We are a people in peril.

The damage our Republic has sustained over the past two years is incalculable.

There is no way to accurately quantify the irreparable harm done to the connective tissue of this nation, to our systems of support, to our electoral processes, to our safeguards against foreign and domestic threats, and perhaps, most of all, to the relational tethers we have to one another.

Everything is fractured, nothing has been spared.

He and they have poisoned the collective so completely that we’re almost better off not even attempting to fathom it, lest the grief fully paralyze us and render us hopeless.

As of this writing, we are less than two weeks away from an election that is so much more than that.

The choices we make in November are far more consequential than merely altering the balance of power in Congress, flipping key seats, or ousting incumbents committing malpractice.

This is a life-or-death proposition; a rescue mission.

It is a rescue mission for our nation, one final chance to rip our destinies from the hands of an extremist death cult whose love for both God and country is nonexistent; an unashamedly sadistic cadre of morally defective beings.

It is a rescue mission for the lives of tens of millions of human beings here who are and will continue to be brutalized by their own government; those penalized for their pigmentation and punished for their poverty.

It is a rescue mission for the sick, for the poor, for the foreigner, for the black and the brown and the queer and the disabled and the different who will be legislated into oblivion.

It is a rescue mission for hope; a desperate grasping for a better future that we’ve been steadily bleeding out week after week as we have witnessed the brutality of a mad despot, his sycophantic disciples, and a high court who’ve abandoned any obligation to the Law.

I love this country, or at least, I love the country I thought we had a chance of being just a few short years ago, before we allowed such a parasitic, ugly hatred to get, first a foothold and then a stranglehold here.

And as heartbreaking as it’s been seeing us mark our 250th year of existence with such lunacy at the helm and with such wasteful, ubiquitous violence everywhere we look, my greater fear is that we somehow have not realized how urgent the next 12 days are, and what is in the balance between now and November 3rd.

But if you’re reading this, I think you realize it.

I don’t think I need to share any alarming anecdotes about his cognitive deterioration, or subject you to another breaking news story about their efforts to poison the electoral process, or bombard your already battered psyche by detailing ICE’s brutality.

I don’t have to convince you of the gravity of these moments.

But you might be able to convince someone else who I can’t reach; someone in your circle of influence who has checked out because they’re exhausted, someone who feels their vote doesn’t matter, someone who’s bought into the dangerous fiction that the choices amount to the lesser of two evils.

Over the next 12 days, you might still have a chance to rouse someone you know out of the haze of apathy or to extricate them from the nihilistic resignation that would render them silent when their voices hold such promise and carry such weight.

If you can do nothing else between now and November 3rd, you can help the people around you understand that this isn’t about politics; it’s about seeing tens of millions of imperiled human beings standing at the very precipice of staying alive—and doing the smallest thing we can do to save them.

Remind them of the tangible ripples of this election on hungry children, on immigrant families, on every woman they know, on their neighbors with disabilities, on people needing cancer treatment, on their elderly family members, on sexual assault survivors, on fathers in domestic concentration camps, on gay teenagers.

Help your people to understand that this isn’t a vote, it’s an act of heroism.

The apathetic, grieving, war-weary people around you may not be interested in winning a political battle, but there’s a good chance they’d jump at the chance to pull someone from the jaws of death or to spare them unimaginable suffering, which is, without hyperbole, what we’re doing here.

Speak to the people you share this life with, whether up close or in passing. Remind them of the very human stakes of November 3rd. Tell them you’re on a rescue mission and ask them to join you.

May we be lifesavers in these days.