

My West Wing Rewatch and Hamilton Obsession! Though I certainly favor either/or thinking that leans fully to the left, the West Wing has helped me to understand progress as a long game, and one that is peopled by public servants who, as Brené Brown would say, are doing the best they can. As much as I am a raging partisan, it heled me to see that even when Paul Ryan is forgetting what the fuck a gavel is for, is probably doing what he thinks is best for the public good. It feels healthier to me to believe that everyone, especially on the blue team, is really fighting hard to do the most possible good. I get that the West Wing is fiction, but it’s just such great counterpoint to my depression-brain.

Hamilton, besides providing the “How lucky we are to be alive right now!” of it all, (And another awesome way to bond with the niece and nephews!) helped me to understand why we HAVE partisan politics, why conflict and vehement disagreement are as much part of our values and freedom and inclusion are/should be.

I feel extremely dorky and sometimes freakish for believing in these things, but it’s just a nice way to see the world. If I didn’t believe that I could be a genuine part of progress, I don’t know how I’d ever get out from under the injustices I’ve seen.

Thanks 2015! "Countless Small Acts of Courage"

The most incredible thing happened at my mom's Christmas party last weekend, something that was worth a million rainbows. My fourteen-year-year-old niece, AKA the coolest person in the universe, and her BFF (my also-quite amazing bonus niece) were regaling us at top volume about the byzantine love lives of themselves and their friends, stories that included all kinds of straight, gay, bi, and trans characters. It made my heart just shine with joy. Though there's still such a very long way to go toward gender equality, the world has expanded and gotten so much more glittery since I was these girls' age.

I'm so proud of the nieces for their ingrained inclusiveness, so I wanted to stop and appreciate all of the little things that got us to that conversation and to that rainbowiest of days last June.  Not the political things, though those are surely important, but all of the many little moments of connection, of engagement, of expression that helped us to make more room for love one honest interaction at a time.  And I'm so proud of all of us who went ahead and got married anyway (even if I personally failed at it) and of the families who created and supported those weddings, especially my own.

I want to hold June 26, 2015 in my heart as a reminder that there is hope for all of the projects of progress, that every time we speak up, show our love, or work for change in the tiniest of ways, we're getting ourselves to that place where we can stop for a second and say, holy Christmas, things really did get better. The future belongs to my badass nieces and my sweet, thoughtful nephews, and for that reason, I'm wholly optimistic.