All the things I write about here are on the line. Our lives, in nature and in society. All aspects of our lives.

This is a time when speaking up is essential. As individuals, our choices nudge the society a little bit in one direction or another, and sometimes our collective choices make a profound difference. That choice has now arrived. If my voice as a writer and blogger can reach a little past my front door, then there is a moral need for me to speak up. All of us should. 

In a little over a month, our collective choice is between someone profoundly unfit to lead anyone and a person with the knowledge, experience, and wisdom to preserve democracy and the rule of law. And there’s more than just a vote for Kamala Harris, there is the need for a Senate and House not owned by the wealthy and populated with opportunists and wild-eyed autocrats.

It was never my intention to write about politics, and this is not so much about politics as it is a plea for sanity. This is the first time a major candidate has been a con man, a habitual liar, a sexual predator, a fascist, and a person credibly described as a malignant narcissist. My psychology background and common sense tell me that to live (in a household or in a nation) under the control of a malignant narcissist is to be in extraordinary danger. It is to be manipulated, used, harmed, and tossed aside. Those victims are all of us, individually and collectively as a nation, not just hypothetical players on the evening news.

Many of his followers are clamoring for civil war, and some of them attempted a coup when Trump lost the last election. Some of his followers are overt Nazis, and others unquestioningly believe any lie and support any suggestion he makes. 

If there was a need for this to tie in with our lives in nature, there is his promise to “drill, baby, drill,” his rejection of the science of climate change and his call for “raking and cleaning and doing things” as a way to prevent California fires (the environmental equivalent of his lunatic suggestion of injecting bleach as a treatment for COVID), his history of – and future plan for – rolling back environmental regulations and hollowing out the EPA, his offer of a bribe to oil executives if they would give him a billion dollars, and on and on.

The documentation is out there, easily available, and there is no point in my posting it all here and making this a long essay. My plea is for all of us to do what we can to, frankly, elect Democrats in November, not because I’m such a fan of that party but because in this election, they are the party in support of facts, reason, truth, and some commitment to respect the rights of all of us, however imperfectly. 

Part of the authoritarian playbook is to make us all exhausted and unsure of what’s really true or if the facts really matter. If you’re tired of it all, want to push it aside as “just politics,” and you’re ready to skip the election, please don’t. Don’t make this a national suicide. The other side is not just an opposition party, it is an abyss.