The long, hard fall

It's getting dark. It's getting cloudy. It's been getting tough out there for a while.

Photo by Nonokas Mota on Unsplash

I voted last Monday, on one of the last gorgeous sunny days of an unreasonably nice Minnesota October, before the clouds rolled in, before the chill found us all, before the darkness of 5 p.m. sunsets started.

It was the start of an emotionally charged week: a birthday, a therapy session, Halloween in a new neighborhood, extreme tests of will from all three kids, plus some lingering sickness in the house.

This time of year always gets me, but I never remember until it happens. But I don’t mind the big feelings, actually. The seasonal transition is telling me to slow down, take it all in, let myself be a little unsettled instead of always put together.

It’s thinking season. It’s writing season.

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This will absolutely not be about who I voted for or who you should vote for, though I suspect my ballot wouldn’t surprise you.

Instead, it’s about a sense I haven’t been able to shake for a while now and that became particularly acute as I drove around a few times this week alongside my feelings.

I drive a lot of places now and find myself saying, “this seems a little less nice than I remember it.” Not a lot, maybe 10 or 20 percent less so, but enough to notice. Maybe it’s a neighborhood in decline, or a strip mall that suddenly has a couple vacancies. It could just be a general vibe that something is off, that the energy has been sucked out, that everyone you see is just trying to get through it.

And then I drive a small handful of places and find myself saying, “this seems a lot nicer than I remember it.” Like maybe 50% better. The houses are well-maintained, the shops are bustling, there are families and dogs and everyone living the good life.

If find myself seeing less and less in the middle.

These are observations. They tell a different story than a lot of the economic data of the here and now.

Unemployment is down, inflation is cooling off, the stock market keeps reaching record highs. We tend to look at that data and conclude: the system is working. What is everyone’s problem?

There is a disconnect between the data and the lived experience. When that happens, anecdotes are useful and worth of our attention.

To me, this is the problem: Those who collect and analyze the data, who write about it, who make the very policies that dictate it, are part of a class for whom the system is working.

I am part of that class, too. But my eyes are open. And I see a lot of people for whom the system, however we want to define that but specifically encompassing mechanisms that have allowed a staggering and increasing wealth gap, is not working.

When I complain about the cost of things, I understand that inflation, price-gouging and economic weirdness tend to be inconveniences in my life. They might affect how our family makes some decisions, but they do not fundamentally change the way we live — in relative comfort, within a squishy budget where we never worry about affording groceries, gas or monthly bills.

The rules of the pandemic response were written by people like me for people like me: We could transition to remote work because we work with our minds and keyboards. We could withstand remote school for our kids. It was chaos, but the paychecks kept coming. We kept our houses, maybe even changed jobs along the way, and some of us even came out ahead.

That was just another step in the economic divide, though. There was a hollowing out of manufacturing jobs, a tech boom, a recession and another tech boom along the way, too. Now there are influencers and money that seems easy, the endless scroll of social media distracting us for 12 seconds with a laugh or showing people everything they cannot have.

If you rent instead of own a house … if you have a significant commute to an in-person job … if you have both of those things and young kids … your situation has gotten considerably worse lately and things are not working. If you had a personal financial crisis or emergency, your situation might now be dire.

This is beyond politics, or at least political parties. You can rationally tell me that policies will make a difference, and I can agree.

But the gap keeps widening. Those who are winning are turning inward and protecting what they have, an instinct when things feel uncertain or fragile.

And things move so fast that nobody has a chance to count or see everyone left behind.

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A woman in front of us as my wife and I waited to vote asked if I had done any research on the school board candidates in our area.

I was proud to say that I had (for 10 minutes the previous night on my phone just before falling asleep), and I gave her the lowdown from my perspective.

She shared something her husband had said before she came to vote: That as a reward for early voting, there ought to be a way to way to be able to opt out of political ads for the rest of the season. Press a button on your mobile device or smart TV. I voted, so you can skip me with this commercial.

It’s a pretty good idea, and at least a funny one.

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For all the polling that has been done during this cycle, the most meaningful poll is a YouGov question that has been asked on a rolling basis since 2009 about the direction the United States is headed: At no point in the last 15 years have more people answered “generally headed in the right direction” than “off on the wrong track.”

The graph lines almost touched in March 2021; but “off on the wrong track” reached as high as almost 74% in 2022. As of the latest poll on Oct. 27 it sits at 64.9%, while “generally headed in the right direction” has just 27.6% of the vote (and “note sure” gets the other 8%).

This is the ethos of the last 15 years.

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An adorable and extremely old couple arrived as we were waiting in line to vote. We were next up, but we were asked if it would be OK if they skipped ahead of us as the husband gestured for his wife to sit down on her wheeled walker.

“Yes, of course,” I said, and then set about calculating which presidential election was the first time they were eligible to vote. Eisenhower? Truman? Could it have even been Franklin Roosevelt in 1944?

I thought about everything they have seen in their lives. I returned to a familiar thought about how impossible the pace of change must feel to members of their generation if it feels like this to me, someone perhaps half their age.

Has it always been like this? Winners and losers, the former writing the policies and history, the latter fading into the shadows? Am I just feeling what has been felt over and over forever?

If the answer is yes, doesn’t that make it even worse?

It feels so overwhelming and complex, impossible to get my head or arms around it — hard to feel like anything I could do, on an individual level, could make a difference or change this course.

I think a lot of people feel this way, and most of us just end up sipping our coffee and declaring, “Somebody should do something” — the passive slogan of our time.

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My turn came. I turned in my early voting paperwork, gathered my ballot and headed toward a small table with a thin divider.

I filled in the ovals earnestly and purposefully (except for the one write-in vote I cast for a friend of mine against a district court judge running unopposed).

It didn’t take more than a few minutes, but the machine beeped to prove that it counted and I got my sticker to show that I did something.

It felt like both a weighty thing and also the absolute smallest thing I could do.