“We’re supposed to kiss for six seconds,” Ray told me after reading an article.

My mom died from COVID four years ago, just after Mother’s Day. I couldn’t write about it until I could be honest about who she was, a feat complicated by my then-pending Congressional race, which I lost in spectacular fashion. Apparently climate change isn’t at the top of voters’ concerns. Yet.

If I was in college today, with the same longing for peace and equality I had then and have now, I’d be in a tent protesting the slaughter of 34,000 women and children by a country with limitless weapons of war. In fact, I did.

Recent polls suggest half the country may vote against their own self-interests in November. The self-sabotage is head-turning: Christians who defend Donald Trump’s debauchery, poor people who give their money to a billionaire with rotating Ponzi schemes, and pensioners who don’t understand that tax cuts for the 1% threaten their own entitlements.