BRATTLEBORO — We are at a crossroads, or at rock bottom, or at the most important election of our lives.
Trump's presidency has shown us that, as much as it is scary to push for change, when we don't do so, things change anyway. Unfairness and imbalance have a way of building until we stand together to make them stop.
Or, put another way, the only way things are going to change is if we change them. We can't solve climate change just by wishing it away. We can't solve it and just keep business as usual. Business as usual is precisely why we have climate change and its sibling, social injustice.
Business as usual is extraction of fossil fuels and carbon pollution, with the extractors and polluters making profits while the rest of us are left with the waste, the toxins, and a warming planet.
Business as usual hires people of color to pick produce, serve food, and do dirty work, paying them little to nothing but keeping them from complaining by threatening deportation or police brutality.
Business as usual has revealed that “front line” or “essential” workers are essential for our economy and yet are the lowest paid and most marginalized and the first to get COVID-19.
In other words, the big businesses that make up a large part of our economy are the very same industries that are primarily responsible for social injustice and climate change, and they are threatening our ability to thrive or even survive on this planet.
Business as usual is a mindset, a way of doing things that is stuck, is unchanged, is humming along unperturbed because those who might want to change it remain quiet.
So I want to branch out here and point out that the term can also be applied to us citizens, too.
Business as usual can look like folks getting caught up in their daily lives and not participating in the democratic process. Democracy is an active sport. Nobody is benched; everybody is needed. It is not enough to say someone else will take care of it. You are needed. We all are.
When we don't participate, when our voices are not heard, and filling the vacuum are other voices: of polluters, extractors, racists. We get Trump and all of the forces that are propping him up as he trades favors for power.
If democracy is a sport, voting is just one move of many, or maybe it's the first quarter or a starting playoff. Democracy is not just something you play when you are young and then rest on your laurels; it's like any form of exercise that you need to keep doing to stay healthy: It needs to be incorporated into our daily routines, like brushing our teeth and getting enough sleep.
The good thing is that - like any sport - if we all keep active and participate regularly, it gets easier. The lift won't be so heavy if we are all part of the process and if we all stay active in it.
Voting is just one big part of a healthy democracy. I am voting for health - for my health, for the health of my community, for the health of the planet.
I hope you will, too.