An Open Letter to Kamala Harris

 

Dear Madame Vice-President:

Wow. That’s a singularly cool thing to type.

I am going to start by getting the gushing out of the way early. It probably sounds utterly ridiculous for a grown woman to say, but I am just going to put it out there. When I look at you, my heart feels a bit lighter. I breathe a little deeper. A sense of calm is somehow restored to my anxiety-rattled brain. I see you as a beacon of hope. As a path to a better future for my children. As a symbol of our better natures.

Yeah…that’s probably a lot to lay on the shoulders of one person, huh? But we women are used to it. Holding the entire world on our shoulders while underappreciated, underrepresented, and underpaid at every turn is de rigueur. I am writing to you instead of Joe because I feel a sort of kinship to you. What, you may wonder, would a middle-class, translucently white, never-quite-rose-up-to-her-potential, frumpy lesbian mom from Minnesota have in common with a Jamaican/Indian, HBC-educated woman from California who was just elected to Vice-President of the most powerful nation in the world?

I would venture to say we have a lot in common.

As a fellow woman, I innately understand that nothing was ever handed to you. None of your success was a forgone conclusion. From the moment you burst onto a male-dominated political scene, your every win was an uphill battle. I suspect you were assumed to be weak, so you had to be twice as strong. You were assumed to be ignorant, so you had to be twice as smart. You were assumed to be gullible, so you had to be twice as shrewd. And when you were stronger, smarter, and twice as shrewd, you were called uppity, calculating, and combative. Just another angry woman. Typical.

We are all both victims and perpetrators of this system. While we rail against it as women, we also fall victim to the patriarchy that permeates every nook and cranny of this world. Even as women – even when every fiber of our being knows it is wrong – we tend to hold women to a higher standard. I am going to make an embarrassing admission now.

You were not my first choice in the Democratic primary.

I found you be extremely intelligent and well-spoken, but maybe a bit cold. I hate to even type that now. I hate to admit that I participated in the completely unfair patriarchal labeling of another woman. What a crock of bullshit! Over the course of the excellent campaign you and Joe ran, I became a convert. Then a fan. Then a fawning fangirl. In short, I am proud to have you as my Vice-President and I want you to succeed on every level, in everything you do.

So let’s talk business.

The American people are hurting. We have been traumatized by the last four years of attacks on our common decency. We are mourning the loss of humility and humanity and honesty in the world. We are afraid that our allies on the world stage will never trust us again, and where will that leave us when we need friends? We are scared of dying from a devastating illness that has killed 440,000 of us and counting. We are grieving the entirely preventable loss of our loved ones. We have lost our jobs and our livelihoods. Many of us can no longer feed our children, an eventuality we could scarcely even imagine a year ago. We are trapped in our homes, unable to see our family and friends. Unable to frequent our favorite neighborhood small businesses. We watch as many of them close their doors for good, while America’s 614 billionaires grew their net worth by $931 billion during the COVID pandemic. Our kids can’t go to school. And if their schools are doing in-person learning, we have to weigh the very real consequences of sending them to school where they may contract a deadly virus or keeping them home where they will surely fall behind their classmates academically. We hate that there are no good choices and worry that our kids are doomed either way. We are traumatized by the events of January 6^th. We are terrified of the homegrown Nazis and white nationalists who have infiltrated and are quickly destroying the Republican party. We see Republicans refusing to hold Trump and his violent minions accountable for their crimes, and we fear we may be seeing an end to the rule of law and even the death of our hard-earned Democracy. We are struggling to come to terms with a nation that was built on racism and where racism not only exists but thrives two hundred years later. We don’t know how to respond to police officers who claim to protect and serve, but choke and shoot and kill our neighbors who do not look like them. I live in the neighborhood where George Floyd was mercilessly killed, and I am afraid that his murderers will walk free. I am afraid of what will become of my beloved city when they do. We are filled with sorrow and outrage and anger and frustration. We are exhausted from the injustices of the last four years. We are a people in excruciating pain.

Worse yet (if you can imagine anything worse than the paragraph I just typed above) is the anxiety I have for my children. I have three teenagers. Lucas is 18. Sophie and Nicholas are 14. They are bright children who have watched everything unfold over the last four years. They have very real fears for their futures. Aside from not getting to go to prom or cheer on his team at the Homecoming football game or walk across the stage at graduation – silly things I mourn every day – my eighteen-year-old son is afraid of being a victim of random gun violence. He is afraid that there will be no jobs for his generation when he graduates college. He fears living in a white nationalist dictatorship. He is terrified that global warming will destroy the world in his lifetime.

What do I tell him? What can I say to ease his very real fears? I think of myself way back when I was eighteen years old and realize that I did not have a care in the world. I took our Democracy and our standing in the world for granted. I was under the assumption that my country worked for me. And as a white, middle-class, college-educated young woman, it mostly did. As I have grown older, however, my eyes have been opened to the fact that this country does not work for everyone. It does not value everyone in the same way. And in the last four years, it has come to value fewer and fewer of us. Certainly not people of color. Not Jews. Not Muslims. Not women. Not immigrants. Not LGBTQ people. What message are we sending to our children? What are they learning about their value? Their potential?

I know I am preaching to the choir. I realize you understand all of this and much more. I guess the reason I am writing to you is because I am grieving everything these days. I am hurting. We are hurting. And I want someone to know about it.

We need help.

I am writing to you to beg for that help. Over the course of the last year, Americans have received $600 from our government. Six. Hundred. Dollars. That is insulting and laughable. Six hundred dollars will not make one mortgage payment or pay one month’s rent for most Americans. Six hundred dollars will not feed our families. It will not clothe our kids. It will not pay for college. It will not pay our medical bills if we, heaven forbid, end up being one of the millions of Americans who have contracted COVID. It will not save us from having our cars repossessed. Our home foreclosed on. It will not satisfy credit card companies. It will certainly not stimulate the economy. Does our government actually think we are going to go on a spending spree when we are seven months behind on our mortgage? It’s a token. Nothing more. A token of our government’s antipathy toward its own people.

We need you and Joe to act. Right now. Decisively. Without Republican support, if necessary. If America – and even more importantly, Americans – are to recover, we need help from our government. I implore you to act. I beg you to act.

I believe you have faith in the American people, and I have faith in you. I look forward to seeing how you will make this country a better place. I know you and Joe are working hard to do just that. I am just imploring you to also work quickly. We need help. We need you.

Sincerely,

Shannon Ralph