Dear President Biden,
I didn’t tell you (why, I don’t know), but I took the latter part of this past week off from work and it was lovely. Laura, dog-Buddy, and I went on around-town-excursions every morning for three whole days, two of which were to Discovery Park. I’m pretty sure I’ve told you about Discovery Park before – it’s been a favorite go-to spot for quite a long time now, but we hadn’t been back there since dog-Lizzie died in June. On Wednesday we visited our same old spots but yesterday we went and parked elsewhere and got to do more of a hike, which we all enjoyed thoroughly. There were several flights of stairs (it was an urban hike after all) and by the third set of extra tall stairs, Dachshund-dog-Buddy wasn’t having it so I got to tote him. Fortunately he doesn’t mind being toted and also fortunately he was happy to walk again once we got to the top.
All of this was wonderful, but the real reason to bring up this excursion is that as we were leaving the area I saw a simple block lettered sign in someone’s yard that says “DON’T GIVE UP.”
Indeed.
There’ve been lots of signs with lots of important messages in lots of yards for lots of years now (DJT was definitely good for the sign industry) and this particular one’s message isn’t any more or less important than most any of the others inside Seattle city limits. I also don’t know how long that sign has been up – maybe it’s been up for the duration, or maybe they planted it last week after the latest round of Manchin/Sinema digging their heels in deeper on their “moderate” agendas. However long it’s been there, I totally appreciated the message yesterday and continue (obviously) to return to it like it’s a sustaining little mantra.
Sometimes I sing it in my head and sometimes I just say it super slowly and sometimes I say it matter-of-factly as though it is an absolute “of course, who would ever think of entertaining the opposite?”
Just to be clear, I’m not anywhere near a dark, “WTF, might as well give up” sort of space so it’s not as though that message is serving as a life ring thrown to a drowning person. Rather, right now, it’s more that I need to be reminded that I mustn’t give up on caring about what you all are or are not doing about the Manchins and Sinemas and their quieter but no less problematic congressional sibs who are either complicit with the GOP or total fools if they think that they will come through politically unscathed if they thwart voting rights and your climate agenda.
So, I will say to you yet again, you all have got to find a way to get through to them on the damn filibuster – DON’T GIVE UP on this. Don’t roll over. Don’t be bamboozled by the bullshit messaging around the nobility of bipartisanship.
Of course I have no idea what it’s going to take to get through to the Democratic holdouts on the filibuster, but if you all don’t figure out how to get them to come around, it probably will be time, at that point, to give up. And we can’t have that. Your grandchildren and George Floyd’s daughter and Greta Thunberg and the girls we had over for lunch today and the little tiny boy who was “riding” his no pedal bike up the block just now and our daughter and all of us need you to push through on this. Hell, even the damn GOP goons need you to push through on this. Yes, their money insulates them against most things, but planetary crisis would totally suck for everyone – even them. So for everyone’s sake, DON’T GIVE UP.
May we be safe from nihilistic greed-monsters.
May we be willing to hang in and stay the course
May those of us who need to muster the courage to get rid of the damn filibuster do so.
May we accept that time is ticking.
Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson
The Biden Letters 