On voting as a right and a sacred rite
Today, I WILL VOTE
Me at Bernie rally in Brooklyn during the primaries in 2016
Today, I will vote early in New York City on the Working Families Party line. I will probably cry.
The first time I voted was in 1992, for Bill Clinton. I got into my car after voting in the gym of the middle school I had attended, and I wept. I wept again when I got back to my parent’s house (where I was living as I attended NYU). I wept because exercising my civic duty meant everything to me, and this first time felt like a miracle. I wept because I knew people had died for my right to vote. I wept because the act of voting felt like a prayer. I didn’t weep because I was in love with the candidate — because your vote is not a love letter, it’s an organizing tool. I have cried in voting booths or while filling out my ballot every 2 to 4 years since.
On the precipice of a world-altering election in which the choice is a descent into American fascism or the opportunity to turn the page, fight for a better future, protect our bodily autonomy, ensure our reproductive freedom, and create collective care, it should be simple to just go vote for Kamala Harris (and down the ballot for Working Families Party candidates in your state).
The last fifteen years of Pluto in Capricorn have made the Venn diagram of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and late capitalism into a perfect circle. The billionaires are now circling in an attempt to make their plutocracy permanent by installing Donald Trump as president and ending American elections forever.
Pluto in Aquarius doesn’t have to begin with techno-authoritarianism on the ascent. It doesn’t have to begin with a fascist to the core Hitler-loving rapist in charge, a convicted felon who will hand the reins of our government to a fundamentalist Christian army of men who will make queer people’s very existence illegal, force immigrants and poor people into concentration camps, ban birth control and contraception and porn and sex education and all books that aren’t bibles.
It doesn’t have to begin with obeying in advance. It doesn’t have to begin with Gaza fully exterminated and replaced with Ben-Gvir’s resort towns, because Trump told Netanyahu to “do whatever he wants.” Pluto in Aquarius can instead begin with FREEDOM and LIBERATION if we want it to. I dedicated the last chapter of my recent book to this. Here’s an excerpt:
The first-ever American Pluto Return1 brought an unimaginable rending of the American consciousness as we lived through a global pandemic, a much-needed racial reckoning, and barely survived the collapse of democracy. Pluto eviscerates whatever it touches, transforming it into a new kind of matter. I liken Pluto transits to our natal planets being slowly run over by a tank, and after being flattened over several years, having to rebuild ourselves out of dust, creating a whole new cellular structure. But Pluto is so slow-moving that human beings never experience a Pluto return like the United States, a global superpower, did about 250 years after it was born. So what remnants are in the dust of the past from which our collective can rebuild itself in the next few decades?
The generation-altering planetary event of right now and our future is Pluto’s transit through Aquarius through the 2040s. We’re looking at an era that will be defined by technology—our relationship to robots and bots, artificial intelligence, and all things not of human origin. The last transit of Pluto through the sign of Aquarius brought us the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and its intersection with an era of rebellion—the Age of Revolutions. I suspect that global uprisings may also be a dominant theme, but hopefully with love at the center of it all.
Even as technology advances and touches more of our lives and bodies, we will need to cleave to the knowledge that we are mammals over and over and over again. Think about how many of us already wake up and reach immediately for our phones instead of reacclimating to our own body in the bed, before sighing or stretching, before taking in the sounds around us, or touching a lover or pet sleeping next to us. As technology reaches deeper into our bodies to the point where we go from wearing it to implanting it, it may further divorce us from our instinctual relationship to desire and pleasure—our mammalian, animal self.
We have to ignore disinformation promoting Jill Stein, even if we are on the left. We just have to vote, and tell our friends to vote, and take a shift or two to make sure everyone in every swing state has a plan to vote.
I have never gotten cynical about my sacred, deeply emotional march to the voting booth. Voting is both a right and a rite. Please don’t give your rights away, rights others have fought and died for — this is truly our last chance to protect each other.