Like hundreds of millions of Americans, I am preparing to go to the polls to cast my vote in the most consequential election of my lifetime, perhaps of this nation’s lifetime.
And while I will enter the voting booth by myself, I will not be there alone.
I am bringing a silent multitude with me.
I am bringing the Dominican father shot in his car by ICE agents while his terrified child screamed in horror.
I am bringing the gay teenager in Tennessee who is terrified of revealing his truest truth.
I am bringing every child and woman brutalized by Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborators.
I am bringing the tens of thousands of children killed in Gaza.
I am bringing the gregarious Mexican couple at the taqueria down the street.
I am bringing Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
I am bringing the suffragettes.
I am bringing our overworked and underfunded public school teachers.
I am bringing the exhausted parents of a terribly sick child who face bankruptcy paying her medical bills.
I am bringing Martin Luther King Jr, and Rosa Parks, and John Lewis.
I am bringing the kind-hearted transgender woman in from the shop near our house.
I am bringing every Jane Doe from every college campus.
I am bringing the Black fourth grader in his school library who deserves to see himself in the stories he reads.
I am bringing the neighborhoods gerrymandered out of the political process.
I am bringing the amazing Muslim family in our neighborhood.
I am bringing the Little Rock Nine.
I am bringing the Wisconsin grandparents who stand on their small town main street every Saturday to oppose fascism.
I am bringing the children and teachers murdered in their classrooms.
I am bringing the disabled woman at our church whose economic supports are vanishing.
I am bringing Anne Frank and Greta Thunberg.
I am bringing religious people and people who wish to live free of others’ religion.
I am bringing the crafters of our Constitution and those who still defend it.
I am bringing the honey bees and the sea turtles and the red wolves.
I am bringing the theatre kids and the theatre departments who make magic for the rest of us.
I am bringing the high school students who refuse to allow their immigrant classmates to be bullied.
I am bringing the pregnant women at the precipice of death in a Texas hospital room.
I am bringing my indigenous brothers and sisters.
I am bringing Emmit Till and Breonna Taylor and Nolan Wells.
I am bringing the young soldier on his way to a war of choice in Iran and the homeless veteran discarded by his government.
I am bringing the Stonewall rioters.
I am bringing the young girl who imagines she might one day be the President, and will.
This is true for each of us.
We are not just using our vote to speak for ourselves or those close to us.
We are leveraging that profound and sacred privilege to stand with every beautiful, vulnerable, never-to-be-repeated human being we hold within our hearts, every person we have admired from the distances of geography and time.
We carry every activist and serviceperson who spent themselves on behalf of those who would follow them.
We carry every person on the horizon of history whose names and faces we’ll never know, but who will inherit the nation we leave them.
We cannot stay home or opt out or cast our votes carelessly.
So yes, vote your morality. Vote your ethics. Vote your values and your passions and your core truths, but vote because you aren’t alone when you do.
This is so much bigger than us, friends.
Who do you care about?
Who are you fighting for?
Who does your heart break for?
Who do you believe deserves to be heard?
Who are you living for?
Who are you bringing to the polls?
