Do you remember last Halloween? Did you trick-or-treat or give out candy? We didn’t do either—well, you’d have to be super brave to trick or treat at our house (long steep driveway, dark woods…), and we usually go to another neighborhood (like Bynum) to walk from house to house and see the beautiful and spooky pumpkins. But last year, we knew a lot less about transmission and how to do outdoor things (like trick or treat) safely. We didn’t have Covid-19 vaccines, and the death rate across the country was averaging 812 people per day.
Donald Trump was the president, and we all were getting ready for the most important election of our lifetimes: a chance to say no to authoritarianism, racism, xenophobia, sexism, climate change denial, and Covid-19 denial.
Bea and I started the day last year attending the I Am Change Legacy March to the Polls in Graham, North Carolina. We were masked, of course, and like our fellow marchers attempting to keep social distance in a crowd of about two hundred other people, including families, young children, elders, and people who planned to vote for the first time in their lives. It was the last day of early voting, and a chance for North Carolina to cast off Trump and his enablers, including the odious Tom Tillis. It was a chance to embrace those working for progressive change for all, including local candidates like Ricky Hurtado (elected!) and Dreama Caldwell (not elected—but now executive co-director of Down Home NC), who would diversify community leadership and representation.
The march started with prayers and peaceful affirmations, as well as a police escort… but those police escorted us, many believe, into a trap. After almost nine minutes of kneeling silence in memory of George Floyd, whose family was in attendance, Graham and Alamance County police pepper-fogged protesters after only seconds of warning. (Body camera footage released months later showed police congratulating each other for spraying and referring to protesters as “motherf***ers.”
Bea was traumatized, and I was outraged. We didn’t know that could happen, that scenes reminiscent of Selma in 1965 could happen in North Carolina 55 years later.
Nor did we expect that an American president would blatantly and violently attempt to overturn a the results of an election—pressuring secretaries of state, pressuring state legislatures, filing multiple baseless lawsuits, pressuring the vice president, and finally inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol.
We didn’t know that seven of the ten Republican congressional representatives in North Carolina—Ninth District Congressman Dan Bishop, Thirteenth District Congressman Ted Budd, Eleventh District Congressman Madison Cawthorn, Fifth District Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, Third District Congressman Greg Murphy, Eighth District Congressman Richard Hudson and Seventh District Congressman David Rouzer—would, at the urging of Donald Trump, vote against certifying free and fair election results.
We know better now. Being a Frog Troubler, Bea and I think, is about more than raising frogs and going on hikes and making cool stuff (though it’s about that too). It’s about keeping our eyes open to trouble, good and bad, and talking with our friends about it.
Democracy has held. But there’s still so much danger out there. Because of a combination of Trump-inspired, Republican-led Covid misinformation and the highly contagious Delta variant (which we might have avoided if people had… worn masks and gotten vaccinated), our current death rate is averaging higher than this time last year, at 1300 people per day. My home state of Virginia is locked in a tight race for governor between a reasonable Democrat and a guy who is campaigning on banning Toni Morrison’s Beloved from high schools, is funded by dark money from a group that also funded insurrectionists, but doesn’t like to say Trump’s name in public (“Is he embarrassed?” Biden mocked).
You’d think a dog-whistling racist coward like Youngkin (I saw his commercials when we were in Virginia last week) would be easily defeated in a purple-to-blue state like Virginia. But beyond physical traps like the one we encountered at last Halloween’s march, there’s another kind of trap you can be led into, which is complacency. Thinking Trump and Trumpism is gone, defeated.
It’s not.
Yes, it’s a different Halloween. We’re going trick-or-treating again (in a small group, all-outdoors). Richard and I are vaccinated (Richard even has his booster, and I’m getting mine this week), and Bea is excited to get vaccinated as soon as we can get an appointment for her.
You can see the difference in our costumes, too. Last year Bea and Harriet both dressed as Artemis, the huntress, in pristine white togas. This year, Bea has chosen the Egyptian deity Bast—a cat goddess who is associated with both protection and justice. (And Harriet is… an adorable Egyptian cat!)
I’m proud of them, grateful for this community of Frog Troublers, and looking forward to growing our readership. Will you help by forwarding our newsletter to a friend?
And remember:
-local and municipal elections count for a lot—especially since so many fewer people vote in off-years. It’s so important to vote in every election.
-You can still donate, text bank, or phone bank to help Virginians stay on a progressive path.
-You can also still help get out the vote for progressive local candidates like Dejuana Bigelow in Burlington, NC, who is fighting for affordable housing. Every vote counts!
-Owl walks are awesome, even if you don’t hear an owl.
See you Tuesday! Happy Halloween!