Beyond the Vote is Hope
Reverend Anastassia Zinke, Minister
Dear UUCA,
Your resilience has inspired me. Our country – its policies, leadership, and its people – have in turn disappointed and dismayed you. Yet, you have endured. Endured and applied yourself towards making this election matter perhaps as none other in your lifetime has.
If you don’t think that one person (you!) can make a difference, perhaps you are right, but together there is a lot we have done and can still do. So far our UU the Vote team has sent out over 6,300 postcards and spoken to voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Iowa, South Carolina, Texas, and Arizona, encouraging fellow citizens to vote in next Tuesday’s election. Some of us have worked to ensure that mail-in votes in Wisconsin are counted as valid. Others have driven to nearby states. UU the Vote nationally is nearing reaching 2 million voters – twice their original goal. That is the type of impact that happens when we collectively work together.
As revealed by our August 16 service, intentional voter suppression efforts have led to us having local, state, and national governmental bodies that are unrepresentative of the broader population of American citizens. But did you know that turn-out-the vote efforts work— increasing turnout by double-digit margins? There were 92 million eligible voters who did not vote in the 2016 elections. But because of the work of Unitarian Universalists and other people committed to voting rights, hopefully, hundreds of thousands of voters, if not more, will find or regain their voices, resulting in a more representative and responsive government that works for all Americans. This is the good work that you told us was the highest priority right now.
In just five days, on the evening of Nov. 3, voting will be over. But every day until then, there are people voting. Maybe more so, because you join our efforts. There are calls you can make in just the next few days.
Volunteer. Call. Show up. Vote. And hope.
Despite all of our efforts, we have been fearful of hoping. It feels too tender, too young. But hope is also the spring of joy, the source of celebration. To encourage us to recognize all the places that hope resides abundantly around us, I leave you with this poem:
“Hope”
by Lisel Mueller
It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs
from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.
It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.
Yours in Ministry,
Rev. Anastassia Zinke