This is the third post in my series on Kamala Harris and the reasons I heartily support her candidacy for president. In fact, and I hate saying this, because I hate feeling this – the election should not feel this way. I feel a moral imperative, a clear good and bad, between the former prosecutor and the convicted felon. Literally. It is both a great campaign slogan and articulation of a fact. Call it injustice, say Trump doesn’t deserve the criminal convictions against him, say Harris was a terrible prosecutor. It’s still true.

I’m not above saying – from my comfortable chair – that Harris (will definitely admit to having) made some mistakes as an attorney. I will also point out that Trump has … made no mistakes as an attorney or a congressman or a governor of a state, because he has never done any of those things.

I first “met” Kamala Harris in the midst of the Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court. She seemed to me to be the only one thinking about the issues in an actual, engaged and fully present way. Total confession, I’m not someone who generally gets involved with politics but I remember hearing that for many “Christians” it was worth it to get an adulterer like Trump into a White House and then a possible rapist onto the Supreme Court in order to get Roe v. Wade overturned. None of them see the irony of this, at all, I know. I had profound personal reasons to want to see Ford tell her story. To hear her side. I planned to listen with an open mind.

I remember believing Ford, and I also remember believing Harris, I mean sort of. Like 50% political posturing but with a real edge of let’s be real to her. Looking back, knowing her history, I think what really happened was that she was genuinely angry but not in a falling-apart-on-the-stand Kavanaugh kind of way. No. He wishes. She was furious and she let it show, but in a practiced way, as someone who had sat through liars lying like this before.

The reason I am saying all of this is because I am both here typing and in my memories I’m listening to older people explain to me that the United States is a Great Experiment and not just something that magically happens. Wondering if this is it for the United States. If we can possibly survive. We might not.

See, this, right here, is why they used to say we NEED kings, we need royalty who are definitely royalty. Democracy will never work. Populism will never work. People don’t want good leaders. We just want “bread and circuses.” They warned us only a couple of centuries ago. That we will vote in kings anyway, and those kings will be worse than the kings who are born and raised to be kings.

I really want to prove those people wrong, but I start to feel like we are going to prove them right. That’s why I’m writing this series now, throwing my bread out on the waters. In case someone might read this and think … oh. Probably not MAGA supporters but some independents who are saying, nope, I’m not voting for anyone! They are ALL BAD.

Don’t get me wrong, guys. I love Mad Max. I love a good anarchist, post-apocalyptic sci fi movie – and disaster movies too.

But I wouldn’t want to live in that world. And, the only “perfect leaders” are the ones who kill off all their opponents and anyone who doubts their perfection.

Seriously.

I finished listening to the book Harris released ahead of her short-lived first run at the nomination, and I’m shaking my head at people who say she basically had no political platform. Did they read her book???

Kamala Harris set a high bar for herself by promising honesty above all, more than tax cuts or bigger or smaller government. Toward the end, she explains it very clearly and succinctly to me: when it comes to politicians, to good leaders, “the job is to speak truth, even in a moment that does not welcome or invite its utterance.” 

In other words, not just bread and circuses – meaning not just people who are going to tell us what we want to hear in the moment. People who are going to be frank with us, even, especially when the truth may be hard to hear. If that sounds like an odd way to end a book, that’s because I think it is. It’s a high bar to set for yourself, knowing that we all fail sometimes. It is so much easier to just be nice. It can – at times – feel impossible, to speak the much-needed words that show not just what we are going to do, but how, and how it will be possible, and why it may not be possible, not at a cost we are able to pay.

Much like the Gospel – in which I as a Christian believe – I think the words that Harris cites from the Declaration of Independence sound nice. They sound nice. Until I realize that someone else’s welfare may come at the cost of my own. In order for someone else to have enough, I may need to have less.

Perhaps one day we will prepared to extend these words, truthfully and honestly to all men (not just landed white men and not just masculine people)…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.