I Can't Help It

I don’t know about the rules of proclaiming political allegiances. I work in a school and I am (mostly) careful to whisper my politics. Unfortunately they always seem to be louder than a whisper. I can’t help it. Isn’t that how it should be, though? Shouldn’t we be so passionately in support of a candidate that we cannot keep quiet? Last night I held my breath for six hours watching voter returns. I stood on tiptoes and squealed a little bit and grabbed the arms of people next to me. Amazing, I said. Or Scary, I said. Depending on what I was seeing. I couldn’t sleep until California was projected. And even then, I couldn’t sleep.
What is going to happen?
I can’t answer that question. If I could, there wouldn’t be all of these excited knots in my stomach. What I can say is there is so much possibility lying in wait between now and November. We should all be passionately about something: speed limits or school lunches or drivers’ licenses or health care access or school uniforms or foreign oil. There is certainly a moment in your life (if you close your eyes, you can recall it) when you worked so hard for something you could barely walk, when you wanted something so badly that it made your stomach hurt, when you were so excited you could only see one thing. Right now, this is all I ask of you. Find that thing. Find the candidate who agrees with you. And fight your heart out for a little while.