ArcaMax

My daughter's swim team meets at a local university. Another mother and I take walks around the campus during that hour, and last week, as we strode past some college students well acquainted with the Hot Topic fashion line, we heard, "I'm really liking Jill Stein."

There was slight whiplash as we looked at each other, and my friend covered her mouth to amplify it behind her without losing a step and yelled, "You're wasting your vote."

I'm unsure if they heard us. We kept walking, shaking our heads, and wondering if we had become a diluted version of Those Older Women. But I also think that without older women who had fought for my rights, such as the right for me to have a credit card with my name on it and not my husband's, I wouldn't be in the place that I am to debate the wasting of a vote.

Or, you know, allowed to wear pants that I might have also bought at Hot Topic in high school.

I had a coffee meetup with someone where we debated briefly how we got here and how the place we've ended up at is so split. As I've repeated at other coffee meetups, there was the long game planned from one side, a unification and a slow absorption of cultural hot topics that planted the seeds for the future we're living in. At the same time, the other side absorbed new things that emerged that rightly needed protecting, but instead of unifying the group, seemed to scatter effort.

Now, seeds are all over the floor, leaving us to tread carefully instead of walking into a new room, clinging to the walls that have grown dingy from our hands trying to catch ourselves. As we're trying to catch ourselves, we're voting for what some call the two of the lesser evils because the evil they see through social media is incredibly potent.

I've heard the election described as putting the oxygen mask on yourself before putting it on those you're with. We're forgetting to emphasize that in that scenario, we're in an active airplane situation. It could end in a crash where everyone on board dies, or it could be two pilots using their decades-long experience to pull us up from a freefall.

We when land, you're welcome to demand that refund and tweet all about how you'll never fly that airplane again. Those two pilots will still be at the bar, celebrating that they saved people who will never know. I'd buy them a beer. Or, I'd vote for them.

I can't blame those two students. The media machine is harrowing without critical skills that have been craftily eroded. I worry that they don't know that the forest we all stand in will be the trees that form the stakes they will tie some of us to and then light on fire.

What is the goal? To fight another day or to burn it all down to the ground? Because if it's the latter, I'm not sure how much more we'll be able to fight for others if we're standing in the pile of ash of those who will not make it past one of the presidencies we have on our ballot.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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